the.damon

or in pastoral structure

I'm sure some of you do this already but I've not seen anyone post up much information about it. One of the major issues with the Sims.net diary is the limited printing functions. I always get asked if its possible to print a Diary in a similar format to MS Outlook (month view etc). The solution I came up with is to export the diary as a csv and import this into an Outlook Calendar. It works pretty well and means all the nice print templates will be available. I have written a simple guide and included a report definition on how to import into Outlook and Print as desired. The guide assumes some basic knowledge of outlook but i believe its fairly easy to follow. I havent had it proof read by a school yet so if you have any issues with the guide let me know: Download One important thing to note is that the CSV exports to S:\sims\ you may want to change this based on your LA/School standards or change the Def's so that Export location is chosen at runtime.

We use an externally managed exchange account for our main email and dont have a great deal of space allocated to it. Due to this, we have a PST which is used to archive the sent & received. Is there any way I can share the PST (or setup an alternative) so that multiple users on our network can access it at the same time? We would prefer not to go the whole hog and install our own exchange server so if anyone has any knowledge of workarounds or 3rd party applications (will throw money at it if needs be) it would be much appreciated.

Does it gradually increase in size even if you login to sims and then let it idle? Perhaps some sort of network based issue causing pulsar to fret.

One of our schools is having an issue with assessment manager whereby the user is left waiting for 5-10 mins before the application loads. There is no stress on the resources etc and the splash screen appears immediately. However, once the splash disappears the process is listed in task manager but the application either takes forever to display or fails to load. I think it is something to do with MS office as sometimes the 'preparing to install' dialog flashes up just before the splash disappears. I have reinstalled office to no avail. One thing about this computer is that it was setup by a complete cowboy who continues to support them. The school purchased a 'new' computer from this person but it turns out they salvaged the old HD and upgraded the OS to win XP. Oh and not forgetting they mounted the OS drive as D: even though all the previous reg entries pointed to C:... i could go on but it just makes me sad!

much better to use win sched tasks and commandreporter.exe in my opinion. Its easy to use, just a case of entering a login then a report name. If you need help though just gimme a holler as i tend to use it in various scripts.

I am surprised your local helpdesk did not assist you further with this issue. The general advice for this error is to use the detect & repair feature of office: Go to Add/Remove programs and click on Microsoft Office Click on the 'Click here for support information' link and then click 'Repair' This will repair this Office install. (You may be required to insert the Microsoft Office installation cd to carry out this operation)

that could be the case. It might be worth having a search on the doc server for larger files to see if they still exist.

have you checked the DOCSTORAGE since the install though just to ensure it hasnt created a dir with IP rather than computer name? I remember there was an update a while ago that created a new folder and used that rather than the original! Also, do the custom reports from the previous install work?

first things first.. Did you copy the DOCSTORAGE folder over? If you did, go into the DOCSTORAGE on the new server and see if there are two folders inside it, eg one is COMPUTERNAME and the other is IP. Make a backup of the docstorage then check which of the two folders is from the old machine (ie. by date or by name etc). Then copy the old folder contents into the new folder contents. Go back into sims, import the newest reports then try again.

wahey! Good work nick!

The problem for SIMS is that what works for one school doesnt for another. I think alot of my primary schools would appreciate some form of update information upon first login. However perhaps the delivery of this information does need fine tuning. Perhaps just a large message on the homepage offering a link to the PDF the first time they login after upgrade would be sufficient. RE: Voted change requests - Anyone with a supportnet account can vote for change requests.

That should be standard practice across all LA's. Would you rather be the guinea pig that receives all the problems people have reported? I control updates for an LA and i always hold back on approving updates for a week or so to judge the reliability. If a school specifically requires the update then of course it will be approved for them but LA's only hold back because they are trying to protect their users.

Perhaps an office update that has caused the problem. Is the good machine on the same build of excel?

That explains why i've only been asked about it recently! Its such a pain to have to edit reports due to sims upgrades but I guess it comes with the territory

Yep it didnt used to be a problem in excel as far as i remember. I think it was either Dec or March that the problem started. I usually use word based templates so I can't be sure as to when it changed. Its possible to include macro's in your excel templates so the report could be setup to find and replace automatically.

Well in most cases you would want those because it formats the address correctly in word etc. The black lines are specified by the different address entry fields such as Street or County. If you just want one cell then use AddressLine instead of the block.

Ahh yes the notorious manual setup! I've had various issues with this one in the past but the first thing to check is whether you can delete the ownaab.pdf from s:\sims\ when logged on as the user. If you can then its worth doing a search for all *.pdf's in the sims dir and moving them to a subdir such as \PDF. Now run the manualsetup again and see if that completes. If it does, copy the previous PDF's back to S:\SIMS from the \PDF dir and ensure that you click NO if prompted to overwrite. This is required so that PDF's that are not part of manualsetup are restored. Finally, delete the PDF dir with its leftover contents. If you cannot delete the simsown pdf from the users account then you need to pop on as administrator and reset the perms for the sims dir. Although you may have deleted OwnAAB previously and thought it didnt work, it may have failed on OwnAAF.PDF but on first glance you thought it was the same file error? Any easy mistake to make as this one has tricked me in the past. Basically, the pathetic way that simsmanualsetup operates means that every workstation will try and update the S:\SIMS dir with the newest manuals when there is an upgrade. I think that the S:\SIMS PDF's should only be updated during the solus routine and subsequently the clients either update their own local store or just use the ones on the S drive! But alas this is not the case so we have to put up with the delete and retry method.

check: https://forums.symantec.com/syment/board/message?board.id=115&message.id=7075#M7075 looks like sp4 hotfix could solve it if you are on sql 2000

I wish our schools did the same! I saw another instance of that app only this morning. Just to clarify, I assume the delay is after you have entered your user/pass and pressed ok? I'm sure it will be but thought it best to ask incase it was an issue with simsload.exe Butuz: You may have a point there but would this still cause the servers sims client to login slowly? I'd probably say that it wouldn't but stranger things have happened. There's no harm in examining the network traffic to see if there are peaks at the time of login issues.

That doesnt mean it's not on school machines though.

One thing to add to phils post above is that imo you should never use that MS antispyware app. The one that has a red and yellow target icon. It runs havoc with sims load times and is detrimental to pretty much any application.

good point. Whats the login time like if you use the client on the sims server? If you can test that when other users are experiencing slow logins then perhaps you can rule out whether it's a network issue.

I wouldn't have thought that would be the cause Dave as it wouldnt increase cpu/memory use. What size is the DB and Log toby? It might be worth backing up and trying to shrink the db.

First of all, have you unticked 'Include records with no such events' in the Behaviour filter? You didnt mention it but without that you will receive incorrect values. rather than use the normal filter page, use the red book filter in the data fields section. This is what i used and the report worked correctly.