sahmeepee

In quite a lot of the sims.net interface you can right-click and customise the text shown for a particular label. I've never been entirely sure why. I wonder if SIMS.net has any moderation features to stop staff changing that part to Sh'tbag Students!

Found this on the Capita Supportnet pages - might be of interest to someone looking to move on from working for a school directly. IT Support Officer As a new member of a successful and well established IT support team providing on-site support to schools of the Borough and the Continuing Education & Training Service (CETS) you will be responsible for supporting software and hardware, installing and configuring new desktop systems and training users. Our clients operate a mixture of standalone systems and Windows 2000/2003 networks with Windows 2000/XP/98 PCs running a variety of packages including Microsoft Office and E-mail. The schools use either the Capita SIMS or RM Management Solutions administration software. We also install and support school curriculum IT systems. You will have in-depth knowledge of the desktop operating systems mentioned above in a networked environment and experience of supporting SIMS or RM Management Solutions software would be an advantage. A good working knowledge of networking technologies and protocols is essential. Your duties will include travelling and transporting equipment to schools and education establishments in the borough so you will need a clean driving licence and a car. Further details are available at: http://jobs.croydon.gov.uk/jobdetails.asp?jobid=801 or phone Rory O'Sullivan on 020 87605725

There's someone from there who posts on Edugeek - can't remember who, but I've seen it in the last few days.

I know a school that's had it like that for a while. Definitely since September. The decision was made by management and I would definitely have some problems with it if the word came down from above like that here. Teachers can make requests for rooms to be temporarily switched into blacklist-mode if they're doing research type lessons, but it's only temporary.

OK, weighing in for the :thumbup: side now. I've had 2 outages with NTL in 3 years. One was due to their lame billing department who happily accepted my direct debits for 4 months without telling me that my initial payment hadn't gone through - then cut me off without any warning or explanation at all. I had that sorted out in less than a day. On the plus side, their speeds are exactly as promised for me. I get a rock solid 3mbps download. Unfortunately the 10mbit upgrade they started advertising in December hasn't materialised and it seems I'm now paying more than the 4mbit customers for slower speeds. Why am I pro-NTL then? Just because I've found the quality of the connection to be very good - fast, dependable if not the cheapest. I'm on about my 4th IP address in 3 years.

We put the new (June) release on today via Solus 1 without any problems. First time for everything! There are some new reports too, so remember to import those after you've run the update folks. When everyone's SIMS.net is updated by Solus 2 (next month afaik) am I right in thinking we'll have a really hard time testing updates on a staging server with a clone of the live sims database? At the moment our SIMS God takes the mdf and ldf and puts them onto his test server to break that instead of the live one. Presumably by storing our version/patch level at their end, it would refuse to send us the update to our live system when we've vetted the release.

Yeah, that's how I understood it. Unfortunately that would allow any pupil with their own non-domain-member laptop to connect to the wireless network from anywhere on the site, which currently isn't acceptable for us. At least with wired connections we can tell which wall socket they're plugged into and go and ask them to pack it in. With large-scale wireless they could even be in the car park or a nearby house.

I'd settled on PEAP as the most likely candidate for when we do wireless "properly" (currently we only have one AP used in anger). Your last statement about being able to connect to the wireless network with any old laptop logging in via a user account has me a bit worried though. Is that because users can add upto 10 computers to the domain by default or is it something different? Is there an easy way to stop that behaviour so that we don't get plagued by rogue laptops riddled with viruses and hacking tools?

Are you editing the permissions at: Exchange System Manager > Administrative Groups > YourAdminGroup > Folders > Public Folders > YourSharedCalendar, Properties > Permissions > Client Permissions or in some other way? When I've made changes there they seem to have worked. Maybe try looking through the Administrative Rights... bit of that dialog box too to see if anything is awry.

Here's the email I have to reply to before IC Technology will deign to give me a quote: They seem to be suggesting that they break their suppliers' rules on pricing etc. and want their customers to keep quiet about it. They'll even take you to court if you don't! (uhm, good luck) What a sh'''y way to treat potential customers! The second point is even more farcical because he's sent me this so that he can quote me on Dells.

Saw this on Gizmodo the other day too: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/elephantdrive-unlimited-online-storage-free-beta-174715.php Unlimited free storage (free part subject to change)

You can look at GMailFS too for an interesting alternative (not a serious solution really, but fun to try)

It took me 6 (SIX) months to get my qualification through after my last MCSA exam. Balustrades! I did mine through Thomson Wavetech and I think they've got the self-study side of it pretty much nailed. The bulk of the material is based on sections from online versions of books from the good IT publishers. You then cover the same material in a very basic read-and-answer quiz thing. Next you'll typically do a related task connected live to a virtual server. This is followed by an hour-long camtasia/powerpoint session by one of their instructors to recap. Each topic ends with an exam simulation to check your progress. It's really thorough, but if you don't put the hours into it it probably wouldn't be any good. Also they don't seem to build any weeks off into the schedule so it's pretty unrelenting. I did 6 months of self-study in total and about 8 days of bootcamps and exams. During the self-study I was doing about 14 hours of study a week. With hindsight I put far too much work into the XP and WS2003 exams. The tough one is 70-291, so if you're collecting pieces of paper, make sure you focus on that one. I was the only person (of 10) in my test centre to pass that sucka. Prices vary wildly with prevailing wind direction, so give them a ring.

We have it on slow computers from time to time. If it's just one PC and in a room of ghosted or RIS'd PCs I'd just wipe it and start again.

Their support is pretty fast and thorough, but we've had a number of pupils with errors in each session and I don't think it'll be workable in its current state. Mostly the DPS was just crashing, and needed killing and restarting. In some cases there were upload problems as above with RM recommending the same fix as you mention. There were also some problems with resuming after a crash (similar fix). To be honest I can't much be bothered fixing all the broken sessions we have so that they get submitted properly, as we aren't putting all 280 kids through the full test this year anyway. Hopefully in a year's time RM'll have developed some software which crashes on less than 20% of our computers each session. Under test conditions and with 1 spare computer, we can probably squeeze 15 pupils into a room, but ideally they should have 90 minutes to complete the 50 minute session to give us time to fix problems. That would take us about 6 days with 2 computer rooms booked up solidly. We can't realistically use any more rooms, as we won't have enough technicians to firefight the crashes. As it is, I think using up 2 technicians for the best part of 6 days is unreasonable. R(un a) M(ile) also need to release an administrator's troubleshooting guide, rather than keeping the info on their own internal KB and releasing tidbits on request. That way we can fix problems there and then (although I do resent having to babysit an exam!)

You have to be very careful with the default graph scales in perfmon. In your graph for example, the top of the graph isn't representing 1gbps or even 100mbps. The graphs DO NOT pick a sensible scale automatically for many counter types! If you look at the stats in text just under the graph, your peak bytes received/sec is only 3,779,984 (= 30,239,872bps, =~30Mbps) Even if your switches are running at 100Mbps, you're not pushing your full bandwidth.

For something simple you can get Yahoo Widgets for your desktop to do it. Sitewatcher2 will support upto 5 hosts to ping, but they're only javascript inside and I'm sure could be hacked about to show more in 10 minutes. Alternatively, you can create a copy of the widget with a different name and use it to monitor a further 5. http://www.widgetgallery.com/view.php?widget=36348 That screenshot shows it in "maximized" view; in minimized view you just see 4 small green (or red!) LEDs. (They can be always-on-top or normal) I notice there's a newer version with more features (Sitewatcher 3) but I haven't tried it: http://www.widgetgallery.com/view.php?widget=37490

Can help you with the easy bit.. To view someone else's mailbox, just go to: http : // yourexchangeserver/exchange/theirusername and log in with YourDomain\SomePowerfulAccount It's possible in System Manager to control the permissions on mailboxes (with a standard Windows ACL permissions box), but I'd read up on it first as there may well be some gotchas lurking! For your main login problem, try sending them an email before they log in first time. Also, try checking in their account properties to make sure that their email addresses have been created the same as your working users.

they do: I'd settle for: "all educational applications shall have a close button in the top right and not make you watch 2 minutes of scrolling credits before they actually exit." What is it with the people who make educational software :? I think: is definitely a long, long way off at the moment. It would be nice if there was some sort of gov't accreditation scheme similar to curriculumonline, but based on a published set of criteria or a scoring system. Unfortunately, I suspect the cost of implementing it would mean software publishers would have to pay for the privilege, putting smaller publishers at a disadvantage. It would also be nice if developers had to specify in detail the Key Stage points that their software covered.

1400 pupils - 1 NM and 1 technician. That's not necessarily all that bad on its own, but you will be managing all the IT/VOIP projects required for the complete rebuild in 2007. Definitely one for people who want something big to get their teeth into. (uhm, possibly a bad metaphor if the school is a "sh**ty hole")

Paul, really interesting post! On the bit I've quoted, they are talking about a scheme called Shibboleth (or AAA depending on where you look). It seems to be a more open version of what Microsoft tried (and failed) to do with MS Passport. Google wasn't very helpful as Becta move their documents every week to improve our searching skills, so here's some reasonable starting point links: http://schools.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=lp&catcode=_le_pp_po_03&rid=11277 http://industry.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=14598 As to how it works, it's quite hard to find docs on that, but they have conducted research so I'm sure it'll be fine.

Come on Tony! You sound like the other Tony . Anyone who manages an IT budget in a school knows full-well that when the budgets are merged "to allow more flexibility for the school" the combined total shrinks significantly. That is the basis of the 33-40% drop we are talking about - nothing to do with the priorities of the school. You may remember this from the LfT era. It's an established trick. In this case the powers that be have managed to roll the IT budget into a headline-grabbing "increase in capital spending in schools" by moving it from a non-capital grant to a capital one. Whoop di do.

I should preface my comment by saying that much of what is in these documents is very reasonable and common sense. Laying common sense best practice down on paper (uhm, pdf) has got to be a good thing, especially if it keeps the Bectards from writing poorly researched piffle about Open Source Software etc.. It does annoy me that Becta seem to be advocating a huge increase in the scope of I©T in primary/secondary schools whilst ignoring the reality of ever-shrinking funding. The time for this document was really before the money was pumped into schools via standards funds, when people had the cash to act on it. That money is now draining away. My main standards fund income has been cut by 1/3 this year. My eLC income has dropped by over 40% and that will happen again next year. I've always felt that eLCs were weighted far too heavily in the overall budgets, but I would rather they were made available to spend on worthwhile things rather than go away altogether! Some more nitpicks in the docs: Too many Grocer's apostrophe's! [sic] Dozens like these: They are advocating gigabit links from my edge router to my network core, even though the routers need only be 8mbit/2mbit. I don't see my LEA providing me with a 100Mb link (even just to them) within the next 5 years: and

Which settings in particular are you trying to access as an admin? If you give examples it'll make it a lot easier. For access to files you can run iexplore.exe under a different account as mentioned earlier.

By default, not exclusively! (file>save as>pick your open format!) You might be able to argue that the html office makes isn't real html, but I doubt you'd get far. Word: CHECK! Excel: CHECK! Access: CHECK! Powerpoint: CHECK! (just about) Note that the wording is: "shall provide the functionality to create, edit, save and print [...] files" Provide the functionality, not necessarily as default. This has obviously been done this way to satisfy Microsoft - nobody in their right mind would try to save a database of any complexity as a csv would they?