misterfriendly

We have been using Google Apps edu since 2009. One thing that Google Calendar doesn't do terribly well is room requests. We would like a system that simplifies the process of staff requesting room use. Ideally such a system should be smart enough to know when a room is being requested outside of school hours, so that appropriate staff can be notified (facilities, etc) and we'll know who's in the building when, and who's responsible for locking up. We've had a few too many instances of the alarm going off because someone's rehearsal ran late, and the local constabulary are losing their patience with us! Does anyone know of a Google Calendar add-on that will provide this functionality? I do NOT want a separate, stand-alone app that will require staff to remember yet another password.

me too! creating ID's by hand is a drag.

Yes, multiple devices on an ID does work if you're not dealing with license codes. Make sure your district understands the limitations of this setup. If they decide to deploy iBooks in that scenario you will have an ugly mess!

Apple won't stop you from putting more than 10 devices on an Apple ID, but things will almost certainly get wacky when you try to deploy paid apps or iBooks. We discovered this the hard way. You can try this tool Batch Apple ID Creator | Enterprise iOS which used to work, but it seems there is now some behavior in the iTunes store that causes it not to work and I think the developer is about to wash his hands of the project. You will also need to talk to your Apple edu rep and get them to whitelist your IP before creating big batches of Apple ID's. Otherwise they will think you're phishing and block ID creation from your IP. This is true even if you do it by hand, which you probably will. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. We're doing a shared iPad deployment too and Apple makes this painful. We have Casper too, but that doesn't help this situation.

Using Applescript for this is klugey, and doing it via Applescript UI scripting is klugiest of all. The terminal commands systemsetup and kickstart have you covered. Look at this: bynkii.com: Some command - line tips for Apple Remote Desktop and OS X

thanks Marci, I am already running TightVNC on all my Windows clients. On Ubuntu Desktop clients I'm using the built-in remote desktop package vino. Up until now vino has always worked fine with the default settings. I just want to be able to view & control the existing GUI session on client desktops -- it saves me a lot running up & down stairs. But apparently ARD thinks I don't get enough exercise.

I've seen a bunch of reports of ARD breaking after the latest 3.7 update. These problems are all about Mac ARD clients and the fix involves disabling the firewall on the target machine. Well, I'm not having that problem. I just installed ARD 3.7 and I can control a client Mac just fine. What I can't do is control a Windows or Ubuntu client from ARD 3.7. It lets me observe but not control. Needless to say, this worked fine as recently as yesterday. I can still control non-Mac clients using built-in VNC, but that's a pain. I'd rather have ARD working again! I tried deleting and re-creating one of the affected clients from my ARD list, but that didn't make a difference. Setting the 'encrypt passwords and keystrokes only' pref didn't help either. BTW, I'm on 10.8.5; Mac clients are a mix of 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8. Nobody's running 10.9 yet. Luke Jaeger | Technology Coordinator Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School PVPA Charter Public School - About PVPA

Does anyone have an iPad case / keyboard they particularly love or hate? I'm thinking about the ZAGG or something similar. Luke Jaeger | Technology Coordinator Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School http://www.pvpa.org

We have 40 iPads to deploy on 2 carts of 20 each, with Bretford PowerRacks for charging. I couldn't quite justify spending $3K apiece for Apple's super-fancy carts And we're using Casper so I don't need a "sync station" - just a secure way to charge & transport them around the building. Something like this would be fine, if I could find one big enough for 2 PowerRacks. (PowerRack footprint is 15" x 18"). Or we could reduce the cart footprint if the PowerRacks could go over-and-under instead of side-by-side. Halfway tempted to get a plain open steel cart and weld some expanded metal to the sides for security. Anyone have a great solution for this? Luke Jaeger | Technology Coordinator Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School

Gaggle works but it's costly. We are considering switching to Google Vault which is far cheaper. My only question is how hard is it to migrate the archive? Anyone done this?

this just appeared, if you run PaperCut & Google Apps take a look: PaperCut KB | Google Cloud Print and PaperCut

WinInstall may be the thing I need - testing it this week. $24 / seat which isn't too bad.

Ability to push BIOS upgrades isn't a dealbreaker but it would be helpful. More concerned about the other stuff.

I need a deployment & patch management tool for a small group of Win7 PC's (about 80). I've been imaging them with FOG which works fine, but it's monolithic and I need something more flexible that can do scheduled deployments, driver & BIOS upgrades, 3rd-party app installs, printer settings, etc. Reporting capabilities (including software metering) would be handy as well. There are a ton of options out there, and many of them are probably overkill for an installation of our size. What do people like for this? SCCM, LanDesk, WinInstall, etc? thanks, Luke Jaeger | Technology Coordinator Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School PVPA Charter Public School - About PVPA

hi Ian, Thanks for your response. Seems to me that, at least in the edu space, Google Docs is by far the leading cloud-based suite — it works, has enough functionality for most users, and it's free. Printing is the biggest headache (as usual). I'm not a programmer, so I'll defer to your judgement that a browser plugin isn't the best solution. But I think I speak for a lot of school IT admins when I wish for a simpler print workflow from Google Docs to PaperCut. Maybe Google CloudPrint could be part of the solution, or maybe it's too consumer-grade to be of much use. Put this in your 'vote for a feature' blog and I think you'll see a lot of interest.

hi Ian, I would love to see some easier way of printing directly from Google Apps edu to PaperCut. Right now users have to download a PDF and go thru numerous dialog boxes to print a Google Doc. And if they make the mistake of choosing the CloudPrint option, the job never comes out at all. Maybe a browser plugin could handle some of these intermediate tasks?

OneLogin looks very cool, and I like the price! Are you using it?

I am looking for a reasonably priced SAML/SSO solution to link our AD accounts to hosted services: * Google Apps * PowerSchool (student info system) * ZenDesk (helpdesk ticketing) * ADP (payroll) Does anyone have a happy or sad story about PingIdentity, SSO Easy, Okta, Shibboleth, etc? thanks, Luke Jaeger | Technology Coordinator Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School PVPA Charter Public School - About PVPA

We have a Win 2008 R2 server providing AD & user home directories. I have successfully joined an Ubuntu Desktop 10.04 box to AD using Likewise Open (this is stupidly easy) and network login works. HOWEVER - by default, logging in as an AD user on the Ubuntu box creates a _local_ home directory for that user. That's not what I want - I want each user's network home (residing on the Win server) to be mapped to some local directory on login, so that they see all their expected files in ~/Documents, etc. In other words, I want it to function like an AD-bound Mac when a network user logs in. Has anyone done this? Online documentation is spotty and out of date (of course). Thanks all - Luke Jaeger | Technology Coordinator Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School PVPA Charter Public School | South Hadley, Massachusetts - About PVPA

We ended up using Gaggle.net - which may not be the cheapest solution, but it works great & puts us in compliance with all the various federal & state rules around internet safety

are you handling Mac client logons on Ubuntu as well?

lownoize, what do you use for a server / directory master? Also Ubuntu? It's possible to remove Unity and install Gnome on Ubuntu 11, though I have not done this yet myself. Google Docs is a great solution and handles the .doc/.docx files very well.

Almost everything is web-based except for MS Word, and if I can get the teachers more comfortable with Google Docs then we won't need that either. We tried Open Office a few years ago and everyone screamed. But Google Docs solves so many other problems (students losing files, having files at school but not at home, etc etc) that I think it's worth the struggle. The classes that do a lot with photoshop / video / etc are already using Macs so that's not much of an issue.

We use webprint for guest laptops and I love it - but I think the users would balk at having to use it for everything, all the time. What it does is very cool but it's undeniably clunky. ANYWAY we are getting far afield here - my question wasn't 'which non-windows OS should I use' but rather 'what are the hidden costs of switching to Linux at the desktop'. It could well be that there aren't any, which would be great news.

Printing is the dealbreaker, otherwise I'd do something like ChromiumOS or Webconverger.