Linfit

I have never done this. It rolls over automatically on the first day of the new year. The ability to change the year you are working in is a user setting for the benefit of timetablers/academic managers who find it more convenient than changing the date, but as it is a user setting, to change it you would have to log in as each individual SIMS user. I think that's a wonky piece of advice.

I believe that's correct - there are no levels reported for this years KS2 tests, just the raw scores, so there will not be an official conversion.

Planned to upgrade everything to Windows 10 this summer. Expected to come back from holiday to find my techs had done it. We had been testing for weeks, had a solid image, should be no problem. Came back to find that it simply hadn't worked - all sorts of niggles and issues right from the get go. My senior techy had to make the decision about what to do ( I was off grid): try and chase down all the issues or revert back. He decided, rightly in my view, to revert back so built a clean 64bit Windows 7 image and started again. Whole thing took 4 weeks instead of 2. He's finally gone off on well deserved but brief holiday and I am picking up pieces of sorting out things like printer drivers and odd stuff (most of our old installs were 32bit). A long slog for him, but heroic effort to get it sorted paid off. At least we have upgraded everything to Office 2016 and we have a nice clean image on everything as a result. Have been in much worse shape at this time in August in previous years.

We are in the same position: we have 2 revals. We still get a lot of money through them and due to the nature of our intake it would be very difficult to go 100% cashless. We haven't decided yet but I think its likely we will pay for the upgrade, although we may have one machine removed: we have found them increasingly unreliable (they are both 5 years old) recently, requiring constant re-starts, and we have had a steady increase in using the cashless side over the years, so I might be able to justify only having one. We also need some new tills, as ours are knackered, (also 5 years old) its going to be an expensive summer on that front I think.

'ICE' - Instructions for conducting examinations - JCQ Joint Council for Qualifications Its Section 8, Other Arrangements, Subsection 8.8 Word Processors

If it has not updated automatically it will be because it is a satellite install, ie one completely independent of your SIMS server. To update it, you will need a copy of the latest version of the Nova satellite installer, NovaSatelliteSetup.exe which used to be found in the setups folder on the server. If you are using SOLUS 3 though, this will not have been updated in some time, and you may need to contact your support to get a copy of the files.

Nova T4 lived in the SIMS\SNOVA folder on the server. You may find the .exe in there - I think in the NOVA4 folder, if your server is old enough to contain the relics of previous versions. Ours is fairly new so the folder. although it exists is empty. I'm not sure there ever was a satellite installer for it in SIMS\Setups - think that was for T6. May be wrong though.

Ofqual are on the case about this - we have had a letter this morning, they are auditing the BCS because they are worried that if the qualification can be passed in a few hours it doesn't meet the 120GLH rule. Wouldn't be surprised if they remove it from the league tables. This would be a ******* for those of use going through the labyrinthine registration, setup and testing process, if it all turns out to be a waste of time.

The latest version of Nova T is 6.33, which was included in the Autumn release. If you are using Solus3 it should have been updated automatically when the Autumn release was installed. If it hasn't, it may be that these machines are using stand-alone installs. Nova can be installed as a stand alone application, for the convenience of Timetablers who want to work at home usually, but you need a separate installer for this and a copy of the relevant licence file. The licence file is probably on your server somewhere, its called MLICENCE.DAT. You will have to get the stand alone installer files from whoever is your support contractor or - I don't know of they are available via MyAccount.

We have used the AmazonBasics ones for some time and have had no issues with them. Unfortunately they don't seem to do 30cm, although they do have some 10cm.

Yep, these are for the school to schedule - so when the dates are agreed they need to be entered into the component properties in the basedata. You can't do this though for some components - you'll find the Exam Date and related boxes are greyed out, even though the school will want the test to occur on a specific date. The AQA GCSE Art controlled test is like this - it won't let you put a date in.

Would agree with this absolutely. When it works, its OK, but its totally string and sealing wax, and when it doesn't work, their engineers basically prod and poke at it until "Hey, look, it started working again !"

This is in Focus>System Manager>Settings The default username format for new users can be set in panel 1

How useful you find it depends on your existing options process. We have essentially "free choice" here, so pupils pick four subjects and then we try and make up the option blocks to accommodate as many first choices as possible. Because of this, we find Options very useful as it allows you to manage this process well: its something that is tedious to do manually or in a spreadsheet. The interface looks complicated but is in fact fairly easy to use once you get into it, but it is a little fiddly to set up as it requires the new academic year to exist, you have to import students, set up subjects etc. I do this and it usually takes me a morning, and a Deputy Head then actually uses the software to work out the blocks. He is only an average SIMS user but has found it straightforward enough to use. He likes it because we operate a system of 1st 2nd 3rd and 4th choices and reserves and the software is designed around that type of approach. If you are a school which has fixed option blocks where the subject distribution is already decided and the pupil choices are constrained then its really not necessary: the set up and admin overhead wouldn't be justified.

Very interesting post, and I agree with all of it and then some. We were in the exact same position last summer, only difference being we are an Office 365 school rather than Google. Our Frog server was even older and probably would not have coped well with Frog OS. We had it for nearly 9 years and usage was never high and had tailed off considerably. I could find no USP for Frog OS and no outcry for it, so I gave everyone three months notice and switched it off at the end of June. Pretty much no one noticed. Staff who want to do everything on line use Office 365, and most of the content was so old and unused we didn't even get hassled to copy it off. I took great delight in the summer holidays in unracking the server. smashing the drive platters and throwing it in the skip. I was never a fan of VLE's anyway and they seem very last decade now when there are things like Google Docs and Office 365 out there. We replaced the parent portal, which was fiddly and difficult to configure, with TASC Insight and this was cost neutral. Combine that with Frog's terrible documentation and its not inconsiderable expense and management overhead and I think its a no-brainer. Unless its a solution to a major problem, its not worth it. I have found in the past that these things linger long after their sell-by date because the people who originally championed them don't want to admit that actually, it was a bit of a damp squib, but technology moves on and five years is a long time in IT - they need to get past it. I was fortunate that the senior staff who had originally driven our purchase of Frog were long gone, so no-one was invested in making it work no matter what.

We use resource manager and we have quotas enabled, but when things are quiet we do wander through the user areas and check the file server reports anyway, just to check what is there. It usually turns up something - like you, movies are the most common, but also stuff like offensive names on files, various other rubbish. I think its just good practice to check from time to time and I suspect that a lot of school NM's do it regularly. It also means we can keep a list of regular offenders and report them up the chain of command (we don't do pastoral work - we just delete the files!) I think that although there are technical "solutions" its one of those things where you need to "wander around" from time to time just to get a feel of what is happening and what's out there.

We don't issue staff with laptops routinely. We have some senior staff who have them and the IT Dept, but that's all. There is a fixed PC in every classroom and in the staffroom, each Dept has a work area with at least 4 PC's in it, some have more. We stopped issuing them over five years ago as the then Head took the view that computers were so common most staff would certainly have one at home. I still think this is a valid point of view, but these days of course staff might have several tablet devices at home but not perhaps a PC or laptop, so we might have come full circle on that one. We do issue all our staff with a personal iPad. These are actually easy to manage as other than setting them up for the Staff wireless we let them use them as they wish - they are not managed: as a result they have a low overhead for us (unlike the pupil ones used in class which are a complete pain in the a***). This works well for us at the moment - given the capital cost of the two options would be about the same. Staff are happy because they get the shiny shiny, and we are happy as the management overhead is reduced.

Just been looking at this, came on here to check if anyone had any issues. And have exactly the same ! Newly updated OSX on a MacBook air, fails with that error every time I try and run the migration tool. I notice there is no Help file either. Looks like the release was a bit rushed.

Are your using the Smoothwall internal DNS server ? If so I fixed this scenario at our site by adding the internal IP's of the servers to be addressed by URL to the Static DNS hosts list in Smoothwall. Works fine for us. We did it to allow people to access our webmail using the same url inside as they would outside.

If you try and download a free App from the AppStore, making sure there is no Apple ID currently logged in, when you get the prompt to create an Apple ID you can work through the screens and this does have the "none" option for payment method. I use this method to create ID's linked to staff e-mail accounts. there are other ways of triggering the create Apple ID prompt but these don't seem to produce an option for no payment method.

The default academic year is the one on which todays date exists - as today is the 2nd Sept it will be likely be Academic Year 2015-16, if you are like most schools and run Sept to Aug. The start and end dates of the academic year are defined when it is first set up - this is usually done quite early in the preceding school year, as it is required for Options and Timetabling.

This is a user specific setting and is changed in Tools>Academic Management>Set Academic Year It should default to the current one, but if it has been manually changed I believe it will stay that way until its changed back.

No, but they probably don't know either - we certainly didn't change any of our networking for them. It seems to be one of those systems that takes a while to settle down and needs a lot of fiddling about initially, and then is OK once its stable, provided you don't change anything. Its a massive bodge of software and little programs scattered all over the place, scripts and scheduled tasks, and I suspect that there is no such thing as a standard install, and their techs just wing it until they get it working.

We got one of these to play with as I thought they might make a cheap netbook replacement. Imaging is a problem - no network port, so going to be old school ghosting for large numbers, not good. Actually thought the build quality and performance was OK for the price. Drivers were a big issue - none for Win 7, (which is our platform) so touchpad doesn't work. Put 8.1 Pro on it so we could add it to the domain, still doesn't work. Rang HP - Business Support won't help as they are considered a retail product, and retail help were only interested in putting it back to the default config - no good for us as they need to be on a domain. Is now on shelf in storeroom, where it is likely to remain.

Their default position is to say its your network. We had some terrible problems with lag and tills locking up when we first installed their system. Its got better and is pretty good now, but they basically blamed our switches, the fact that the server was virtualised, the fact it was on its own VLAN, anything really.