Linfit

Yes, the report section tabs should surround each subject - this will prevent "empty" sections from printing. Getting the merge to work properly is a dark art. Sometimes they work first time but often they don't. Have you used Validate Tags - the last item on menu when you right click on the page. You need to do this every time you make any change to the template before you save it back. Sometimes you need to do it twice. If it is merging some of the tags but then stopping part way through, try deleting the tag that it is stopping at and then putting it back in. This sometimes kicks it into action. If the template is recycled there are sometimes hidden bits of tags still embedded in the doument - if you turn on show paragraph marks in Word you can see these and delete them. If there is any word art or embedded pictures in the template take them out and see if that works, then if it does, try putting the pictures back in: the sequence you do things in can make a difference.

Ah: that brings back memories. I installed hundreds of these in our old building back in the mid-eighties. It used shielded twisted pair cable on a bus so cutting the shielding and puching down the conductors without breaking the cable was quite a fiddly job. I still have the special tool somewhere to stript the shielding off in nice neat cylinder. Econet was a good bit of tech for its time, especially when you think that back then there was little alternative other than the full fat thick ethernet stuff - certainly not the sort of netwoking you could do in house. Life was so much simpler then..........

Offers invited - Virtually unused,it was commissioned and tested by an external provider, ran for a few weeks and was then switched off when we installed a much better backup solution. It has a Fibre Channel interface fitted: no SAS or iSCSI. Coming out of our Cabinet over the Easter Holidays so we are keen to offload it. PM me with offers or further details.

We have approx 160 of these, all in their plastic boxes, most still in the cellophane,unused. Part of a backup solution set up by a third party service company but never implemented. Anyone care to make me an offer for some or all ? I'll happily post them but buyer pays postage. Alternatively, we are just North of Manchester.

I have been timetabling with Nova for several years and am also our MIS manager. I can honestly say that there are no iteroperablity issues at all. In fact, Nova is one of the better bits of the SIMS suite, mainly because they don't try and tinker with it too much: (they have added new functionality relatively slowly and the base software was good anyway) and its data sits outside the main SIMS database. That is not to say that you can't get yourself in a hell of a mess if you don't know what you are doing; its a steep learning curve and getting some proper training and then doing some careful planning of workflow is essential: importing a broken timetable is one of the most comprehensive ways of breaking SIMS there is.

Never did when I did it - I think if the timetabler had lost his edits I would have been the first to know........!

Not used T4 for a couple of years, and don't have a working copy of it to check here, but I think that if you choose "Reset Locks" - (I think its on the File Menu but my memory may be slightly off) this will achieve what you want. I used to use it when the Deputy Head who was writing the timetable forgot to log off.

Is there sufficient space on the disc/share where the outbox is located ?

The remote agent you need depends on exactly what you want to back up. There are several different versions; the simple remote server agent will allow you to back up files from another machine; you install the agent on the other machine and it communicates with the BE server and allows you to specify drives on the remote machine in the backup list. You can also get agents that will back up running remote SQL databases and other fancy stuff. Cost will depend on what sort of licence you currently have and what version you are runnning but likely to be couple hundred quid at least from memory.

Gavlar, we have a 4108GL sitting in our server room, was working fine when it was taken out of our old building last summer. Its got redundant PSU's, four 6 port mini GBIC modules, three 20 port Gigabit copper modules (the ones with 2 mini GBIC ports onboard). We also have about 16 GBIC modules that work with it. If you are interested please PM me.

A reasonable compromise might be to use the "Class check sheet " option. To get to this, open up a class list and click on the first pupil in the class as if you were going to edit the comments. If you then click Print you get an option to print the check sheet. It prints a check sheet for the whole class just for that subject, which allows a check that all comments read OK, all sections complete etc, but it does not use the template, so it prints much faster and does not waste paper. We get one of our Admin support staff to do this for each teaching group and they are then given to the Heads of Dept for checking and they feed back to the teachers if any corrections are needed. This seperates issues to do with formatting and layout of the report (my problem) with issues related to the poor literacy of many teachers - NOT my problem, but the cause of many.

We have always taken the view that this line from the guidance is pretty clear: "The Information Commissioner advises that the UPN should only be output to other schools, LAs, the DCSF and other central agencies". so it shouldn't go to hosted services etc. We had quite a debate about this with our intended Managed service provider when they wanted the UPN as an identifier on our proposed new VLE and we would not provide it. I also remember dicussing with QCDA officers at intial meetings about the Diploma (I am also our Exams Officer) why ULN's were introduced for Diploma learners when UPN's already existed, and the reason given was that UPN's could only be used for tracking learners through the school system and could not be used for anything else, so thats the line we have taken ever since.

There is a policy document about UPN's here: UPN policy and practice guidance - The Department for Education which gives detail about what it can and can't be used for.

They are finally letting me get my very own PFY..... Trainee ICT Support Technician This post is offered under the National Apprenticeship scheme in association with Bury College. Hours: 36.35 hours per week, Term Time Only Salary: £102.00 per week, rising in increments of £20 per quarter to a max of £162 per week subject to successful performance reviews. Start Date: 1st Jan 2012 Contract: One year fixed term until 31st Dec 2012 Successful application will be expected to attend Bury College one evening a week to undertake a 12 month Level 2 in IT Professionals Qualification at the College The work will be varied and include software installation and support, PC support, repairs and upgrades, work on the network infrastructure and servers, and end user support. This is a professional and busy environment with a great deal of variety to the role and is excellent experience for someone starting out on a career in IT. Bury College are managing the first stage of the applications process for us so enquires should be made to them in the first instance: Bury College - Bury College Apprenticeships - Welcome or via the Connexions Service: cnx2jobs Opportunity Details so please do not contact the school directly. We aim to interview wb 12th Dec.

This happens a lot. The AM reports are very flaky and do not like anything to be changed on the template. There are several things that you can try but the easiest is to re-verify it. Open the template, right click and select verify template. Then save the template, close it, save it in SIMS. You have to repeat this process - it only seems to work if you do it twice, and then the tags should be replaced correctly.

When the profile is generated the comments from both teachers will be placed into the template. This may be what you want to happen, but we have found this often causes repetition or contradictory comments. The best solution, as you are suggesting, is for each teacher team to decide which of them is going to do the reports for a particular class and for the other teacher to stay well away. If they do not heed your advice, they will end up having to go back and edit at the review stage if the merged comments throw up inconsistencies, so it is in their interests to follow your advice.

We have a very simple structure here; Technician managed by Network Manager, Network Manager managed by IT Manager, IT Manager managed by Headteacher. Nice and clear, with hotline to the top. But we are strictly a service and support unit - our relationship with the IT dept is the same as with all the other departments, and whilst we provide advice and support for development, we have no direct curriculum input. I think that this is reasonably common now in schools, and a better system than having someone who is really about curriculum development trying to manage the technical side as well, but I know that the chains of command in some schools can get very complex, usually to the detriment of providing a good service.

In our new build we have specced a minimum of 6 for each teaching space that does not have fixed computers; one for the teachers PC, one for a phone, and and 2 spare coming down the wall. The other two are in the ceiling void and these end up being used for various things as time goes on - projectors, wireless points stuff like that. Of course if we know there will be a requirement for some fixed curriculum PC's we add those in as well with a couple spare for luck, but the rooms are so small in our new building there is little space for desktops in many of the classrooms - hence the future proofing for wireless.

The routines accessible from Reports>Print Timetables appear to be code lifted straight from Nova-T4. I have been runnning SIMS on 64 bit for some months now and these routines will not work and I wouldn't expect them to. As Hecate says, the new routines which are in Reports>Timetables do work OK though on 64 Bit, and they are probably more useful than the older reports, which I think were included as a bit of a bodge interim fix as schools were being discouraged from using Nova-T4.

This sounds like the issue we had here which my Network Manager Chris found a solution to:

I think the variation from school to school on this one is quite interesting. At our place we have a desktop machine in every classroom and several others for staff to use in almost every department. Up until the summer we did issue staff with laptops and every new teacher got one as part of their induction. Our Head then decided that we were going to stop the practice, so from Sept, no new ones have been given out and staff have been told that when their old ones die or are damaged we will make 'best effort' to fix them but are not replacing them or buying spares. I think that in todays world this is reasonable. You would be hard pushed to find a teachers home these days that does not already have a computer in it, and their relative cost for someone on a teachers salary is not that great. I don't think that schools should pay for something which at best is slightly more convenient computer to use and at worst is simply passed onto their kids (and usually comes back to us six months later with all sorts of trojans, malware and assorted llimewire/bittorrent clients installed and the plaintive cry "Its started running really slowly......"

Good luck with this, it is an awful piece of software. When you get it working, it will inevitably break when you have to do an upgrade. You can ring the helpdesk and get them to schedule a 'test' exam to check all is working and I would suggest you do this before any live tests. We used it extensively for ALAN tests for three years and it gave us more problems that virtually any other piece of software - fortunately given up on ALAN now, they have moved over to functional skills; back to pen and paper.

I have tried customised user guides in the past, but find that staff don't. or won't read them. I now circulate the most useful of the A4 quick guides provided by Capita and do customised versions of these specific to our system - for example how to do a register, or how to fill in marksheets for our progress monitoring system; but they have to be brief; no more than 1 or 2 side of A4, or I find they are not used.

We have found AngryIPScanner Angry IP Scanner : Download - IP and Port Scanner Tool for Analyzing Networks very useful over the years, no install, just an .exe that runs from anywhere. Its an IP address and port scanner thats very good for finding whats on your network. I also use Irfanview http://www.irfanview.com/ a lot - its a batch image converter/viewer, and again does not require an install. Very handy when someone has some wierd format image they must have in a powerpoint NOW !

This is being discussed on the Supportnet forums, and apparently you can force a global format. If you set the layout as you want it and then click the "Save" button it becomes the default layout. However, if someone else subsequently does the same, it changes it globally; similarly, if someone clicks the "default" button, it resets it to the (useless in my view) default settings. Have tried this here this morning and it appears to work. They key appears to be to make sure that the default and save buttons are not generaly available, but I haven't worked out yet which permissions make them available.