Linfit

1. Have you imported the students into the season ? Surprising how many times I forgot that step. 2. I used find issues if the start of the academic year and start of term dates in Sept didn't match. Try changing the group membership date to a few days after the start of the school year. 3. Might be worth running update group memberships in SIMS.

It is for us. We haven't had many requests for home use for Office for a long while now to be honest. We have an O365 tenancy and Google and so people tend to use that. My inclination is to do nothing and simply allow the facility to lapse - I cant think of any work related use where they couldn't get by with 365 these days.

1. High School 2. 1000 users 3. 100Mb, but there appears to be some headroom as we have monitored up to about 110. 4. Leased line 5. ? We rarely max out the connection but our "base load" as it were is between 15 and 20 MB through most of the day, - we monitor on a screen in our office and it has not gone below 15 since start of school today. Would agree with you that 20 is way too low for a school that size.

Nope, we have an O365 tenancy and I am no clearer than you are.

I got this e-mail as well and was just as perplexed. Went onto VLSC and couldn't see anything relevant to this at all. Tried in a few places and eventually followed links through Software Assurance benefits and when I clicked on our current agreement number got to a page that was Copyright 2004 and had links on it for Encarta Subscriptions and other weirdness !

Just been going through drawers looking for some fibre gear and found 22 Netgear AGM731F-R GBICS - they came out of our old building 7 years ago and must have been in the drawer ever since. They are 850nm1GB with LC connectors. Happy to put them in a jiffy bag and send them to anyone who is still using legacy Netgear Kit.

Yes, I used it to remove all our non-SEN 25yr old+ pupils during the Autumn term, as a sort of a test and as a way of making a start. It doesn't remove everything, and I will need to track back through, but it does work and at least makes it possible to start on getting compliant. Previously it was just such a huge job it was beyond what most schools had the time to do.

This is a squishy problem not a technical one, and it can't be solved by processes or tick lists. Its a classroom management issue. Some teachers will report everything and be really on top of things and some either won't or can't - if they are incapable of preventing the issues or don't think them worthy of reporting they are not going to fill in sheets or carry out checks. We have similar problems from time to time - we know which teachers and which departments cause the issues, but other than continually reporting the issues up the chain of command, its difficult to do anything about it unless the SMT are willing (and able) to try to get a grip on it.

Ridiculous. You could buy 26 replacement Ubiquiti AP's for that first year cost and then have no ongoing future costs. You just need a computer to run the Ubiquiti software on and you are good to go.

AD activation works OK - I activated a 2019 server importing a KMS into AD on a 2016 DC no problem. Don't know about standard KMS server though.

There is a bulk deletion feature now available - it appeared in the Summer release and has some additional functionality in the Autumn release. I can't find any specific manuals for it in the SIMS Documentation though, although it is documented in the context sensitive help. Its accessed from Routines>Student>Bulk Delete Student Data Apparently they are working on a similar set of routines for bulk staff deletion as well.

We have had something similar. APP created some years ago and left dormant, and we lost the password - had two factor authentication set up for a device we no longer had, so couldn't get anywhere. I decided to cut our losses and start again, but when we tried to re-register they said we were already registered. We did know the original e-mail we had used though, so we re-activated it (it was on our old domain) and Apple then contacted that e-mail address after we contacted them in order that the original administrator could give permission to deal with the issue. They knew that the original administrator, the new administrator, and the "authorised person" were all the same person (me) but they had a process to follow. Eventually, they deleted our old account completely and this allowed us to re-register from scratch, and its all working fine now. We did get it resolved in the end, but it took several e-mails from us and phone calls from them and like many of these things it often depends who you get on the other end of the phone. We did find it was better dealing with them by e-mail as we had to explain the issues several times and it was easier to track things by having the e-mail chain. I think if you don't know the original e-mail address it might be more of a problem as they don't seem to want to do anything if they can't contact the original administrator. Sort of surprised they don't have a process for dealing with stuff like this - I suspect its a fairly common scenario, but then again, it is Apple.

RDS is probably the cheapest and quickest option if you have Volume Licensing. We have SIMS as a remoteapp, but selected staff can also remote desktop through to their office PC. This is good if they are also using things like FMS, 4Matrix etc. Fairly straightforward to set up, there are lots of guides on the web, and numerous threads on here about it. Its been a real game-changer at our school, and some staff, particularly SMT, Exams Officer etc, use it extensively.

We use our Sports Hall for exams and put down carpet - we bought it years ago and it rolls out in 10ft wide strips which cover the floor quite quickly - takes about an hour to set up. The carpet was quite expensive (its really rubber matting with a fabric top) originally but it has lasted a long time. It is very effective at deadening the sound and makes it possible to do MFL listening tests in there with little reverberation. This is only really practical if you have somewhere to store the carpet though (we have it on big stands as you would get in a carpet shop in a storage container). At a previous school they had large curtains which could be pulled across the walls which hid the Gym equipment stored up against them, but also had a good deadening effect - this is quicker to set up and likely cheaper as well. Any solution though is likely to be quite expensive in the short term.

Indeed - we use SIMS for this and behaviour and achievement can be reported separately with no issues. There are some pre-defined reports that take the aggregate totals, but its not inherent in the system.

Yeah, I think if we had the pupils on ours I would probably be wanting to go cloud, and if its part of implementing other changes and trying to get systems more integrated, then it makes sense to move everything, particularly if there is a direct cost saving as well.

We have used MDaemon here for years, but only ever for staff e-mail. We are familiar with it, its very easy to manage and very reliable. Its running on a VM so we can increase storage as required and have done several times. A significant proportion of our e-mail traffic is staff to staff so never goes off-site. We also have been an Office365 school and now very much getting into Google. The staff all have Google mail accounts as do pupils. We like that the staff admin e-mails run on MDaemon are completely separate from the Google accounts, which staff use to communicate with pupils. I know we could have another domain on our tenancy to achieve this, and I can see the simplification arguments of moving everything to a cloud based system, but my view is that if you have the kit already set up and you are happy with the current version, so are not paying maintenance costs, why change it for the sake of changing ? I intend to leave ours in place until some other factor comes into play which makes making the change essential or gives significant extra benefits.

You can deploy an "out of band" patch using SOLUS without the need to do it manually - On the Update library screen on the SOLUS console there is an import update link to import the patch file into the system - you can then schedule it and leave SOLUS to do the nitty gritty.

Thats not a bad spec for a typical SIMS server in a typical secondary. I think you might do better to spend the money on upgrading the storage on the existing server rather than upgrading/replacing the server. I don't think you will significantly improve the performance by adding extra cores, and the memory is ample.

Essentially you just need to make sure that your mail-server DNS record is pointing to the public IP of your server, and that the MX record for your e-mail domain is pointing to your mail server. It is probably currently pointing to an RM server. How you achieve that depends on where your domain is registered and how the registrar allows you to alter DNS settings. We are with Zen, so can change the DNS settings for all our domains ourselves on a dashboard page. With other registrars, you may need to get them to do it. We use MDaemon, have for years and I really like it. I am curious though, what aspects of the security have you been advised would work better without the relay ? I would have assumed that the relay would have some security of its own that would deal with some nasties before it ever hit your server ?

The process of setting up a domestic season is quite well documented in the handbook. The main difference between a domestic season and an external one is that you have essentially to create your own basedata. This is quite tedious at first, and will probably take the whole of a day the first time. Make sure before you start you have all the information you will need, which is basically which subjects, how many papers, length of each paper, and the date and time of each paper. You must also be clear about the difference between an award, an element and a component - these are the three key components of the basedata and you need to use them in the correct way. There is a Capita document called I think "A Guide to Structuring your Basedata" which is worth a read.

The start date for attendance should default to the first day of the academic year. Is it possible your academic year start date is wrong ?

My understanding is that alternative curriculum does not remove them from the substantive course - it just allows you to show that at certain times they are elsewhere doing something else. If a pupil is in a Geography class, but for one of the three lessons a week is withdrawn to an alternative curriculum provision, they will not appear on the lesson register for the lesson they are withdrawn, but will appear on the other lessons, and they will still be a member of the Geography "course" and will therefore still appear on the marksheet for that course. I think that's how it works.

There are a number of things that can be done to help alleviate things like this: 1. Run Update Course Memberships before doing a reporting run - although it ties up the server, so don't do it at a busy time. 2. When you run the reporting session, change the group membership date range to a day or two before the report run - this will remove pupils who were in a group sometime during the academic year but have now left it. 3. Ultimately,if a pupil is on a class register, they will be on a marksheet. If they are not doing the class, they should not be on the register - this is an issue for whoever does academic management or timetabling at your school. Its worth pointing out to them that if a register is inaccurate, and the students timetable inaccurate, you don't know where the pupil is or should be, and this is a safeguarding issue.

Thats possible. Mind you, this is SIMS we are talking about, so the underlying logic (what little there was to start with) of many of the interface and programming decisions is lost in the mists of time.