WSF

I see your point, however with many schools gaining Academy status, they are able to break away from their LEAs and choose their own software. Also, integrating with existing MIS providers will prove to be very difficult; Capita charge over £7k for partnership that gives you the resources to develop, and Serco Learning charge about £5k - so unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money, you're back to square one. There is a huge need for a better and cheaper MIS though. Hope this goes ahead!

I'm definitely interested in assisting with this project, MShakeshaft. PM me if possible to discuss this further if you're interested?

Right, I've set up a VM and installed and configured AD following the structure suggested above and it seems to be working quite well. One thing I've also tried out is delegating password management to Teachers on the test domain and asked a member of staff to test this, however, although resetting a password in ADUC is extremely simple, the member of staff in question seemed to have real trouble and would prefer a dumbed down version! Perhaps the bespoke software would be a good idea... By the way, how stringent are you guys with setting GPOs for Staff? I generally completely lock down the desktop for Pupils, however I'm not really sure how strict I should be with staff.

Thanks for all responses so far. @Kim - I've spoken to a few members of staff today - all of which agree that 'something needs to be done' as when they move between machines, their data isn't always accessible and the current shared drives are rather hit and miss. The roaming profile structure in place just doesn't work. @Speckytecky - We currently have around 35 members of staff and 450 pupils. SIMS is used for all the admin side of things - which I'm not particularly familiar with. In the last school I worked at, they used a bespoke package developed for them. All members of staff use SIMS however they all have differing levels of access from what I can see. @Neil - That looks like the exact soft of thing I'm after. That sort of structure would make Group Policies a lot more effective I think. The file shares look good too. I think I'm going to get a VM installed and play around with some ideas and report back to you! One thing that I'm contemplating is developing a bespoke system to sit on top of Active Directory - similar to RM I suppose - that will allow me to delegate permissions to Teaching Staff for resetting just their pupils' passwords. I've got quite a few other ideas in mind for it too, but I'll see what I can put together. Slightly off topic, but if I managed to build such a system, would anyone be interested in testing it?

Hello everyone, First of all I'd like to say how useful I've found many of your threads on this forum; I've been a long time lurker! Down to the problem: I've recently taken on the role of Network Manager at a Primary School and the first task I've given myself is to redesign the entire Domain - it is an absolute mess. Please could you post a brief explanation of your OU structure so that I can get a good idea of where to start. I'm thinking a seperate OU for Office Staff, Teaching Staff, Non-Teaching Staff, SEN and Pupils, and then apply GPO's restricting each one differently. Also, what shares and network drives do you all have in place? Many thanks for any advice you can give. WSF