michael2k6

Lots of schools deal with this very differently to the above. We find that the most successful projects in terms of engagements are staged roll outs based on year groups, with workshops / demo to parents to show what the software can offer to them and how they can use it to benefit their child. If you're doing that, the best thing to do is give the details out at that session, ask them to bring ID. If you're expecting more than 80 parents in one shot, sort people by name - be sure everyone knows whether it's the surname of the student or surname of the contact, and then have a table for A - D surnames, E - L surnames, etc. It sounds long and drawn out, but the whole reason you're doing this is presumably to increase parental engagement, the extra effort at this stage goes a long way. I've seen it done also where parents are then given the oportunity to log in, in a workshop environment and any issues can be sorted out there and then. If you're not going through that method, or you've already done all of that and this is more of a question about how do you send out resets, or setup new users, offer a similar service (presumably by SLT or pastoral rather than a techie job) or post out by two seperate letters. In the first letter state that the second letter is on its way - what you don't want is the students finding the letters. Mic @ Serco The above post is my own and does not represent the opinion or views of my employer or those associated with them.

Ok, sound, post back and let us know how it goes.

Hi Mounters, You can connect as many ePortal servers to the same database as you see fit, so it's perfectly fine to keep up the old box running and install on a new box, then just point the users at the new one when you're ready. Please bear in mind that a big performance hit with the database in VM environments is the disk queue due to images being hosted on SAN's then the SQL data is stored within that image. The only time I've seen VM environments running at the same performance as a physical where SQL is involved is where people have had massive EMC SANs made up of 15k SAS drives, and where the VM images have been hosted on a seperate RAID to the SQL data. People having performance issues in that setup have put dedicated RAID's into a host and mounted them as a storage array in the VM, and moved the MDF and LDF to that drive. ePortal is made up of DataServer and Facility ePortal, each of which can use a maximum of 2gb of RAM and 1 core of a processor each. So If you have a machine with ePortal only on there, 2 fast cores are better than 4 slow ones... though 4 fast ones are better so that there's 2 left for the OS and anything else (though they will be under utilised). Mic The above post is my own and not the opinion of my employer or their associates. ePortal uses hardly any disk (in both capacity and usage) so clock speed and RAM are most important. Ideally, you'd have atleast a dual core, probably quad, for the SQL backend and 4 - 8gb of RAM depending on your OS, and on the ePortal box, you'd have 4 - 6gb of RAM and 2 - 4 cores again. If you're putting it all on the same box, then you want 8gb - 12gb of RAM, and 8 cores, 2 for the OS, 2 for ePortal and the rest for SQL (2 for SQL would be enough so if going for a single hexacore rather than 2 quad cores, that's fine, but bear in mind that clock speed is king as each ePortal service can only utilise one core each).

Really wanted to ask if you had a car cradle for this for field work but the bidding has ended.

You're right in what you said, it's encrypted. The only thing I can think of is that you populate your own table in another db manually containing the userid and the staff name so that you can then automate the dump of data from audittrail. I would expectusernames will rarely change and new ones will be created on large at certain times of year. It's not perfect but it's a workaround. May I ask why you're doing this, out of interest?

I've never known that happen, server or otherwise, it was a head scratcher you're right. Normally the CDB file is kept in the client files folder and not shared. The reason being that it stores the last saves academic year, the last place a backup was taken to, the last place a timetable extraction was taken to. So if you've got people changing academic years for timetabling etc and saving as they exit there's a good chance someone's going to open it the following morning in the wrong year and do an hours worth of work before they realise. Mic

The mistake you've made there is keeping the product. I've had this before - put in writing that it has a fault and you want a full refund or a replacement product. It's their responsibility to collect it. it's the same when you've had a faulty phone ordered online - they sent me a new one and arraged courer for the old one. It's the suppliers responsibility - so Amazon.

I'm struggling to get my head around that, it's been a long day, but it's trying to connect with windows authentication at some point, which it shouldn't be.

I'll clear this up once and for all (again).... Anywhere in europe, any HID (High intensity discharge... xenon) light fitted to a car MUST have self levelling function and ALSO washers. It is why if you spec it on a new car you'll notice the washers are added too. Any car not having these will fail an MOT if the MOT tester is doing their job right. There's another thing to consider.... depending on the lens you have you might send light all over the job, or nowhere at all. If you have the kind of lens where the pattern is on the back, this will be the case. If you have the kind of lens the pattern is on the front, this will be the case. If you have the 'projector' style lens, you can generally get away with the 'pattern' of light being correct (MOT testers use pattern testing to check the angle of the light), so that will pass the MOT and most importantly not blind everyone else until your next MOT, but the fact that they don't self level will still blind everyone and fail it. Another thing to consider is the canbus, if the ballast isn't the right resistance / you dont put the correct resistor between the ballast and the loom, you'll get a canbus error telling you that your lights have failed. This will annoy you, bring it to the MOT testers attention, and I believe is actually an MOT fail itself- on all cars of a certain year (i'm sorry I don't know which) that are CANBUS driven, it must alert you to failed bulbs (head light, tail light and stop light). I could be wrong about the last bit, but the rest I can vouch for. So many people drive towards me on dark roads at night with aftermarket HID kits, and blind me, and one of these times I'm going to chase them, catch them, and go to prison for what i'll do to them for endangering the lives of other road users with unecessary and quite often visibility decreasing bits of kit - bear in mind if you're blinding someone else, you're not lighting the road ahead of you, so you're worse off than with standard bulbs. I absolutely urge you, with all of my being, if you want to improve the view at night, get some road legal ultrabright halogens, and make the world a better place. They'll cost you less too. Also remember not to touch the bulbs when fitting, regardless of which kit you upgrade with, so as not to get greasy finger marks on there or they'll blow soon after when they heat up and cool down (the glass expands and contracts at a different rate where it'd been touched). Stay safe man, and don't try to kill me in the process, ta. This post if my own and does not represent the opinion of my employer or their associates.

Yeh and why didn't I see this? It's basically the job I used to do....

I completely agree with John's post, and the previous one. I never said the internet connection shouldn't be taken into account, it wasn't mentioned in the original post I commented on. As Cybernerd said though, most establishments now have a redundant connecton and we're seeing more and more move away from LA lines and leasing their own lines with redundancy and a good SLA. Also, don't forget things like 3g connections, and soon 4g connections - how many people in school have a phone or a tablet they can use? Some schools, granted, will be in areas that don't have good connections of that type... it's like I said, what suits one establishment may not suit the next. Just as you said about not advising people to host it locally if they don't have the resource to cope with it or the funds to improve. In terms of 'duff' updates etc, in a locally hosted solution, you may or may not have put that version on yet. As upgrades are released for census purposes, it's likely you'd have installed it, or put it on a standalone and ended up doing everything twice. When a fix comes out you then have to implement it. In a hosted environment, the problem is likely to be found and resolved much quicker, and the fix is done once by the vendor rather than a thousand times by the schools. Everything can happen much, much faster. As we both said, let's not turn it into a hosted vs local solution, we've all agreed that at the moment, certainly, it depends completly on the establishment and what is most appropriate, taking into account all the variables.

+100000 for the power management. Happens all the time. Check the BIOS settings even, that's tripped me up beyond the power management in the software. I've seen 3rd party power management such as lenovo crap do it before, but there's also a setting on the device in device manager which is something along the lines of allow power management to control this device. Turn that off saves you going through everything else. I think that might have been mentioned but I've only skimmed the thread as i'm sleepy. Mic

I'm not sure how apropriate it is for me to post here in this thread, but just to add to what alttab said (i dont want to get into a hosted / local debate here...) but in terms of cloud, quite a few people are finding it's more flexible that way, because it means other hosted solutions are able to integrate without needing the net at the school and all the port forwarding setup, etc. In terms of a tried and trusted system, if it were running in the school in SQL and .NET then it would be running on hosted solution in SQL and .NET too. The difference being that in a hosted solution you're going to be looking at much bigger clusters in terms of resource and failover, so if anything it's to be trusted more. Don't get me wrong I can see there are advantages and disadvantages to having a MIS in the cloud, i just don't agree that those are relevant. It's the same story as many other apps and services - the more things that end up in the 'cloud' the more sense it will make to host others there... it's like a snowball! I think it's a white one though, not a yellow one It's always going to be down to the individual sites, and the users there, and what suits one may not suit another. Is just my ten penneth Mic @ Serco My posts are my own and are in no way representative of my employers (or associated bodies) opinion or sentiment. This post is made on my own time, reference to my employer is only to give a fair perspective to anyone reading my post, as other posts have mentioned people lurking secretively - I would hope those using the MIS section would know me by now, but just in case... I do work for Serco.

Doned.

Fair enough, I have absolutely no experience of SIMS, just Facility. Have we got Graham from Aspen, Phil from Capita and Mic from Serco all contributing positively in the same thread here? *is just saying - thumbs up*

There's nothing stopping you taking CSV from reports containing all of that information from Facility, then validating it in something like Excel to make it match the fields required by SIMS, then doing an import (assuming there's an import routing in SIMS for that, which I wouldn't know about). It may be quicker to type it as has been said. Mic My posts are my own and not the opinions of my employer or their associates.

Really liked the look of this until I saw the salary, I'd clearly misunderstood the post

I get the same

Only available to those in Birmingham with a login though.

May I ask why the other post is available? Are you being replaced by two people?

I so read that first post as crepes not cripes. Imagine my disappointment. My car has satnav in it, it's a navteq maps satnav, i think the head unit is a bosch, it's in an alfa. It cost £1200, and doesn't have 7 digit post codes in, just 5, and doesn't have the option of turning on speed cameras. It will tell me where car parks are though and sometimes if they're full, but can't take me to the post code of the place, or point out the speed camera on the way there (not that i'd be speaking, it's only got 235bhp - this car, if any, needs the ruddy speed camera jobby on the satnav!)

Hi, It's either not Serco software or it's not running in Excel - just for anyone else out there, it might be running in access on a peer to peer system if in a primary school rather than putting SQL on one of the clients. Sounds like you've found a solution in the interim, if you've got any issues post back. Bear in mind that if one of the other machines on the peer to peer still has an open connection to the database then any automated backup of the mdb file you have isn't going to do much. If i were you i'd be looking to set a startup in the BIOS of that machine at a particular time followed by a scheduled batch file of xcopy to ship it over to the server, then another scheduled batch to shut said machine down. Or move it to the server, point the dsn at that, and schedule a shutdown script on the client machines so that if there's anything left on overnight it's shutdown before the normal server backup takes place. Mic

Ryan, This sounds like a recipe for disaster long term. If the school have pulled out of support with the LA, they will need support from us and they'll need new releases etc otherwise they won't be able to completely legal requirements such as census returns. Given that there was one last week it's possible theyre behind already and don't even know it. Please PM me your details so that I can put the right people at Serco in touch with the right people at the school, and the authority. Let's fix the roof before it rains rather than waiting for a downpour and everyone involved getting soaked. Thanks Mic Sanderson Customer Success Manager Serco Learning The above post is my own and does not represent the opinions of my employer or their associates.

ePortal (for the serving of the pages) will be using port 8080 by default. To change it, you need to be in c:\facility\eportal\conf\server.xml If it's running on 8015 that's been changed at some point, it's not standard. If SIMS is using Tomcat, and you've got ePortal is installed, 8080 won't be your only issue, you'll also need to change 8005 (shutdown port), 8009 (which if using with IIS ISAPI redirect iwll then need referencing in workermap files), 8443 if you're using the API, I think that's it off the top of my head but it's a Sunday so don't hold me to it! If it's still a problem give support a call, but we do recommend you don't introduce other apps to the server for this reason. Mic My post is my own and does not represent the opinion of my employers or their associates.

Hi there, Firstly, let me just say I do work for Serco Learning (as the previous post, we use them sometimes), but this is a personal post, not work related, and doesn't come from my employer or their associates (including RivaNet). I've known RivaNet since 2005 when they were a smaller company, and always dealt with the same chap, Nick, who's the MD. I've always had a good working relationship with the company, I've always got time for their engineers, and it works both ways. I've never heard anything bad (personally) come back from it, but I have had some good reports. If there's anything specific you'd like to know, ask me, you'll get an honest answer either way. Mic