sahmeepee

From what I saw at BETT, the VLE side of it is very different from the hacked up rubbish you see on the public-facing sites on http://www.school-portal.co.uk It seems the tools are pretty much what you see in every other VLE with a handful of other bits and bobs (live video comms via a flash widget, an in-page sound recorder in the WYSIWYG editor). SIMS support is part-way there - they can import and are a few months off being able to export e.g. assessment data to SIMS (apparently they're waiting for Capita to fix/update something). I hassled them for a logon at BETT and one was promised, but it hasn't been forthcoming. From the people I know in one of the LA's that's taken it, it seems that from an educationalist's PoV it was the best offering in the tender process. The technical side may have a few niggles but nothing earth shattering. At the end of the day it's not moodle, but no VLE is going to be a complete disaster. Unless it's made by N**M****, ho ho.

What proxy/firewall are you using and what version?

If the homepage is internal, make sure it's in the proxy exclusion list in IE?

The automated way of doing it via group policy doesn't actually work. It gives the impression of having applied the policy, but all it actually does is disables the GUI controls when logged on locally. You can check this by comparing a machine which has had the policy applied via GPO with one you've done manually through the GUI. The latter will show your filenames in green in Explorer, the other won't. I went to great lengths to check that the files were definitely not encrypted. Thank you Microsoft. I wasted about a day on that little gem! EDIT: Vista laptops have bitlocker of course, which probably works as advertised.

I think having a BECTA endorsement might detract from the clueful image. Something like Edugeek "Easy Install" award/badge might do the trick, but the problem with badges is that you can't tell if the software just hasn't been evaluated yet. I'd be happy just to have a knowledgebase as long as it included the known-bad software as well as the known-good.

The cost of our sims licensing including direct support from capita is well under 6k/year even if you include sql licenses etc. and we are a big school. It's very dependent on which modules you buy into though - lesson monitor for example is prohibitively expensive for us. I'm sure PhilNeal will be happy to decloak and give us the annual financials for CapitaES I realise you're only thinking out of the box (I hate myself for typing that phrase), but then you have to allow for the fact that you've not paid any NI for your developers, they don't have any heating, electricity or lighting.. not to mention an office, you don't have a sales team or anyone managing the business... and as you say, you're taking the cost of SIMS+support and comparing it with OtherMIS+no support. I would say that the investment required for OtherMIS to catch up with SIMS (I know nothing of other MISs tbh) in under 5 years would be sooo great that you'd have to get government to slap down a huge amount of cash to do it. The reasons that wouldn't happen include: The govt's record with large IT projects is pretty shaky (that goes for most large IT projects really, but we get to hear about the public sector ones) They would get in all sorts of trouble with the EU for funding a public sector project which directly damages existing private businesses. This happened with what the DG of the BBC said was "shaping up to be one of the most important services the BBC has ever launched" Yes it's a shame, but to answer Russ's original question - unfortunately, no, I don't see that there's room for a small MIS to grow in the foreseeable future even with my seriously optimistic hat on. I would say the best you could hope for is innovation in fringe areas (e.g. 3rd party addons for SIMS) being popular enough that they would be absorbed, but even then the cost would be passed on. OK, I'm depressed now.

We have something like that in our kitchens. We call it a "till" Obviously our tills don't look as nice as that, but then ours exist! Having played with one of those projected virtual keyboards that came out a couple of years back, I do wonder if the lack of springiness to the virtual keys ever stops feeling weird.

We use Kixtart to log pc name, username, ip and logon time to SQL server. Even with 1000s of logins a day the database doesn't get big at all. I log IPs as well as PC names, because sometimes you need to tie an event to an IP address and it's not easy to prove which PC it belonged to 3 weeks ago. I'm looking to increase the logging to include MAC addresses and possibly log off times via a logoff script - another job for the "one day" pile. Adding the logoff time to the same record as the logon would be my preferred setup. If anyone wants it, send me a PM - the meat of it is in a free UDF from the KiXtart site (DBCommand.udf) - my bit adds up to 4 lines of kix + comments and a database a 6 year old could make Making it log to your choice of database server should be easy enough too.

If you can hold on until every module is running .net code against a SQL Server back end, you will probably have a more reliable SIMS experience. Of course, if you are over 40 you will have retired by then. (har har)

If anyone's interested in seeing the BSF debacle play out from the point of view of Stoke Newington school, I spotted this blog: http://www.bsfatsns.blogspot.com/ written by Jill Cameron, who I think is their business manager. It's certainly interesting reading and highlights some of the day-to-day non-hilarity of putting your school through the Brown's Shady Funding process.

I didn't see that until today, but I must admit it raised a titter

You can also use GPInventory from Microsoft. Yes it's a GUI and you want it scripted, but someone might find it useful GPinventory's range of queries can be extended by adding more WMI classes/queries into xml settings files. Here's my xml file for physical memory: LDAP://myldappath,getyourown! OneLevel

I think there might be a recessed switch on them (paperclip time). The older ones certainly have it. If you hold that in while starting up (you may have to keep it pressed) the thing won't turn off so you can reset the timer.

I would also like to see Adobe taken outside and shot for their (mis/ab)use of the term "site license". I was told today that to put Adobe CS3 on 501 computers in my single site I would have to buy two site licenses. Zing!

I'd be interested to know what the network card is topping out at in Task Manager while this problem is happening. If that turns up anything, you can go further and get a free version of PRTG which will allow you to monitor the throughput on a few switch ports/fibres. You'll have to pay if you want to monitor a lot at once (or find some different software!)

It's a known bug in Firefox. If you google it you should get a hit from the mozilla site with a workaround. Sometimes restarting the browser sorts it out though.

We use 3com NS here too (the free one). As well as the layout it will let you launch the web management for each switch, set up QoS (IIRC) and also show you health alerts if you turn the monitoring on (e.g. slow fans, saturated links). Very good for a freebie.

I like to SIMS-bash as much as anyone, but when you look at the endless changes imposed on MISs by the government and the large, diverse userbase they are catering for, combined with the critical nature of an MIS, it's something which would take a very serious development team to keep up with. Considering it's a relatively niche area (i.e. "uk pre-uni education staff" rather than "everyone in the world who uses a web browser") I'd be surprised if you could keep up with the likes of SIMS/CMIS on a non-commercial basis or even at 50% of the cost - never mind 1%.

You might have more luck on the Supportnet forums or by logging a call if you haven't already. We only do statutory registration so I'm not sure I can help. I have noticed that sometimes doing a "preview" in the report designer and then running the report from there gives different results, often favourable!

I had this on a staff home machine which they brought in. It turned out to be USB ports that would let you put the USB device in the wrong way round. Every time you did, the PC would shut down or reset. The PC is now lying dead on my desk, having been replaced - mobo is very faulty and it wasn't economical to repair it.

In the past I'd got bored of cold-callers claiming to be able to offer better prices for Dell kit than Dell themselves - my Dell account manager always beat their prices and they were sometimes even more expensive than the web price. It was only when I tried out a request on schoolquote last summer that I found any suppliers with cheaper pricing than Dell and it turned out *miles* cheaper. OrchidUK won the order in the end, but quite a few suppliers came in cheaper than my quote direct from Dell. The upgrade from 4 to 5 years warranty was only 4 quid per PC! I should really recommend Orchid for their good communication and for arranging a delivery date to suit us and sticking to it. I suspect Dell account managers may perform better in their mid range as they don't seem to be as interested in punters buying their cheaper kit without screens, optical drives etc.

I now have a question for Phil or any SIMS ninjas out there... Q) Is there a way of making custom reports upload to the DMS in the same way as the Quick Letter template now does? I tried using a renamed copy of the quicklettertemplate.doc as the basis of a word mail merge report, but it didn't behave as expected when I ran the report from the student's details page: I got 2 documents on screen - one showing the merge field names with a "quick letter save and close" button; one with correctly merged data, but no "quick letter save and close" button. It would be really handy if office staff / HoYs could draw on a pool of preprepared letters home and be able to save them into the DMS in one smooth motion. Should I be filing a change request on Supportnet or can this be done today?

I'm pretty sure that setting doesn't have a "disabled" option which is the root of the problem, but the palaver I outlined is probably the next best thing.

I've bought some larger items from Orchid via schoolquote and found them to be amazingly cheap in some cases. I think 3com switches were their best ever result, coming in at about 70% of my lowest "regular" supplier's price and not a dodgy non-UK model either. I dealt with Simon Hulland as well - presumably he does all the schoolquote business. On the original topic, Probrandstrokeitindex are a tad annoying with their big-brother style monitoring of your use of their website. I check prices against them every so often when I'm struggling but they've not managed to be cheapest for anything yet.

Excellent video, thanks. Good job there's no sound - system manager causes Tourette's you know!