altonPM

Is anyone using Office 365's Public Website feature for their school website? I am looking for some example sites to review. Pam

A year later and I believe this is still an issue? Has anyone heard progress on it? Through the course of the year, it was painfully obvious that everyone in Microsoft Education is aware of the problem, especially with the "under 13" accounts in the U.S. They said it was their most requested issue.

Has anyone tried NTFSFix on newer versions of Windows Server? (2012, 2012 R2) It used to be one of my go-to tools but I haven't used it in awhile.

I've learned to use PowerShell, but I also use this great tool called ADManager Plus. It needs to be installed on a server, and it provides a web-based interface for bulk reporting and modifications in AD. It's pretty reasonable in cost.

Has anyone tried using Office 365 for student blogging? The catch is that we are looking for blogs that are public. Our Public site doesn't seem to allow us to allow a blog sub-site.

I am responding in case US users find this thread in the future. In the US, we have pretty strict laws about accounts for students under 13 years old, called COPPA. Office 365 does follow COPPA very closely, and you can also request HIPAA-BAA certification, which is another law that covers data privacy of student information. So, I am very confident in Office 365's "safety", more so than Live@edu or Google Apps. Google is actually the subject of a federal lawsuit in the US regarding this issue.

I really like Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 - we are also an Office 365 school. What I am struggling with is the need to create for students to create a Live ID in order to make use of the start screen. We are a primary school and most of our students are under 14 - the law in the US states that children under 13 cannot create internet accounts without parent permission and, in fact, Microsoft requires a fairly complex process for "approving" children's accounts in the US (I set up an account for my child - it was easy enough to attach that account to my personal account as a parent, but it also required credit card verification). It would be fantastic if our students could use their Office 365 accounts, but Office 365 accounts will not work for this - is has to be a "regular" Microsoft account. Even if we could use an Office 365 account, we do not use Office 365 with students lower than Grade 3 (8 years old), because of the complex password requirements. Additionally, an average student at our school uses several computers a week, depending on whether they are in the computer lab, a classroom, etc. Since we have domain logins, it would be helpful if their "Microsoft Account" could roam with them onto different computers, just like their documents do. It is also difficult for teachers (who do create their own personal Microsoft accounts) to figure out when to use their Microsoft account and when to use their Office 365 account. Apple and Google both offer enterprise management of their IDs. Am I missing something? How are others working around this?

For us, it's only confusing for teachers (who have Surface RT tablets). Students only have Office 365 accounts. I love the Office 365 product, this is just a major barrier to the use of Surface tablets in schools (especially with students under 13). On a personal note, when you do have both Office 365 and personal accounts, I DO love that my Office 365 account is now so separate from my personal Live account - I can actually be signed into both in the same browser!!

To me, this makes it even more confusing, because then they will have 2 different SkyDrive accounts: (1) a personal account at SkyDrive.com; and (2) a school SkyDrive Pro account under Office365. Both with the same credentials!

In the US, it is not legal for students under the age of 13 to create internet accounts without parent permission, unless the accounts are directly managed by a school district. If we are using W8 for younger students, we cannot help them create Microsoft accounts. Office 365 accounts, however, are directly managed by our district. For our staff (who just got Surface RT tablets), it's just confusing - they created their own personal Microsoft accounts, but those are different than their Office 365 accounts. So, two additional accounts in addition to their Active Directory account.

I don't use a proxy server and I am having this issue, as well!

I just got in a small set of ASUS VivoTab's with docks (the regular, not the RT version) with Win 8 home. I upgraded to Win8 Enterprise with no issues; however, it had to do a fresh install and I lost all of the drivers in that process. Thank goodness the USB ports still worked, because the touch screen, keyboard, touch pad, wireless ... nothing else worked. I plugged in an external keyboard and mouse. ASUS doesn't offer their VivoTab drivers via download, so I used another tablet (not yet upgraded to Enterprise), and a downloaded application called DoubleDriver to send the drivers from that tablet to a flash drive. Then, I used the same application to install the drivers on the Enterprise tablet from the flash drive. All of the basics work now, but I notice that the top row of shortcut keys (volume control, etc.) still isn't working. If anyone has ideas for restoring these, please let me know. I do plan to upgrade another tablet to Win 8 Pro and to compare the two. The VivoTab seems like a really nice tablet, by the way!

Karl, can they access the drive if they then type in the FQDN of the server path? For example, my fileshare is at \\depot\students\username . But when I get this error, if they type in manually: \\depot.alton.school.com\students\username , then they can get there. If this is the case, it is related to this thread. I know the title is regarding home folders being deleted, but this permission issue is a symptom of the problem, as well. As far as I know, Microsoft has never fixed it. There is also a discussion on Microsoft TechNet here.

So we are now about a month into full-blown deployment with SCCM 2007. It does have a steep learning curve, as someone else mentioned ... but it is going to save us so much time in the long run! We kept the Win 7 ref image very light, with no apps - and then deployed our base software (Office 2010, Adobe utilities, JRE, Quicktime, SCRATCH, etc.) by collection. Teachers have just come back to school and are pleased with how much faster their machines log in without all the extra apps bloating the OS. We're still working on a few apps, and have some strange glitches, but I would say we have 90% of our users covered with all apps they need at this point. I used SCCM over the weekend to build, capture, and deploy a new Remote Desktop Services Farm (2008R2), this one with apps, into virtual machines ... it was great (and I did it all from home)!

Chiming in here (a year after the thread) ... we found that deploying Windows 7 with SCCM 2007 directly from the CD without building a reference image first caused the drive to be called D: rather than C:. I see another thread about this below (http://www.edugeek.net/forums/o-s-deployment/51200-drive-letter-os-disk-after-osd.html) but wanted to add this here. We've had some luck building a plain vanilla Win 7 reference image (using a virtual machine), then capturing it from there and deploying that. Then, we can still deploy out the applications individually.

I just wanted to add some perspective from the US - this forum is the best forum I've found for discussion Windows 7 issues in education! I'm sure there are many other districts in the US moving to Windows 7, but they aren't discussing and sharing issues like you are in the UK. My issue with Win 7 home folders being deleted, for example ... in the early days of my issue, I found no other site where any school aknowledged that this was also happening to them. I've been thinking how progressive y'all are here at edugeek!

I took a quick look at my GPOs and I'm not sure this is it exactly, but there is a policy called "At logoff, delete local copy of user's offline files" under Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> Network/Offline Files .

I had some problems with the Downloads for awhile and it turned out to be the settings on my Sonicwall Firewall and that fact that the downloads are from Akamai. In case anyone needs the solution for Sonicwall in the future, it is: The problem is with the Security Services blocking HTTP Byte-Range requests. The download managers do not follow a strict byte flow. I'm guessing this is so they continue a download later on after stopping. With that being known you must change the setting in the SonicWall to allow HTTP Byte-Range requests.The setting to check is under Security Services->Gateway Anti-Virus->Configure Gateway AV Settings. Now check "Enable HTTP Byte-Range requests with Gateway AV". This should now allow your Download Manager to work. The weird thing SW did was put the setting under the Gatway Anti-Virus Section even though it affects ALL security settings. That is why you had to turn off ALL Security Settings to get it to work.

Thanks psydii for cross-posting that, I'm sorry I forgot to post it here! We are still working with Microsoft on part of this issue. Although we resolved the folder deletion, now we have a situation where students don't have permissions to access their own home folder / mapped drive by short name only (i.e., they can get to it by FQDN!) and only on some machines (mostly netbooks). It's not a server permissions problem or a Group Policy issue, and MS has a Networking Team analyzing data for me on that part of it. -Pam

I have an update! So, Microsoft asked me to turn on some profile and folder redirection tracing (I got to write the scripts myself - see this thread on TechNet for details: Can PowerShell restore previous versions of files/folders via Volume Shadow Services (VSS)?). From there, they were able to determine that the home folder is being deleted because, somewhere, it is seeing the server's FQDN as a different path, and deleting it. In the 2nd line below, it is not seeing the server name (\\depot) and the FQDN (\\depot.alton.school.com) as the same path, and is deleting the folder because of this discrepancy. We've just done a full search of the group policies and haven't seen the FQDN of the server anywhere (it's always mapped as %HOMESHARE%, so we're trying to find out why this discrepancy is occurring.

Just wanted to add that tech support asked me to turn off offline files at one point and that did not seem to be causing the issue.

bestbett, what is FSRM? You are thinking that the ini files cause the folders to be deleted? If so, those .ini files are pesky! (because they also cause the issue where we can't see the folder names because they are all seen as "My Documents") I finally had my MS case escalated to a Premier case and we are taking profile logs for tech support. No new news from my side, but they are definitely working on it.

Any luck with this? I've just set up my new 2008R2 remote desktop farm and noticed that the Server Manager and PowerShell are pinned to the taskbar, as well. I do have Group Policy solutions for the Administrative Tools and some other Start Menu settings: User Configuration -> Preferences -> Start Menu .

It's all about sharing! My Microsoft Support Incident number is 110092159909810 - in case this is helpful to anyone in the future. They elevated the case a day ago, so I am waiting anxiously to speak to "the experts". -Pam I'm also posting here my PowerShell script which compares AD accounts in a specific OU to Home Folders - obviously, this script needs to be customized for other environments. I run PowerShell on a Win 7 workstation - and I've enabled the PowerShell Active Directory module first via RSAT (see How to Install the Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell ) Import-Module ActiveDirectory # 1. get users from AD Students container, loop through them $theUsers = Get-ADUser -Filter {(Enabled -eq "True")} -SearchBase "OU=StudentAccounts,OU=Students,OU=Accounts,DC=alton,DC=school,DC=com" write-host $theUsers.count enabled users found $folders = Get-ChildItem S:\ # 2. for each user, does the home folder exist? foreach ($user in $theUsers) { #write-host $user.Name , $user.sAMAccountName $userHome = $user.sAMAccountName #does the home folder exist? $userFolderExists = Test-Path S:\$userHome if ($userFolderExists -eq "True") { #skip } else { write-host No home folder for user $userHome , $user.Name -fore darkblue } }

My Microsoft account manager thought that might be the case, but I did try it with my own child and the $0.50 was charged to my card. They say a portion is donated to charity. It's a very small amount of money, but I think the money is beside the point.