Zaphyr

King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls Vicarage Road, Kings Heath, Birmingham, B14 7QJ Girls Selective Grammar School 867 on roll with 250 in the Sixth Form. Headteacher: Mrs D James B.A M.Ed Telephone: 0121 444 2150 Fax: 0121 444 5123 ICT Manager Full time post (36.5 hrs per week) Salary: Scale Point 29-37: £24,402 - £30,546 with the possibility of flexibility for an exceptional candidate. The School is an outstanding school and one of the nationally renowned schools belonging to The King Edward’s Foundation, Birmingham We wish to appoint a well-qualified person to lead the ICT support team at this highly successful Maths and Computing specialist school for girls. The role will include the strategic development of the ICT systems and facilities, management of budgets and technicians, as well as maintaining and enhancing existing resources and systems. The school is committed to using the latest ICT developments within all areas of school life. If you would like further information and an application form please contact: Mrs Angela Tompkins, Head’s PA Email: [email protected] Closing date for applications: Friday 22nd May 2009

Sorry I am confused/ignorant...how are you running two instances of the data server? Do you have the data server running on the eportal server only and not CMIS/SQL server?

Yep also use Irfanview, we have also used the batch converter to crop sets of pupil photos to get rid of unneccessary background on them.

We use a split installation that runs fine (touch wood), the main problem we have had in the past was with the data server service crashing when the automatic scheduled caching for the eportal administrator account was carried out at night. The LEA added what I think are the same tweaks that tosca925 mentioned and this along with the fact that I stop (or kill) and restart the data server service after the caching is carried out each night seem to have resolved the issue. I recently upgraded the eportal server onto a new box and got it up and running following the documentation that comes as part of the install. (Well until I had to go cap in hand to the LEA for the passwords needed to install the certificates for the ssl connection). So wouldn't imagine it can be too onerous to split them up. I have also played with CMIS/Eportal on VMWare, using VMWare Converter to create a VM of the old Eportal server, which was also the old original CMIS server before they were split. This seems to run fine under VMWare Player, both the CMIS side which I have restored using a backup from the main CMIS server and the Eportal side which will happily connect to the main CMIS server. Apart from some well documented problems with a release of the Converter (which were overcome by downloading a newer version) this in fact went frighteningly well.

Given that the backend is MS SQL server, then theoretically any reporting software that will query that should work ...Crystal Reports etc. One of the problems that I have encountered when using SQL Query 2005 for SQL Server is getting anything meaningful given the complexity of the table structure and the fact that you haven't a clue how it is set up. I for one would also be interested to know if anyone has had any positive experiences with this. I believe that they have made improvements in the reporting engine in the latest versions of admin, although I haven't had a chance to have a look yet.