nick3young

Thank you for your thoughts everyone and I'm certainly going to look into an alternative providor for SIMS support. SchoolICTs looks brill. I feel for the staff I speak to at Capita. I have no issue with them personally... but I just hate the level of bureaucracy they enforce. SIMS is a pretty sensitive beast at the best of times and when you hit a problem with it... you don't want to be emailing someone or being pointed towards an irrelevant KB article. You want to be speaking to a human being who sounds like they care! Which I never get at Capita. And for the money they charge in general, I just expect better.

Definitely a direct package Steve. When I spoke with them on the phone, the chap did say something about 'us going through the Bedford office'. Not sure how that effects us though. According to that document... we should get telephone support too. Which they also told us we don't have! I think I need to explore this in a little more detail!

Steve... yes sorry, I am including the license in that price. £8000+ (might be closer to £9000 now). But even so, it's still a lot of money and I would expect a better level of support.

Hi All, Is it just us or the level of support that Capita provides supporting SIMS absolutely woeful?! I think we pay well over £8000 a year for it (admittedly, that includes updates etc... which do.... I don't know what because SIMS still looks like it did 10yrs ago). Perhaps I've become spoiled by the various other suppliers that we deal with (ClassCharts, Clickview, RM, Eclipse...) who actually respond to requests in a timely manner and actually appear like they care! SIMS support is just constant 'jumping through hoops', waiting forever for a response, not being able to talk to anyone on the telephone ever. In fact, last month, I was speaking to an engineer on the phone who knew how to resolve an issue but told me that his hands were tied because our level of support doesn't provide the 'remote desktop' option. At £8k+ for the basic package I dread to think what it costs for their premium service! I just feel like SIMS have been resting on their laurels for far too long. They've got the education market mopped up. They know it is too tricky for a school to move away from. So they get away with providing a shocking level of support. In my opinion.

Thanks Mikkydoos... I'll check it out. I actually have a thread running parallel to this one to pretty much try and solve the same issue. But I felt that this was quite a generic question which will solve a specific problem. I'll post the results...

Ha... I have started a bit of a debate here haven't I?! The way I see it, similar to what Matt40k has said... we use 'Symantec Endpoint Protection'. And like with SOLUS, we can push out the AV agent to clients using the 'Symantec Manager'. But it is much more convenient to deploy the agent as an MSI via GPO and then have the agent pick up the definitions from the server. This is exactly what I would want from SOLUS - deploy the agent via MSI and pick up future updates from the SOLUS server. We deploy 250+ applications and SIMS is the only single one (after a new computer build or reimage) that we have to remember to add back on! Deploying via MSI will solve that. As far as I can tell, there are three bits of information that needs inserting into the MSI to make the install 'silent': (1) Agent Service Address (2) Deployment Server Address and (3) RSA Keypath. I've managed to insert the first two into the MSI via an MST... but I'm struggling with the 3rd one, the RSA Keypath. This file is created when you click 'export files' in SOLUS (like you can see in Michael's post at the top of this page). When you install the SOLUS agent manually, you specify where this file is as part of the installation process. The problem I'm having is trying to bundle this file as part of the MSI and suppress the prompt for it. Arthur... can you repost your MST please? Does that have the answer?

Do you know how to deploy via GPO Matt? This is exactly what I'm after...

I've had a go this morning and the tricky part is building in a key.xml file into the installation. When installing manually, it prompts for it during the installation and you simply specify it's location. The challenge is making this part silent. I feel this is more of a generic questions so I have started a thread about this here. I'll make sure I update this thread with the results...

Hi All, Does anyone know how to build a file into an existing MSI to suppress a prompt for it during the installation? Using Orca, I'm happy modifying properties to add in things like 'registration keys' etc. But, if the installation asks for the location of a file during the installation (e.g license key)... how could I tackle that? How could I make this part of the installation silent? Thanks Nick

Yep - there is another thread on it but from a long time ago. I private messaged the chap who had managed it... but it was so long ago he no longer has the files. It must be possible because it is possible to manually install the agent using the exported files. It should just be a case of automating that process... somehow?!

Hi All, Has anybody managed to package up the SOLUS agent for network deployment? We have been using the SOLUS server for years to deploy the agent remotely but, with 99% of our other applications being delivered via MSI/GPO, we can sometimes forget to install the agent after building a new computer on to the network. Not to mention there is a direct relationship between how little I have to use SOLUS and my happinesss! There is a way to export the SOLUS agent for manual install... but this creates a batch of files and a javascript file for the install. I could do with it all in a nice, tidy MSI (with perhaps an accompanying MST). Any help would be much appreciated. Cheers Nick

Hi All, I am in the process of upgrading our vSphere 5.0 to 6.0. However it errors at the start of the upgrade with the following error: So I thought I would do exactly that and upgrade our SSL certificates. I found a PDF here with a brilliant guide on how to do it: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/replacing-vCenter-Server-5-ESXi-Certificates.pdf But I'm stumped at the first hurdle really. I've installed Open SSL as requested in the first step. Then I am required to enter some configuration details into 'openssl.cfg' file. I think I could perhaps 'jump in' and brave entering the details but I'm just nervous as anything that I will brake the communication betweek ESXi hosts and vCenter at some stage! (they both require SSL for communication). Has anyone done this before who can offer me some pointers or anything to watch out for? Has anyone encountered the error above when upgrading? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks Nick

Hi All, Does anybody on here use SAM Learning? We would love to implement some kind of 'single sign on' solution to save our students having to remember their login details (which they never do!). I've spoken with SAM Learning directly and the only option that they have offered is an unsupported method using 'HTTP POST'. It basically involves passing the 'centerid', 'login' and 'password' parameters to a URL. Has anyone attempted this? Or using an alternative method? Thanks Nick

I've cracked it. It was an issue with a shared 'normalemail.dotm' (I hadn't realised it was shared so don't know when that happened!). I'm guessing one member of staff must have changed the default on the template to French.

Hi All, We are having an extremely strange problem where Outlook 2010 is defaulting to 'French' for the spell checker. My observations are: It is only effecting our ‘staff’ users (indicating it is a GPO setting somewhere? – not one I have consciously changed though). Student and Admin users aren't effected by the issue. It only effects Outlook in the Office suite. Settings are identical in Word, for example, and that spell checks correctly. The settings appear correct under 'Language Preferences' in Outlook but under 'Proofing Language', it is set to 'French'. Changing it back to English fixes it until the next logon. Anyone come across this or know how I might sort it? Cheers Nick