Linfit

Ah - No. I may have misunderstood the question. I was thinking in terms of the whole timetable. If its just two staff then the blocks will have to be re-staffed accordingly.

Its on the cycle menu - Exchange two days.

Not sure what you mean by importing the staff. The staff list in Nova is independent of the one in SIMS - you can add new staff in manually at any time from the Plan>Teachers menu: you just need to make sure that the teacher code in Nova matches the one that has been set up in SIMS Manage Classroom Staff.

We had them in to do this about three years ago. For the copying, they gave us cardboard letterboxes to go next to each copier/MFD and a set of forms - staff were supposed to complete a form and post it in the box everytime they photocopied from a book. Someone from CLA came around every week to empty the boxes and take the responses away. I recall we had to create a shortcut to the web logging tool so that staff could log on-line their use of web resources, but that was about the extent of our involvement. I have no idea how comprehensive/complete the staff response was: we had no feedback afterwards. I suspect it was patchy, but I imagine if they get sufficient responses to make their sampling valid that's all they are bothered about.

We have used this for a year. Its all about the set up. Get that right, goals, evidence, targets and such, and once its set up staff generally like using it. Tombry makes a good point about the appraisal chain - it assumes a very hierarchical top-down structure with the Head at the top; the appraisal structure you want may not match your line-management structure so it needs some thought. The user permissions need some careful thought as well, because it is these that define who can see what, who can edit/add things to individual staff appraisals. We had a good paper based system which we were able to transfer without too many issues, so the main time spent was in the initial set up. I think I spent about two days total in set up tasks (but we were starting from scratch working through the manual and training materials) and maybe another half day working with the one of the Deputies beforehand to get the structure we wanted.

No, we're not that sophisticated. We just have two to spread the load - one is user shares the other is everything else.

We went ahead with it last summer and I have been very pleased with it. We bought one with four servers and a 10GB Ethernet card and migrated all our core servers to it, moving them from XenServer to Hyper-V. We stuffed it with discs and it is also our primary datastore. I replaced a somewhat overspecced and flaky SAN with two windows file servers running on the VRTX and this has simplified things considerably. As a result, we could replace 8U of old Dell servers and 8U of SAN with one 5U box. Massive saving in space, power, cooling and cabling. I think its an excellent piece of kit and would very much recommend it.

Timetabling software is not cheap. Most schools use either Nova or Timetabler. Both have their proponents and both are capable of doing most things. If I had my preference, I'd use Timetabler here, but as we are a SIMS school and Nova is therefore already paid for, we use Nova. All timetabling software has a steep learning curve: even an experienced timetabler has to get used to the specific terminology and workflow requirements of a particular piece of software. I don't think that any software that does something so complex as a school timetable is going to be "simple" in that respect, as its not a simple task, even in a small school. In the end, someone needs to weigh the benefits that might come from having a timetable done in software against the time and cost of someone being trained to do it. It may well be that if there are no obvious gains, you are better off carrying on doing it manually.

That first section on the Summit pound is about 500yds from my house ! Good to see you had nice weather for it. Neat bit of flying through the changing room porch as well.

Same here - looks like the site is down.

We use the Milestone software with a mix of Mobotix and Axis IP cameras, all PoE. It wasn't our choice as it came with the new building, and its not a cheap combination, but we have found it very reliable and effective in the three years since installation. We have two servers of which one runs the internal cameras and the other the external, partly from organisational choice and partly because there is a 64 camera limit on each install of the server side software. (We have around 60 cameras total at the moment). The Mobotix 360 cameras are amazing if you have large open spaces that need coverage with only a minimum of cameras (we have a three storey atrium in the centre of the building). The only downside we have found is that the client software for live view or recordings needs a fairly hefty spec machine to work effectively: you can't install it on a standard two or three year old staff workstation and expect it to work effectively. As a result of this, I will be upgrading SMT computers in the summer to allow them to use the client more effectively.

You will need to create a new reporting session. Attach the comment bank you want to use to that session, and then on word template to use you can click the search icon and all the templates in the system will be available. Select the one you want, click clone, give it a new name and it will attach to the session - the first time you save it will complain that the comment bank in the template doesn't match the one in the session, but as you are going to re-do the tags this doesn't matter.

I saw this ! I get on the motorway at that junction on my way home. I must have passed a few minutes before you, not long after it happened as there were no emergency services in attendance yet. I also couldn't work out the geometry: only the overturned car appeared to be damaged.

My understanding is that some of the 5GHz radio channels can potentially interfere with Weather Radar from overflying aircraft. We have a Cisco controller and ours detects radar quite often (we get a lot of aircraft overflying coming in to Manchester) and when it does it shuts those channels down. I think that if its a problem you can stop your controller from using those channels. I haven't gone into it in any detail as it does not cause major problems for us. I'm sure someone who knows more about these things will be along shortly......

Although it may be a pig of a job, its worth spending the time now, although the damage may already have been done. We had a newbuild/refurb four years ago and the new and very expensive EMC SAN was installed and commissioned, (by a well known large IT services company heavily involved in BSF projects) while the building work was going on around it. Although we did our best to clean up when we finally got control of the server room, by then the dust had got into the drives and we had regular failures for the next three years. When we decommissioned the SAN I removed some of the drives and opened the lids of a couple of known failures - full of cement and plaster dust. I amazed things lasted as long as they did.

We have used this for Emerge in the past, we use it for cashless catering and a number of other things still - it seems to be the most common app for third party companies to extract data from SIMS. Once set up, it seems pretty much trouble free, just works, which is exactly what you want I suppose from that type of application.

This is the case if you are going to be using the Cover module to manage staff absence and room changes/exams. If you are not using the Cover module then temporary room changes are difficult as it requires a change to the timetable which is not actually created or edited in SIMS. If you are not planning on using Cover in the first instance you may be better sticking with your paper based system.

We have had it for three years, renewal came due last month and I renewed without hesitation, one of the most useful and functional bits of kit we have. It isn't the cheapest, but you get what you pay for, and its not an area where I would want to cut corners if I didn't have an upstream filter.

We have used it for years. From a technical point of view, config is minimal - send them anextract from SIMS every year at that's it. It uses flash and I think still uses java which can be a pain, but generally just works for us. I think from a curriculum point of view, coverage is variable. It seems to be good in some subjects, not so much in others: difficult for me to comment on which as I'm not involved at that end and I don't get the monthly usage data. I know our Maths dept used to use it extensively, but have now moved over to MyMaths instead. I think these more specialised sites are generally better as the ones like Sam Learning that try to cover everything tend to spread themselves too thin. Having said that, its good for revision and the minority of our pupils that use it use it extensively for this and do seem to find it useful - but despite the fact that they all have access and we push it quite hard, it is a relatively small proportion that choose to use it, I would say no more than 20% of our year 11 are regular users.

If you are using configurator you can make the computer running configurator an authorised device. You should then only need the two factor authentication then if you change the account details. I have not needed it since I set up the VLL account, but I set the MacBook air that I have configurator on as an authorised device.

Provided you get the dates right when you do the import you should not have any issues with this. I am in the process of doing something very similar as a result of changes in our Maths dept. Pupils will continue with their base band memberships even if there group memberships have changed - you will simply need to re-allocate those pupils to their new groups. You can do this as soon as the timetable has been transferred - again, just check the dates on the curriculum assignment screen are correct. Also, when you are done, remember to run the update Course memberships routine.

We had 60 of the Stone AIO's in the summer. I think they are well thought out and like the look of them. Response of staff and students to them has been good. However, we have had issues with 10 of them since July, which is a high failure rate. 2 heat sinks not fitted properly, 3 motherboard failures, 2 hard drives, one dodgy power button, just from memory, without checking our helpdesk. We also had 3 missing mice and/or keyboards from the boxes on delivery. Whilst all have been fixed under warranty, their response has not been as good as it used to be (we are a long standing Stone customer) and they clearly had/have some quality control issues. Might just be a bad batch, but it would make me think twice about buying any more.

We have just decommissioned our SAN which was installed as part of our BSF managed service that never happened and are looking to sell it: EMC Celerra NX-4 SAN with Clariion AX-4 comprising: 2 Data Movers 4x 12 Bay Disc Enclosures populated with 43x300GB SAS discs Control Station Power Supply/UPS unit Complete with all fascia plates, mounting rails and interconnects and official EMC training materials and original OS and support discs. Was running from Jan 2011 until Oct this year. We would look at around £5000 for the complete unit but could split specific items if no-one wants the whole thing. Buyer would need to arrange collection/delivery. We are approx. 12 miles North of Manchester. PM me for further info.

We get this a lot. We have a number of very large summary marksheets for KS3 subjects which behave in exactly the way you describe. Its not pulsar or the workstation, its the server. If you monitor the server when the edit is happening you will see it max out CPU time on one of the cores and just sit there until it eventually completes the save. We have had our local support team look into it and they reckon its just bad coding. We have a high spec server with acres of spare RAM, loads of cores - doesn't matter - the process maxes out whichever core its running on and it takes as long as it takes.

We have had this. It expects to find a file called index.html in the sims\documentation folder. If this file is missing, you get this error. On our system, it turned out that our documentation had originally been in S:sims\documentation\documentation and so it couldn't find it and failed.