Iain.Faulkner

Although not a network manager, I thought I'd throw my two'penneth's worth in. Assistant Network Manager, Secondary School, approximately 1250 kids, 130 staff. 400 PC's 100 Laptops. Currently Salary is Scale 6 on the NJC pay scales (approximately £21k to £23k).

We've been using Viglen (despite getting rid of classlink this year), the guy there has been really helpful and their pricing has been the best we've found for a lot of licensing bits.

Hi, Not sure if this is the right place for this or not, but heregoes anyway. I've got a users laptop that I've just reconfigured to work on our new network/domain. I've set him as a local user, ensured that his home drive is available offline and synchronised everything between the server and the laptop. When attached to the network, the laptop is fine, he can access his documents, save them, save new ones etc etc. But as soon as you take the laptop offline, the ability to save documents is severly affected. When the user tries to save a document, a progress bar appears on screen and scrolls to the end then the laptop freezes for approximately 20 minutes at which point it crashes out. Anyone seen this before? Any suggestions? Cheers in advance. Iain

11th November - 1am

Hi all, We've recently startde using quite heavily the achievement and behaviour side of Sims.net and the staff are finding it relatively easy. The one area I could do with some assistance on is the reporting side. Just to give you one example, our house/college leaders in school want to be able to run a report on their particular house/college at the end of a week/half term/term giving them a total of the number of behaviour points issued (obviously this can then be replicated to allow form tutors to do something similar). Has anyone been able to get Sims to do this? Any help anyone can provide would be gratefully received. Cheers Iain

Hi everyone, I'm after your help...yet again. We've just moved up to Exchange 2007 over the summer, and we want to be able to create a public school calendar, as we had previously as a public folder shared calendar in exchange 2003. I've done googling, and i've searched through here but to no avail. Has anyone else managed to do this? If so, please could you enlighten me :-) Cheers in advance.

Thanks TimZim, you've made my night as that's finally solved it!! If you were closer I'd buy you a pint :-) Cheers to everyone though who responded

Hi Marvin, I did exactly the same thing at first, I've checked user permissions and all staff have read access to the share and the folder.

we are using roaming profiles for staff. Not tested anything for students yet, who will have mandatory profiles.

apologies, let me explain how i'm trying to set this up. I've created a share \\servername\teacherdesktop and redirected users desktops folder to this location. Within the share I've set up a structure of folders and software shortcuts that I'd like to appear on the desktop. User logs on, and rather than get the desktop I'm trying to give them, they get the standard windows desktop with a couple of icons on. Have checked eventvwr, no errors. Checked RSOP.msc to see what policies are running and the only error is on this policy in that it can't write to the share. But why would it need to write to the share?

Thanks for all your replies to this. Tried the three links in the first reply, followed the instructions and still no desktop :-(

Hi all, I'm hoping someone has done this before. We've just done a complete rebuild of our network over the school holidays, moving to Server 2008 and Vista (I know, I know!). One of the things I'd like to be able to do is set a standard desktop and start menu for our staff and students using group policy. Is this actually possible? Having spent some time on google, it's not looking promising, but I'm hoping someone has done it before. If it's not possible to do this, what would be the best way to setup users' destkops and start menus? Any advice anyone can give will be gratefully received. Cheers Iain

Hi all, Thanks for your responses. It is just the 1900 tower that I have. When I spoke to Dell yesterday, I was told that the rack mount kit is available, but they have sold out, and gave me the number of a firm that will sell them. Spoke to said firm today, who tell me that Dell are talking rubbish, and my best option is a shelf or some sort of third party rack mount kit. But thank you for your endeavours anyway :-)

Morning all, The title says it all really, I'm after a rack mount kit for our Dell Poweredge 1900. Spoke to Dell direct.....truly useless. Let me know your prices :-), sooner I get pricing, the sooner I'll be looking to purchase. Cheers Iain

Hi Andrew, At my previous school IRIS was brought in by the SMT without consultation (not Iris's fault or its developers fault I know). Upon trying to implement it our staff found that the layout was not as user friendly as it could have been. To be honest though the main issue was getting pupils to import correctly so that they would appear in the correct classes for each teacher. Quite often we would have "rogue" pupils that were in the wrong classes, despite regular imports of data (something I found quite laborious in that it had to be done via csv file) from Sims.net, this led to a lack of use of the system (a mistrust of it, if you will) from our staff. When we had issues, we would report them to the IRIS support team, however the response would take a significant amount of time (if we received a response at all). On a more personal note (although this is only my opinion), I prefer to run as few applications/systems as possible. I find that the more usernames and passwords our staff members have to remember, the less likely they are to use the different applications/systems we expect them to use. In my experience, staff have found it easier to run as much as possible from one console, a la sims.net. Similarly, I prefer to run systems "in house" as much as possible to avoid reliance on other companies. Hence I prefer to avoid hosted/off site solutions unless I absolutely have to use them. Iain

We run a digital signage provided by Matrix Education, onelan i think, does exactly what we want it to do, nice and easy to use. Wasn't cheap though.

But surely it's worth a look just so you can get together the number of quotes that your finance department requires?

Have you tried using Schoolquote? Very handy for pulling together a number of quotes before handing it into the finance department, however you'll most likely end up going with someone off here as 9 times out of 10 the edugeek suppliers are cheaper.

Hi Bandgeekmafia, Just looked at your location, and was wondering which school you've got the network manager's post at? I know there was one going in our LEA (which isn't a million miles from your location), and just wondered if you'd gotten that post (particularly given your comment about the NM leaving under a bit of a cloud).

thanks Sylv3r, that was exactly the kind of response I was looking for :-) I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole in all honesty, my previous experience isn't good. I just need to fully justify my opinion based on other people's experiences.

To quote Maniac..."Ok, Here Goes" Classlink going out, 4 brand new servers coming in running 9 virtual servers on a Vanilla Windows Network 330 brand new workstations coming in, to be installed in our IT Suites 100 staff laptops to be rebuilt onto the new network 5 IT Suites being completely refurbished, with painting, flooring, new benching, new data and electrical cabling and Smartboard and Projector installation 2 new IT Suites being created, all work as above, but with some building work to put up stud walls and remove some brick walls Rebuild of all remaining workstations (most admin workstations are staying) Disposal of all old equipment Think that covers it all :-) suffice to say that our refurbishment work and building work has already started! oh yeh, I forgot Install 2 Sans (1 x 1.8Tb, 1 x 6TB) Install and configure 5 x Imacs Move all data from current admin network to new domain, shutdown Admin domain (hurray :-) ) Create new users in new domain using new naming convention Migrate data from current domain, to new domain, renaming user folders where required Think that might finally be it :-)

Hi Matt, You'd be dead right. It is web based and is hosted only. Two good reasons not to purchase in my opinion :-)

Just wanted to bump this thread, even though it is pretty old. The SLT at our school has had an all singing all dancing presentation on IRIS and are pretty sold on it. My own personal experience of IRIS is not good, having used it in a previous school, and my personal preference would be to use the behaviour and achievement modules in Sims.net. Does anyone in edugeek land use IRIS in their school at the moment? Has anyone used it and got rid of it? What were your reasons for binning it/bringing it in? cheers Iain

I actually thoroughly enjoyed Transfomers 2 and hated Star Trek......Guess I'm on my own with that one.

I know this is different, but we've just priced up for two IT suites (both about two/three the size you've said), we were looking at £2.5k per room.