Killer_Bot

We're implementing Veeam Backup Essentials here soon (having used, and been frustrated by, Microsoft DPM for the past few years). Really intrigued by the idea of the Google Drive backup of the Synthetic full. Could you tell us more about your process Primus? We're implementing it with a 3 node failover cluster (utilising the max 6 cpu licence of the product) with around 20TB local storage. Currently implementing an idea of offsite backups using a VPN and local feeder schools but Google Drive could be an interesting alternative.

Any reason you're not looking at Meraki? I only have limited experience with Meru and Meraki but always found the latter really good.

Are people happily using Wonde now or is there still some concerns around their processes? We've had a similar request from our Maths team today from "Diagnostic Questions".

Not sure if I've misunderstood your question now sorry. You can produce reports with monthly balances if that's what you mean? We have an automated monthly report that shows accounts and balances for our Finance team. It's pretty straight forward in the 'Reports' section.EduGeek.net - The I.T. Professionals' life line

I don't believe you can display it via the small popup client unfortunately. I believe if they login to the interface they can see it then though. See here; PaperCut KB | How do I show Shared Account Balances in the User Client

I've heard of Foldr which would do this but it's not cheap. It effectively gives them access to their homedrives or shared drives. It does have the bonus as acting as a Bonjour Gateway too. Or you could go down the route of Google Drive or OneDrive and save files there then have Staff pull them off.

This is how we do it too. I've set up AD Groups based on Departments that are then mapped in Papercut Groups and allocated to 'Accounts'. Staff don't get the option of a personal account anymore and must select one of the accounts they have access to (which is based off of AD Security Groups) and then our monthly report is just per Account. We also set up a 'Billing - All' security group that is a member of every 'Billing - %subject%' for people like ReproGraphics or Admins who will be printing for others. Whilst you could do something similiar with Papercut I prefer to keep the groups AD based as they're easier to manage and maintain. Works really well.

The PC Client can be found on the Server Share. Just browse to it's path and then PCCLient. Depending on your setup it will prompt you for credentials to authenticate so you'll likely need to create your own user for it or get them to use domain credentials. Check out the article Big_Ted linked above for more info on that front.

Whenever I've came across this it's been down to an incorrect password being supplied. Had it changed recently and the DirSync had yet to run maybe? Be interesting to try accessing outside of your network and see if you have the same authentication issue.

Haha That's a bit cheeky mdrabble. On a serious note; I'm happy to trial for 11 months and post back my thoughts........

That sounds quite interesting. I can't see much on their site for costing though, is it one of those situations where it really depends on the number of students? Can anyone give any indication for pricing for Secondary?

You can do a search on AD (top option but I can't think of the name of it at the minute) to find accounts that have 'Do Not Expire' on them. But if you're trying to find actual passwords then yeah; unless reversible encryption is enabled it's a no. Though I find staff will often tell me if I ask them which always makes me laugh and tell them off. Do you have Fine Grained Passwords enabled too? As otherwise Staff should all be hit by the one and only policy at the default domain GPO.

I'm fairly sure you can only have one Password Policy on the domain. If you want to allow for different levels you need to use Fine Grained Passwords. You just create Password Setting Objects and reference them to a group (of which the users are in). So in our case we have a PSO for Students that allows them to have far less complex passwords than our Staff. You'll need to create them directly in ADSIEdit with Server 2008 R2 unless you use a third party tool. Once they're created it will override the default domain settings for those users only. Full details here; Fine-Grained Password Policy in Windows Server 2008/2008R2 | iSiek's blog about Microsoft Windows services

Are you able to ping the printer from the Server?

A colleague of mine had mentioned something called Concerto too but it didn't look particularly user friendly. I'll have a look at Xebo. Thank you for the suggestion.

Good morning all, I was hoping someone could give some advice as I would guess this has been done somewhere. I have a Primary School who have had a lovely new kitchen area and would love to get up a number of displays to both show the food that's actually on offer (using a camera so the children can 'see' the food before they get to the counter) as well advertisements for things going on around the school or upcoming lunch events. Now the camera portion I could do quite easily, just hooking a camera directly into the panel. I was wondering though if there are any cheap and viable digital signage solutions we could use so that they could advertise over the camera (whether it be an IP Camera or something). I know of some digital signage solutions but they can be incredibly expensive. Does anyone have anything that comes to mind that could do this? I'd like it to be easily manageable by somebody on site who isn't IT as otherwise it could get quite out of hand. But ultimately I'd like to get a solution that works. Any advice would be most appreciated. Thanks, K

The types of groups really depends on how granular you want to be. You could go SLT, ALT, Maths, English, Finance, etc. but again it depends on what you are going to do with those groups. Don't just think of groups being used for 'Shares' either as you can use them to filter all sorts such as GPO's via the 'Security Filtering' or ITL 'Item Level Targetting' on certain GPPs. For instance you mention mapping a drive via GPP and having to use all of SLT but you could do an ITL saying only map for each user if they are a member of the "PCT" group. You could even go as far as to say they are a member of group A but NOT a member of group B. Access Based Enumeration as Penfold says is also a good option and looks a lot better if you can get it all set up initially.

I suspect this is a no but just in case; you haven't gotten the account set to 'password never expires' have you?

Sounds like it may be competing GPOs. Have you had a look in the event logs to see if it happens around the same time GP refreshes? I think default is 90 minutes or so. If not you could set up a monitor on the setting itself to alert you as soon as it changes and try to see what else happens at that time. Do let us know if you track the problem down though

I suspect its as halbaradkenafin says. Especially as it sounds like you're using Group Policy Results which gives you the results of group policy that has already happened. For example there would be no results that feature your new policy for User B if they haven't logged on since you made the change (it would still give you the results of when they last logged in). You can always do Group Policy Modelling from AD GPMC as that will tell you what "should" happen rather than what "did" happen (the latter requiring the user to logon first to give you some results to see). If they have logged on and it's still not happening then please feel free to ignore the above

Yeah I've just been having a read through the thread below; http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-8/137229-deploying-windows-8-x-apps-group-policy.html MS really have failed with education and the store. On a 1 to 1 basis it ought to work great but in a shared environment it's just not feasible to go around installing manually and we don't allow students access to the store for obvious reasons. Fingers crossed they find a better solution for Windows 9. Never did I think I'd be recommending an Apple product over an MS one but manageability is key.

Hi Gareth, Were you ever able to find a workable solution for this? Dan

I want to try to keep it as simple as possible because otherwise it will end up not being used. I think filming with a view to what's going on and then applying the effect afterwards could work really well and should be straight forward. The only concern I'd have is when using live backgrounds. If the children wanted to interact with what's going on in the background for example they'd have to get the timing perfect with regards to starting the movie at the same time they hit record. I suspect it'd be similiar whether you were recording with the effect live or not now though wouldn't it..... just hit record and play at same time and off you go. That could work. Brewerd - Could I ask what camera you tend to use? They're looking to get a camera/tripod setup but I don't want to go over board nor do I want to go too cheap.

I'll do exactly that thanks NewFormz.

Thanks for that brewerd. Am I right in thinking that you could, in theory, just record a video on the camera whilst seeing the chroma key effects live, and then apply that same effect onto the video afterwards with something like FinalCut? Not quite as neat as a full solution but that could work right? Any advice on hooking a camera into the Mac so you could see that live effect whilst still being able to record on the camera? That software you mentioned didn't appear too expensive either (atleast Veescope). Am I right in thinking with that, and all the necessary kit, we could see what we're recording with the chroma key in effect?