TheScarfedOne

Ok - Ive found one sort of fix. The username needed to be entered as DOMAIN\Username in the Advanced Permissions. Setting as a Room Admin (via HAP config generated the ability to remove and override booking; adding the user to the group defined at the top of the booking section gave the "As another user" option. So, Ive used a combo approach on that - and it is working ok now. Ive got a feature request on bookings - which I will put in the right area too; but as its related to bookings - I'll stick it here too! The ability to book a whole day rather than go for each session would be great. Kind of an option to copy to remainder of the day or something like that. Hope you can do it... Stuart

Flip - completely forgot! Sorry....! Here it is... HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ EnableNegotiate (DWORD) - set it to 0

Hi Nick. Ok - Ive replaced the DLL and restarted IIS. Sadly - no change. The user is listed as an additional admin on the HAP Config page, but doesnt get the ability to book on behalf of someone else. They can remove/override others though - so some parts of the additional admin are working. Ive given the user Advanced Permissions from the Bookings Control panel - and the number of bookings for the week sets correctly now, but the number of days in advance doesnt.

SQL can be hosted anywhere - Ive been running it against a cluster since install. On the 2012 front, can also substantiate the rumourings about MMS... there is lots and lots of talk about it.

Congratulations! :-)

Ive found it can be a pita like this... but in my case, was doing worse - not prompting and just saying "NO". Was one fix, a regfrag forcing Kerberos off so that it had to use NTLM. I will track it down from my GPOs and post it...

Hi OP. There is a load of information over on my blog EduGeek.net - TheScarfedOne - Blogs on setup and some of the things you can use it for - to manage your estate basically. Everything from OS, to Apps, to compliance, to audit, to security (Bitlocker), to standardisation....

And a bit more digging on it. If I remove the users from the "Additional admins" on the Room/Resource - it doesn't look like it is reading the group membership of the AD group added on the HAP Config screen under Bookings > Administrators. Any troubleshooting ideas as this one is a major PITA! Stuart

Seconding comments made earlier really - it is important to define the difference between DFS and DFS-R here... DFS - lots of shares on different servers accessed via one path e.g. \\server1\share1, \\server1\share2, \\server2\share4, \\server 3\share4 all become \\domain\network\share1, share2, share3, share4 DFS-R - yes, multiple copies of each share across different servers. Earlier versions of DFS-R could be a real pig. SVR08 and 08 R2 have majorly improved this. Overall, Id recommend any setup uses DFS as it gives you the transparency. No users need to know what server the files are on, you can move servers easily, just change the paths etc. Can make life a lot easier.

And another discrepancy surrounding rights on bookings... Ive now upgraded to v7.10... and these are the issues I've spotted: 1. Advanced Booking Rights - Max number of bookings per weeks is applied, but number of weeks in advance isn't 2. Additional Admins of a Room/Resource get the "over-ride" option on bookings, but they cannot book on behalf of someone else. Upgrade otherwise works nicely Nick. Great work. Still got that other bug with MyFiles not displaying and throwing that error as per other thread....

Hi Nick Ive not upgraded to 7.10 yet - so apologies if youve fixed this already... Im trying to use the Advanced Booking Rights to extend the booking window for some staff. Ive entered their username, and changed the setting so that is is 10 weeks in advance - but it isnt setting it (the dates show greyed out still). It soes seemt to set the max bookings per week successfully though. Any ideas? Stuart

Oh come on... "mits off" combined with the :-p should have denoted joking about!

Mits off - Ive PM'd :-p

Right.... gloves off - round 1! Only kidding. Im in the Hyper V camp - purely because you can do all the Live Migrate stuff and clustering, service monitoring, auto failover for free in Server 08 R2 HyperV. Previously, VMWare had a monopoly on the live migrate stuff, with preferred hosts etc - but not any more. I designed my environment last summer and its already been tested a few times with power ups failures etc. It works really nicely. And for those that say about HyperV hosts being a full OS - start using Server Core for those servers. I do for DCs, and any others which don't need a full GUI that I can manage with the remote tools. Need any more info/advice - PM me or comment and I will trry and keep an eye here. Stuart

With the printing - you would be better looking at Print Clustering, which is supported well in Server 2008 R2.

This article was originally posted on the Microsoft Schools blog on 20th Jan 2012 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukschools/archive/2012/01/19/building-school-networks-for-the-future-with-system-centre-and-hyper-v.aspx Building School Networks for the Future - with System Centre and HyperV One of our (many) friends over at EduGeek has recently done some work with Marine Academy Plymouth taking over their systems in May 2011. We have now a series which charts the process of systems modernisation from analysis, to planning, then implementation before finally evaluation. This first article will deal with a summary of that analysis; and the ones which follow will cover Stuart Wilkie’s (IT Manager) decisions and how he put them into practice. Marine Academy Plymouth is the UK’s first Marine Academy. It’s a state-funded specialist secondary school with three sponsors - University of Plymouth , Cornwall College and Plymouth City Council. The Marine theme is not just about Marine Science. One of the common questions (and EduGeek had a few at a recent open evening), is why “Marine Academy”? You immediately think, do I need to grow fins, have a boat, swim even…? Well actually it’s none of those things. All the careers that we currently pursue from a land-based concept can feasibly be accessed in association with the sea and marine. Careers in areas such as engineering, tourism, medicine, catering, building and agriculture – just to start with! Marine Academy Plymouth’s focus is to help to prepare and develop the students’ career opportunities, for today’s traditional jobs and for those that we don’t yet know about, we will achieve this through a commitment to high standards and to sustainability. “A modern, reliable, environmentally friendly computer system is key to the Academy in so many ways. Everything we do here has to embody our ethos and beliefs and ultimately empower the learners of tomorrow.” Standardisation and a stable platform are the key to the success and development of any system – at least that’s what the experience of time tells me. The systems at Marine Academy were a bit of a mix at the start with a wide variety of hardware manufacturers as well as specification. Dealing with the inequality of accessibility would be key to ensuring the consistency of the learning experience. The system itself consisted of surprising few servers for the scale of the clients – all 600+ of them! The server platform was powered by two DCs, Exchange, Capita SIMS (Student Management System) and ISA all of which relatively new. There were also a selection of older servers performing legacy file sharing and testing roles such as WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) and the free imaging and management platform “FOG”. The problem was the DCs were also the DFS, directly connected to the SAN , contained all the User Data (everything from Home folders to Profiles and the traditional Staff and Student shared folders) and the legacy servers were exactly that – legacy. There was no redundancy within the system, and the ability to perform any maintenance, or failure, would render parts of the network inoperable. The majority of the teaching staff had been issued with laptops, a throwback to the Government “Laptop for Teachers” scheme. There was a wide variety of sizes and specifications. A quick glance at these, and their age/condition presented an issue. Consistency of delivery for one, and secondly, Devon and Plymouth as Local Authorities were insisting on implementation of encryption of all mobile devices which left school and college sites. Largely, the desktop fleet was in a good way. Marine Academy has 6 main ICT Suites plus clusters for Technology, Science and Arts. ICT Suites had largely been refreshed the previous year with high not being realised due to downgrading to the older Windows XP Operating System. The administrative and support workstations had also received the same refresh which was slight overkill based on their use. The remainder of the machines comprised of large fleets of either “custom build” dual core machines, older Celeron small form IBMs or RM All in Ones. The majority of classrooms had a single workstation installed to be used with the Interactive Whiteboard and AV facilities available which fell into one of the latter two ranges. Returning to the headline intentions, consistency of learning experience, reliability, stability and core to the Academy ethos, sustainability, the question lies, how could it be done? Key development intentions: • More power was required to bolster the Server Platform to give the failover and resilience, as well as the flexibility to develop. • Security of Laptop Fleet for Curriculum Planning and Delivery, and a decision on the future of laptops or workstations for the “teacher point” in classrooms • Workstation modernisation, in those areas which had been “left behind” • Consistency of learning/delivery experience, by ensuring that no matter where learners were working – their settings and files followed them, and the environment they were working in was always the same. Coming up in the second article in the series, there will be details of how we designed the new server system, what choices we made and why plus the start of the implementation process… so stay tuned! Stuart’s “alter-ego” is TheScarfedOne and as well as being the IT Manager at Marine Academy Plymouth, he fits in being part of the staff team at Edugeek.net, with whom Microsoft have a close relationship. Edugeek.net is the community for ICT Support and Development in Schools, with a worldwide following.

This issue... as you had the release notes to hand I assume from the postings... http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/81021-solus3-app-v-woes.html

Oh fun time again. Will be downloading that tomorrow then. Does anyone happen to know if the Solus3 and AppV drive letter issue is fixed? At least with SCCM I can manage the client install process by essentially a silent reinstall :-p

Exchange 2010 has the capability to have "Room based" mailboxes to use for resource booking supposedly, but Ive never tried it or seen it in action. Id take a look over on TechNet documentation for this, if I find anything in my noseyings - Ill post back.

Wonder if I can use the visiting folks excuse for some more holiday time to come and show my face too.... ideas....

And I know it doesn't really belong here - but there is also a Free "Express" version for MAC/Linux etc too Free Active Directory Authentication for UNIX, Linux & Mac I hadn't spotted that...ideal for getting started

Yeeeeeessss! Someone called? There are a few Centrify resellers in the UK - if anyone is interested, PM me and I will put you in touch with them. Ive used Centrify before for just MACs and its very handy indeed. Will be getting it again later this year too...

Did someone shout??!! The bits you need can be found here.... Remote Desktop for Thin Client… Part 2! - Blogs - EduGeek.net and Windows Thin PC - Blogs - EduGeek.net

Ok - so from Outlook, you've been able to share your calendar with another user for ages. The problem is there haven't really been many options around automating this. Well - enter some handy new features in Exchange 2010. The calendar sharing feature introduced in Outlook Web App 2010 (OWA) allows a user to grant access to their calendar to another user. To access the option, click on the Share option when in the Calendar and then on Share This Calendar. You’ll then be able to select the user(s) that you want to share your calendar with and define the level of information you want the recipient to be able to see in your calendar. Now, this is all well and good - because as an admin, you can open their mailbox through OWA logged on as you (you do give admins permissions to other users mailboxes right through delegation?) - and do this for them. The recipients are then sent an email message with a link in it which enables them to create the "OWA" or "Outlook" shortcuts to the calendar. All they have to do is simply click on the Add This Calendar link. OWA will then add the calendar to the list of available calendars and the user can then access your calendar whenever they want by simply clicking on the calendar’s entry to instruct OWA to open it. It breaks it down as My Calendar, and Other Users Calendars. So far so good right? The user will be able to see the calendar, but they won’t be able to add anything to it or make a change to an existing appointment. In short, they are restricted to “Reviewer” access. You can confirm this by clicking on the Change Sharing Permissions option in the Share menu, when you’ll see something like the screen shot shown below. In this case, just one other user has access to the calendar and all they have is Reviewer access, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they won’t be able to add or edit items in the calendar. Now, you will be thinking that you can then click on the "Change Permissions" option and increase those permissions to "Editor" right? Sadly - wrong! The Exchange team left this out annoyingly - in the same way the pre SP1 version of OWA 2010 didn't have an option for printing the calendar. So...in short - Im hopeful they will get round to this. In the mean time, you need to get down and dirty with a bit of Powershell to sort this one out. Actually, when you think about it, this is a good thing, as you could Powershell it from the start. There is one gotcha here tho - you can't give a user "Editor" on a calendar without them already having "Reviewer" - which is another annoyance! What do you need to do then.... well, here we go! We need the the Set-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet, which is the underlying command that manipulates folder permissions. The command that we need to run is: Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity alias:\Calendar -User UsertoGetRights -AccessRights Editor Now, remember I said that you can’t run the Set-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet to alter a permission on a folder unless a permission has already been granted to the folder for the user. If you want to add Reviewer permission for someone who doesn’t already have access to a calendar, you have to run the Add-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet with a command like this: Add-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity alias\Calendar -User UsertoGetRights -AccessRights Editor To confirm that everything has gone to plan, we can use the Get-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet to validate the permissions on the folder. This lists out the users who have the various levels of permissions. Oh, and just for fun - and to prove where the Exchange Team need to do some more work - go back into OWA and take a look at the shared calendar permissions now. You will notice it says "Editor" but it is also all greyed out, and the button to change is also dead. The code to support dealing with this permission level isn't finished - but at least OWA knows about it rather than throwing a complete wobble at it!

Welcome to Part 4b of my System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) series! So - on with Part b of getting SCCM ready for building your first Windows 7 image - how to deploy that (with a load of extra options and fancy stuff!) to your estate. In the mean time, if there is something specific you need, or that you think Ive missed, please comment or send me a PM. Alternatively, you can find me on Twitter @TheScarfedOne. Add New operating system image Remember Ive been saying you are going to need you Windows 7 DVD? Well – now get it ready! You need to copy the contents of it to a folder shared that folder on the network. For this – I created a share called SCCM-SOURCES on my local server E$. C Drive is the OS obviously, D is where SCCM is installed, and E is a third partition. Im going to reuse this later on - so, SCCM-SOURCES needs sensible permissions, I gave Everyone Read, and Domain Admins Full. Remember, I said reuse. Inside it – I created an OS folder, and and APPS folder. APPS we will come back to in Part 5 of this blog series. Now weve got that done – guess where we are going?! That’s right, our trusty SCCM ConfigMgr, Console. In there, select Operating System Images from within Operating System Deployment and right click it. On the menu, choose Add Operating System Image. I don’t think we need to be screen grabbing here again now – you get the idea of the way these SCCM wizards work. A little off topic, but you will be pleased to hear under SCCM 2012 RC2 and RC3, the wizards are largely unchanged! Win! We will deal with what has changed in 2012, and how to upgrade at a much later date. Lets just get 2007 up and fully running for now… Back to our wizard for adding the OS image. On the Data Source page browse to the sources folder of the DVD you copied above and select the install.wim file, and then on the general screen fill in the details. The usual summary to next past, and then finish. Remember in Part 4a, we dealt with the concept of distribution points. Well – we need to do all that again for OS images. So go and find the image you just added in Operating System Images, click the arrow next to it, and right click on Distribution Points. Heres a reminder on that process then… Select New Distribution Points, when the wizard appears click next. Remember - we only select the normal distribution point from the list (and not the PXE one) as this is not a boot image. Summary time and done. Add new Operating System Install Package Next we will make an Operating System install package, this package will contain the files necessary to support the installation of the install image we created above. You might have noticed when in the Operating System Deployment node, there is an Operating System Install Package option. That’s what we need here. The section title was a bit of a give away! Wizard time again! Instead of picking the install.wim file from the source we used above, we must now point the Operating System Install Package wizard to the root of the DVD which we've already copied to the network, SCCM will then import all of the setup files that are required to support the installation of Windows. Why – well here is some TechNet info… Quote The Operating System Installation Package must contain all the files necessary to install the desired Windows operating system on a reference computer. For example, this package might contain all of the reference files found on a Microsoft Windows XP Professional installation CD (not just the files in the i386 folder) because the installation must be run unattended. You create this package as you would any other Configuration Manager 2007 package. This package does not require a program. The task sequence will reference the source files as needed. Next up, enter some details to describe what you are importing – I think you might just be getting the hang of these SCCM wizards now. They are pretty good at walking you through what is neeted. Summary, confirm – job done…? No… not quite – don’t forget to create that distribution point! And again – its not a boot image, so “Standard DP” only. Next up – that’s all well and good – but weve not told SCCM what to do, or dealt with something that will really foul you up if you arent careful…. DRIVERS! Coming soon ☺