rjmayer

Dear Edugeek Community, One of the schools in our Trust has a large number of domain-joined Mac devices running OSX in their fleet. In the main, things work well, but one residual problem that keeps occurring is around the Keychain feature of OSX. Whenever an administrative password change takes place, however it is done (any way except a user doing it on their OSX console), the next time they log in the user sees a prompt asking if they'd like the operating system to Reset their Keychain. If they click Reset, everything works fine, but very often they click 'Cancel' and things are then not fine. There are several immediate reflections here, not least that Apple is not properly geared up for corporate networks, but that's by the by as we are where we are. Another is that it is unavoidable needing to do administrative resets in any user community, let alone one where over a thousand young people are involved. We've tried putting up posters, attempting to education staff and students, but to no avail. We have tried running some Powershell behind the scenes upon resetting the password (to bin out the Keychain directory), but it takes several seconds to run and in a classroom environment, this is an age and would not be tolerated. We could also bung in a Powershell element to run 'later' into a database and pick this up on a cronjob, but this would take even longer. There is another post on here that discusses stripping out the Keychain directory during a holiday-period mass password reset exercise and I could achieve this perfectly easily, but it would not solve the post in-class password reset impact of the OSX user experience. Has anyone found a satisfactory solution to this conundrum? It seems to me that there should be a GPO equivalent policy that would force the O/S to assume the user wishes to Reset their Keychain and not prompt them to make a decision. Does such a thing exist? Any thoughts gratefully received! Richard

Hello, Very occasionally, there could be a circumstance where a teacher, delivering a lesson, manages to project Outlook onto a whiteboard in the classroom. If luck is not on their side, it could also be that some sensitive information is shown in a message at the same time. If further bad luck prevails, a student may spot this information and this, in turn, could lead to a complaint. Clearly, there is a significant element of training and awareness that could come out of such a conversation. There are also possible rudimentary approaches to tackling this issue through means of warning messages ahead of Outlook launching and the like, but I was wondering if anyone knows of a more sophisticated solution out there. What I have in mind is a service that runs on the client which is configured and applied centrally, perhaps by GPO, that is instructed, on a per-group basis, that if certain applications get output to any monitor except the primary one, the image of the application becomes blurred... As far as I can make out, if the training and awareness fails and the rudimentary options are seen as insufficient, a cleverer approach such as the above, may be the only answer... Any experience of such a solution? Richard

Dear all, We've been using Sophos Antivirus for many years and to good effect. However, I've never managed to get the automatic deployment working when a new machine is discovered from AD. Obviously, we work around this by ensuring deployment through the build process etc., but I was wondering if anyone had any tips?! The apparently necessary boxes are ticked! Richard

Any conclusions on this, in respect to tempering the sensitivity of Impero's word list alerts? A lot of false-positives here at the moment.

Senior IT Technician Scale 5 (APT&C) - £20,253 - £22,212 Permanent Full Time 37 hours per week, 52 weeks We are looking for a Senior IT Technician to join our hard working and forward thinking Technical Services team. You will have a high level of IT literacy, excellent communication skills and be conversant with Windows 8.1, Server 2012 R2, Mac OS X and typical productivity software packages, as well as having the desire to enhance the learning experience of students through the implementation of great IT facilities. Main duties will include providing first line support to users, maintaining the school’s client device provision, managing classroom IT infrastructure and assisting with hardware and software installations, upgrades and maintenance. Closing date for applications: 12 Noon Monday 23 November Application forms for the above posts can be downloaded from the website http://www.netherhall.org/school-information/vacancies/ or contact Iris Considine: [email protected] “Netherhall School is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment” Netherhall - Senior ICT Support Technician - JD - October 2015.pdf

Dear all, We'd like to start making use of Wisepay's Single Sign-On support. They provide an ASP.NET class, but one in PHP would fit more neatly into the application I would embed it into. I have approached Wisepay, but thought I would ask here too... Has anyone got a PHP wrapper that would do this job, before I write one using the standard SOAP tools available in PHP? Many thanks, Richard

Bottisham Village College are looking for an ICT technician to join our hard working and forward thinking Technical Services Team. You will be ICT literate, conversant with Windows, Server 2008 and Microsoft Office. Main duties will include providing first line support to users, maintaining the college’s laptop/netbook provision, managing classroom ICT infrastructure and assisting with hardware and software installations, upgrades and maintenance. APT & C Scale 3 (£15,725 - £16,830); Full time – 37.5 hours per week, 52 weeks Further details on the college and documentation below. Bottisham Village College, Lode Road, Bottisham JobDetails-ICTTechnician-20111116.pdf

Join us for an exclusive free seminar ... "Back to School with Virtualisation" on 12th May. During this informal seminar, we will highlight our reasons for adopting ICT virtualisation, the approach we took and the benefits we are now enjoying. At this seminar, we will be participating in an interactive panel session and you will have plenty of opportunities to ask questions to both us and our virtualisation partner, Intercept. Please join us at Ely Community College IT Lab to hear more… To reserve your place please email: [email protected]. This event is free but numbers are limited, so reserve your place now. The agenda 15:30 Registration & Refreshments 15:45 Welcome and Introductions 16:00 Panel: Back to School with Virtualisation 16:45 Q&A and next steps The Location Ely Community College, Downham Road, Ely, Cambridgeshire, CB6 2SH Regards, Matt Sampson, City of Ely Community College David Knappett, St Bede's Inter-Church School Richard Mayer, Bottisham Village College "Adopting virtualisation enables us to enjoy long-term flexibility by making any future changes or improvements far easier to implement. We don't need to buy servers as often and spend far less time maintaining those we have." David Knappett, ICT Manager, St Bede's Inter-Church School Back to School with Virtualisation - Seminar Invite 12th May 2010.pdf

We're lucky enough to have a solution that has been designed for purpose in a bespoke manner. Sitting on IIS/PHP with a MySQL back end, the school intranet 'Mark II' is custom delivered to the users (staff, students and soon parents and governors), providing an efficient platform for content delivery. Many of the school's administrative tasks utilise this system, delivering dynamically generated emails, PDFs and RSS Feeds directly to the recipient (staff and parents). Through growing integration with other SQL based systems, such as SIMS, data consistency is now high and duplication of DB Admin tasks minimal. Page/Directory security is LDAP based and uses Active Directory to authenticate users using IWA. Examples of applications within the intranet are Work Tracking, Behaviour Monitoring, Performance Tracking, Rich Media Delivery, Biometric Purse Monitoring and so on. The difference it's made to the ICT Support Team has also been huge, shipping out those old password changes and the like. This is now all done through our AJAX Student Details interface. Our in-house Webmaster liaises closely with staff on development projects and the focus is always on efficiency and usability, keeping modules as integrated and streamlined as possible.