Sylv3r

Live@Edu can connect to your AD but it requires quite a bit of jumping through hoops installing FIM etc. Currently working on this now - wish I hadn't bothered!

Our LA buy into and we use Evolve here also. We use Google Calendars and have a different calendar setup for each Year group available on our website (or new website to be launched anyway) Parents are able to see events taking place on our website / VLE. We are also introducing Pebble School Fund Manager and sQuid in the next few weeks to assist with the payment side of trips to enable online payments.

Yes it is possible to e-mail tutors associated with a particular student via Schoolcomms.

We had this problem in September for a large number of our users. It appeared to be related to issues we had with our Forest root server and the number of AD requests / possibly deep routing of the AD structure. We tweaked this a little and not had the problem in weeks.

This is not something we use here, but I vaguely remember a post with this info included. Do you have the domain name as part of the userfield i.e. TEST\joe.bloggs Could be wide of the mark, but may be worth a go.

Our VI (Visually Impairment) unit at our LA are currently seeking electronic copies of most of the text books we use in school to enable students to view on laptops / larger fonts etc. Publishers such as Heinemann / Pearsons etc now appear to offer this service but I am not sure of the cost as the LA are bearing all costs.

Year of Entry + Surname + "." + Initial I..e 11Smith.T

We also get the same error message on our school wireless - it's a job for next week to have a scan through the logs and try and identify where it's trying to get too.

Recycool - Recycling mobile phones and printer cartridges with schools for cash we've been using them for a while but have built up around £300 in credit up to now.

I must admit we've had Office 2010 installed for as long as we've had a CC4 network. From cold bootup attempting to logon as soon as the logon box is available takes a little longer than leaving it for 30 seconds or so - I guess theres so many services still starting up / AV checks etc going on in the background that it will take that little bit longer.

We TXT all parents and staff Staff are sent an e-mail Annoucement via Local Radio Station Annoucement via LA website Put a news update on our website at the top of the main page Updates on our school facebook / twitter accounts Someone local to the school arrives to answer any telephone queries from parents. Bus company drive around the normal stops if routes allow informing the students that the school is closed if anybody is waiting at the stop. We do as much as we can, and hopefully the majority if not all get the message.

We also have issues updating, running and downloading some apps on our iPAD's but work fine whilst connected to a PC and syncing that way. We use a Smoothwall UTM and have our wireless VLAN pretty secure, so will be looking at it during the half term to let things like the iPAD store go through.

gmail for personal use - at school we use a product called FirstClass for staff and Zimbra for students - soon to be moving to Live@Edu

I don't disagree, but getting the ideas / shortfall from 15 Heads of Department is probably going to be easier than the views of 100+ staff. If it's a new job you've got - good luck in the role.

Discover the skillset of your team (if you've got one) - make sure they are utilised to the best of their ability, find out if there any gaps in their knowledge which you could either help them with or put them on some training. Ask if there is any outstanding jobs that the school is aware of, any of these that have been open for a while that you are able to fix early on will make a good impression. Meet with all Heads of Departments individually - ask how their department could be improved via the use of ICT - listen to what they have to say, some will have valud points which you could introduce. Speak with someone like the office manager - ask them what day to day tasks they carry out manually - could these be electronic to save time and money?

Hello all I've just had an e-mail through from the above. Has anybody ever used them before in the past? I am interested in what you think of them and whether it is value for money. An excert from the e-mail is below: ------ You can benefit and get a PRINCE2 Foundation Course (worth £290) free when you subscribe to our 2 year IT Technical study package. Our 2 year package allows you to study any of the IT Technical Courses we offer (Server 2008, Exchange 2010, SQL 2008, .NET, CompTIA, Cisco, CISA + many more). Even though this great value offer only costs £790, we offer interest free monthly payments to help spread the cost of your studying. To secure your free PRINCE2 course (limited availability), please contact me before the end of September when this offer ends. [ demo-library ]Click here for PRINCE2 Course Demos [ Demo Library - ITonlinelearning - ITonlinelearning ]Click here for IT Course Demos

Good luck for those that apply - if anybody does get it, feel free to drop me a PM as your more than welcome to come along to our Durham Network Managers meetings.

I got a call out of the blue from them last week - haven't as yet used them for anything. Thanks Andrew

I've moved the PDOXUSRS.NET file to a shared area and set the necessary permissions and using the Borland Administrator pointed to the mapped drive and works with no problems.

That is a similar name but unrelated company. The company you spoke to are Hardware based. IT Support from Millennium Computers first class IT support contracts and maintenance

I use my iPAD reguarly for note taking and calendar mainly. I also can check on my vSphere servers and remote in where necessary. It's also useful for checking on tickets via our helpdesk, but I tend to pick them up via e-mail.

Answers below: 1) Did you support a two way system to begin with, i.e. use both Cash-based registers and Cashless Catering System, or did you migrate from cash to cashless in one go? No, we moved cashless throughout in one go. 2) How did you inform parents? Simple letter home or something else? We informed parents via letter, school website and our newsletter. We also invited parents in to an hour session after school if they had any questions / issues with regards to the recording of biometric data. 3) How did you show students to use it and register them on the system? Did this take time? It's relatively straight forward and students did not require any training - dinner took slightly longer to get everybody through initially, but now we can get 1,400 students through and fed in 50 minutes. 4) Do any schools here integrate it with their VLE or provide Parental Logins so they can view what their child(ren) has been eating? Does anybody have Frog which they have integrated with? Did you launch this at the same time as you moved to Cashless Catering? Do parents look at this? We are yet to implement, but we will be configuring parent payment system via a company called sQuid. 5) How do you accept payments of parents/students? Online payment (i.e. Credit Cards), or Cheques? Do you have machines that accept cash and register it to their account automatically? Anything else? Currently parents can pay via their students with cash or cheque. Cash in the revalv machines and cheque in a deposit box near reception. Once we launch the sQuid system - parents will be able to pay online via credit / debit card. 6) In the use of paying for their food, do students use Cards, Pin Numbers or Biometrics or a mixture? We are looking at Biometrics but just wondered whether any schools use this and have had parents who have refused their child to be fingerprinted? In which case what did you do to resolve this? We use Biometrics for all students - some parents were a little wary at first but all students now use the biometric method. 7) When students leave, whether at the end of the year or part way through how do you re-imburse students/parents with any access funds? Or do they lose it? If you return them does it add a considerable work load to Finance staff? We offer a refund of all remaining balance on request only. We tend to remind students a few weeks before they leave, to ensure they spend as much of their account as possible. For the very few cheques we have to write for refunds it doesn't take too long. 8) How did the first few days go when you implemented the system? What pitfalls did you find and what went well? I'm guessing that some students may have struggled but how about catering staff? Went pretty well - we had a CRB / Cunninghams install and they insist on having engineers on site during the first day or two to ensure the system works without any problems. The catering staff find the tills easier to use than the previous tills they used. 9) What contigencies have you got in place if the cashless catering system goes down? Nothing - I asked this question on here a month or two back if you do a search - I come up with a plan of printing a stock image of the till where the students name could be written at the top of the page and each item ticked off incase of a powercut etc - I haven't done anything with it yet, but will be suggesting this is what we do. 10) Again looking through the forums I've noticed that there has been issues with parents paying, whether issues with online payment systems or something else. Do you allow students to go into a low negative balance by a few pounds just so they can have their lunch? If so how much? We have a negative limit of £5 for each student, for those who forget to bring in dinner money. This is where the major administration takes place through having to send out letters or telephone calls to parents to remind them that their son / daughter is in arrears. If we were to launch the system again - we would probably think twice about doing it this way. 11) And finally any particular systems we should look at or avoid? I've only really seen the CRB / Cunninghams system and can't think of anything negative to say about it.

Touchwood everything regarding SIMS and Office 2010 is working without any problems.

Not quite loving it as much as I was.... but getting there!

Unlimited but the majority of staff accounts are reasonable - Music, IT and Graphics teachers appear to take the most space.