jcollings

Is it just me or does anyone else find new year a bit of an anti climax. I've been in education so long I always feel that Sept is the new year and the one in Jan goes largely un-noticed. Roll on July, August and 5 weeks off work!

CLEO are ditching CachePilot in the new year and rolling out a new solution developed at Lancs. Uni by CLEO chaps there. Going to be called NED (Network Edge Device). Just filled in some paperwork for ours with a roll out in Feb 08 if I recall. Maybe worth looking at before you do something different.

Well we finish at noon tomorrow and that'll be it til 7th Jan - yippee!!

We'd be unemployed - incompetents keep us in work!

No he wasn't - that was the first thing I checked. Finally figured it (I think) - something to do with CLEO set up we'd just implemented whereby an auto config their end simply checks for our proxy and if it doesn't find it drops them out to their proxy - so we'd put bogus details in using script etc and the CLEO bit says "oh that isn't the right setting - have ours" thus giving them a route out. Sorted it now. On another note if I specify a GP to stop IE running why is it that Microsoft seem to think that only means by clicking the icon so they can still call it via Excel macro for example!??!

Hi folks Looking at changing all our pupils to mandatory profiles in the new year. They currently use roamaing profiles with appdata, desktop etc redirected to network locations. Currently when a student saves favourites, sets up site details in Dreamweaver, custom dictionaries this is all saved in their profile folder on the network (usually Appdata). My question is how does all this work with manadatory profiles? Thanks

We've got 2 in our new science labs as they look good. To be honest they work quite well although installing them really shows how level (or not) your wall is. No-one has moaned about the colour although we did have 1 ghosting the image (dodgy VGA cable). All in all I think they work pretty well.

But that's the issue for me - yes I can just install it and it does work but... 1) I have maybe 160 stations to install on so I have to msi it - too much to ask the provider of the software to provide one. Manual install not an option really. 2) You say 30 days before but the upgrade I got came in and people scheduled tests two days later 3) The software (client end) terminiates if there is an update available - nothing to do with grace periods etc. All in all it's not the worst software but it's far from the best and I did use exambase and it was better.

What's even more entertaining about it is that you can get the students sat down, they connect to do a test and then the software says "there is a new version of the software available" and terminates! So if a new version of the software arrives just before a test - guess what - - the test don't work!!!

Thanks guys - I've got a few things to try from this. In terms of a script to let me know when someone logs on - does anyone have one please?

That's exactly how it is configured.

Yes - he's been blocked for ages. Very irritating though.

No it was IE and they can't run stuff from home drives or flash drives. No it has to have the proxy info in there.

No - this guy was using IE. We have it so they can't run stuff from USB drives etc.

OK - currently we have a group called Webdeny - if you're in that security group IE won't run for you and the proxy server is changed to a bogus one. This has worked fine for ages but students seem to have found a way round it (not sure what yet). So 2 questions: 1. How are they getting round it 2. What ways do you use to block specific students when they've been bad boys (or girls) Cheers

Hey that sounds like a plan

Yes but for me that's the whole issue with single status - I think schools should be able to set pay independant of other schools. We are in an area with 3 schools all of comparable size, I know all the other IT Managers and I know my job is very different from theirs. My head has set my rate quite high and why should he not be allowed to do that? All IT Managers/NM/Technicains have differing responsibilites so how can single status work?

We have 1450 students (11-18) and approx 150 staff. 600 odd computers/laptops, usual kind of server and comms infrastructure, Smartboards, projectors etc All the SIMs stuff including Census, implementing Lesson Monitor etc Additionally we give our primary schools/partner schools 2 hours a week each of onsite tech support (we currently have 12 of those). Also we do other one off events eg. sports day, fashion show, productions etc. We have me (ICT Technical Manager), 1 Senior Tech and 2 technicians (both training on the job). We are all term time only + 4 weeks so we usually have 1 person in on any given day of the hols. Oh yes - I do first aid too Hope that helps.

QMS Printers - they are minolta/knica whatever they call themselves thee days.

Jsut give him a flash drive and tell him to plan ahead Seriously I use logmein and it's really useful. Means I can upgrade SIMS from home at 10pm so I can be sure evey bugger is out! Deep Joy!

We spend about 11k a year on consumables which I think is a scandal. We took all our inkjets out over time and replaced them with laser (b&w) or colour (HP2600n cheap as chips) - in the long term these work out a lot cheaper. We really need to implement some kind of control but Pcounter doesn't work well with our QMS from what they say.

Dedicated print server. All networked printers (bar 1 or 2). Script to allocate printer based on OU. Staff laptops - little HTA that runs when they logon listing all the printers. Staff can then pick the nearest printer to where they are using their laptops. They then have that printer until they logoff or manually run the HTA again. Mobile classrooms - as staff but with fewer printer to choose from.

Therein lies the issue though - how do you know they own it?

Well we try not to teacher bash here but the issue we had was twofold: 1. They had no clue in the main where the library was and it often ended up on the network 2. Earlier versions seemed to cause laptops to slow down a bit.

We have a policy of not installing iTunes at all. Interestingly I have just deleted a whole load of mp3 tracks from staff areas.