Tricky_Dicky

Hi, Our attendance office has just emailed asking why Thursday the 1st of May is blocked out in SIMS register. I've had a look and she is correct in that all the classes have a hash mark already in place. Is this because SIMS presumes it's a day off? Am I ok to get the teachers to just over ride this when doing the register as normal tomorrow? Thanks

We do. Care to elaborate?

Both SSD and Win8. We are trialing Win 8.1 on a netbook and OK it's not perfect, but it works well and seems very responsive. This is on an Atom chip and 2Gb of Ram but with a normal HDD at the moment.

Hi, Our Head Teacher loves the ideas of blogging the pupils learning and has asked me to get it working. I'm looking at using Wordpress and was wondering what the best way of setting it up was. Ideally I would like to have a single blog for the class and then each child in that class have their own blog that only they can edit and post things to. The front page of the class blog should contain a list of links down the left hand side to each child's blog, tags on the right hand side that pull through tag info from each of the blogs and the main part of the page is a feed with each posting from each blog being displayed. Firstly, is this possible and secondly what would be the best way of doing it? Do I need a separate DB and install for each blog and then just do all the links manually? Thanks

This is a fantastic idea, well done Little-Miss for sorting this. It definitely needs to be mixed between primary and secondary. I know Link aren't perfect, but we as a group as large as Birmingham are in a much better position standing together than falling apart.

I think he meant literally capitalise MAC, instead of just the first letter, Mac.

Always open to visitors. To be honest though, everything you have discussed is handled using Apple Remote Desktop apart from imaging which is done through Deploystudio.

I think you make some very valid point Michael and yes on the whole the internet provision isn't that bad. However, what really annoys me and would be so easy to fix is the transparency. If there is a problem, tell people about it as soon as you know and then when it's fixed tell people, in detail, what happened, why it did and how you fixed it so it isn't going to happen next time. Yes 450 schools is a lot, but in terms of network size you don't have to look very far in to the corporate world to find much much larger and more complex networks. There are plenty of people out their with the skills to manage a network of this size and these are the sort of people that need to be employed. In regards to buying power, then I think it's a shame that Andy doesn't think it's worth their time to sell things to schools. If we think back to Tempus, everyone had one of those servers and on the whole they weren't bad and it meant that everything was set up the same in each school which makes maintenance and problem solving much easier. If Link2ICT could setup a strategic alliance with a similar company it would be fantastic as there are many schools now running very old server 2003 Tempus boxes and they don't know who to turn to. There are also some awful cowboys out their who will rip them off blind. IMO though, a lot of these small schools and nurserys really should have a virtual server inside Link2ICT HQ that is managed for them. But that would involve Link2ICT actually thinking a bit differently and taking a risk.

Upgrade to 10.9 and yes you can.

I'm sure most of you will have noticed but there is an update to Apple Remote Desktop that seems to sort all the weird issues. Admin 3.7.2 Apple Remote Desktop 3.7.2 Admin Have fun

Hi, We have had 3 of them for a few months now. It's been an interesting learning curve to say the least. We are only up in Birmingham if you want to come and see them in action. Rich

Fair enough, I stand corrected. However, there is no reason this shouldn't work. It isn't Meraki that needs to know which accounts it needs deploying to, it's apple. When you setup apple VPP it will send an email to all the users that you invite asking them to enroll themselves on to the account. This way Apple knows who is linked to which account. Once this is done all Meraki needs to do assign the licence to the group you set, so students for example, it would then talk back to Apple and say assign X app to Y account. With automatic application download enabled the app would then download in the same way that if you had an iPhone and iPad the app will download to both when purchasing on one or the other.

For instructions for Meraki try these: https://kb.meraki.com/knowledge_base/deploying-vpp-apps-to-ios-devices-using-apples-managed-distribution-model Like I said, you are deploying the Apps to the user account, not the device. In settings -> iTunes & App Store. Make sure automatic downloads is turned on for Apps and Updates.

I don't think I am, but willing to stand corrected. you aren't pushing the App out to the device, but rather the user account on that device. Thus you need to make sure the option of installing apps automatically is turned on on the iPad itself.

As mentioned above, the way to do this is to use Apple VPP and then some sort of management program such as either Apples own server or Meraki and then it will allow you to silently push out Apps.

Hi, One of the things that our behaviour department was looking forward to in this discover/Sims release was the ability to look at behavioural incidents by half term. The graph seems to be available in Discover now but when I try to put it on the worksheet it just comes up with the error "There has been an issue loading the Designer items data. This has been logged. Would you like to try and load the Designer items data again?" Any idea why this would be happening and how to fix it? Our LA don't seem to have a clue. thanks

Not yet they don't. There was a statement on their website about how they won't at the moment due to differing standards.

We've used Little Dreams based up in Stoke for several jobs and they are excellent, however it is much more bespoke desking rather than just a worktop.

It would be very handy if you could. Thanks

A proper presentation matrix would be the best thing for the job from the likes of Crestron or Extron but they aren't cheap.

Really? I wouldn't rush in to it if I were you. We are doing the sums to get out!

It was never going to go smoothly was it! Wonder if we will ever get access to the shiny new filtering system they were showing off at the NetMan meeting a little while ago.

I'm looking for the same thing. Don't suppose you fancy sharing where you found it do you?

Quick question about the Unifi stuff. Does the server software have to be constantly connected or is it just used for setup? I'm just thinking at home, if I had a couple of AP's, do I need a server running or can I set it up with a laptop running the software and then leave it to it?

Hi, Don't suppose you care to elaborate on how you do this? Thanks