Boredguy

In an ideal world your C Drive would just be the OS and installed applications Your SIMS Database files would be on a different physical drive completely with nothing else (you can move the files within the SQL Management Tool) Your SIMS Data and DocStorage can be on another drive as well. In the real world, you can get away with the Database and SIMS files all being on a separate D Drive, but I'd at least make sure there are no other servers using that drive if they are virtual ones on a SAN so that if anyone complains about speed you know it's not due to disk requests from another server causing it.

Yep been using it for over a year. Only downside with the Student Wonde sync, is if you use lesson attendance, the wonde sync from e-Reception book only updates the AM and PM slot so overwrites all the lesson marks. Oh forgot to say it's not just our site, but we're using it across all the schools in the MAT.

I'm using that form and it seemed to be fine so far.

I've been doing something similar today, and if your using the results from a MS Form, you can read the row from the excel online (business) sheet that was created, and get the e-mail address of the user that completed the form and pass that into the "Requestor" field in the "Start and Wait for Approval" task as the person who it should be from instead of the account your running the automate f. I've also made sure the Form has been moved into a Team that the Automate account has access to instead of it just being a form in a users account as it's easier for future

@petben that folder is correct, but we also contacted our SIMS Support company as they had a newer ReportData.xls file that had the macro updated to point to the OneDrive path that has also seemed to resolve the issue. Depend I manually copied the file into users areas through the 365 Admin console since trying to push it via GPP resulted in onedrive Sync errors In our Workstation GPO we do have the OneDrive "Exclude specific kinds of files from being uploaded" set to *desktop.ini to prevent lots of files from every PC the user has logged on to from uploading, but nothing specifically for SIMS, but you could put the ReportData.xls value in there

Depending how you deploy printers, if it's via GPP you could always change the shortcut for ExamWritePad to batch file/PS1 so it calls GPupdate /force /wait:0 before the app runs. If your using another method for printers within the GPO might not be as simple.

I think this is purely down to the naming convention the BGfL used when registering the sch.uk domains originally. Certainly all the addresses registered by RM for the SWGfL/SEGfL at it's inception in the early 2000's didn't seem to have the same limitation

If you are using the client version of an Office application, it still needs to pull the file information from the cloud to the local machine (download), but it then uses delta sync to keep the files updated. Using the Web version of the Office application is doing all of that at the server side instead of in the browser cache.

We try and minimise it though repeated information to staff that the best way to access documents in Office if it's in OneDrive, Teams or SharePoint is via the "OneDrive" or "Sites" UI within the office application. Also if they are creating a new document from scratch, make sure to save it straight away. Delta updates are quicker that way. If they get the Explorer Folder view up then they must wait for the client to say it's updated. Thankfully most of our office documents are not any larger than 200mb so it doesn't take long to sync up but students have found out the hard way with non Office Applications if they don't wait a few minutes before logging off at the end of the lesson as the file is then gone when they come back the next day as we clear profiles either on logoff or after 1 day depending if it's a local or roaming profile.

The Summer 2013 ISO is the last official installation media that Capita/ESS provided for installing SIMS onto a clean server. As you've mentioned your wanting to do a migration to a new server, you don't really need a lot of it since you already have a working database, and the support companies have the migration tool to move it to another server. Most of SIMS Server can be setup with a Copy/Paste these days since .Net Framework is standard, but you will need to reinstall thinks like Solus 3 (different installer anyway), SIMS System Manager for the Online modules etc.

Solus 3, when it works saves time when SIMS wants to update, however it does have a lot headaches when a station might not communicate happily to the server for any reason (often DNS). In the thread posted earlier, is the method on how we deploy out the Solus Agent to Stations via SCCM and ensure it retained the same GUID each time and that still works, however we are looking to move our new network over to deploying SIMS via the old EXE method as @David44 mentioned as it will allow us to ensure the stations should have SIMS updated when they turn on other than the hit and miss we sometimes get at one or two sites (especially as we can push the new version out to stations before we've updated the server) Depending on the Solus issues, they aren't that hard to fix. Only real headache we've had recently was it trying to keep redownloading files from the old Capita URL's but a simple tweak in the Database to make it think it's already downloaded fixed that for us.

A couple of us have recently installed some ViewSonic LS850WU's for large areas. It's 5000 lumen and laser so virtually maintenance free. I've got mine projecting onto a normal 4:3 screen, but will also do widescreen if you want. Has some corner keystone options so if it's not 100% straight on you can still make it look square. I've added a MS Wireless Adaptor onto the unit as well so that if someone doesn't want to use the existing VGA cable they can present remotely to it. My projector is about 6 meters away from the screen and is throwing about a 4m wide image

The LAN - USB adaptor that works on the GeoBooks is unlikely to work on the Dell 3190's in our experience. We have UNI USB-LAN adaptors which work on all our non Geo-book devices as it has a Realtek chip in it. Our Geobooks use a StarTech adaptor that has a AX88179 chip and that does not detect on the Dells.

Well considering if your already using Wonde, they have already slurped a lot of your data into their ecosystem ready to share with third parties, so it's just an additional step. At least they send you an encrypted CSV of your data if you need it post incident so you can open it up on a stand alone device for basic data access in the short term.

Yes it's not very clear in that e-mail, and it's only when you click the option within Wonde that it makes more sense. However I will say that for a legacy SIMS network it might be something to think about depending on the other backup options in place. Certainly might be something I'd recommend for our Primary schools who don't already have offsite cloud backups but only tape

File Share access works fine in Windows Home, I've got it on all 3 of my stations to move stuff around. You can still create local users for permissions to stuff so you don't have to rely on MS accounts. RDP might be lacking, but I just use VNC to do the same

If you had purchased a retail copy of Windows originally, you could have moved it to the new hardware, but that old scheme was basically along the lines of OEM and tied the licence to the Motherboard Bios (hence you never need to reauthenticate if you did a fresh install) Amazon does have a W10 Home Licence & USB key pack listed for about £90 that appears to be genuine as a OEM product.

It depends entirely on what your ADConnect is using to match up accounts. Out of 5 of the sites we renamed students at in Oct half term, 3 of the sites automatically picked up the new login name when AD Connect sync'd, where as mine and another I had to run the PS command to rename them.... luck of the draw

well come on, the BBC just used the Getty Image that was also used over on https://education.yourdictionary.com/for-teachers/lesson-plan-on-how-to-teach-conjunctions.html

Yes as the Script is just installing Solus onto the workstation, not SIMS itself. Then again, we're about to do away with Solus completely on workstations and instead revert back to the old method of running the SIMSApplicationSetup.exe each time via Intune.

Normal User Based Filtering one domain devices is via network credentials so it's seemless. You only need to use Radius if you want user based filtering and Transparent proxy on non-domain devices, such as BYoD

If you can send the Framed-ip-address on to the RM Radius accounting yes, as long as you also setup the RM unify Captive Portal as well as a fall back (and your not running it via any NAT which might cause issues!) In the Safetynet Admin site, go to Network Configuration -> Radius and they have a guide on how to set it up with Windows NPS. Ideally you would want to make sure your devices are on a different subset of IP addresses so you can set the different policy to it, otherwise if you have any guest WiFi setup with Transparent it will send those users to the captive portal to login with their RM unify details.

Downside to the Transparent Proxy is that unless you play with assigning different IP ranges in RM Safetynet to different security policies, is you don't get any User Based logs, or group based filtering. For our few staff loan laptops they are set as Transparent so they can function at home, and in school it just means they get the "Student" level filter which is the default with the most restrictions, compared to when they are on a normal device which can then put them through the Staff filter which is slightly less restricted (but does need a proxy address added) If your wanting to keep User Based Filtering logs for when the students use the device in school, then you will need to go the pac route... if not just clear the proxy value so it's transparent and away it goes.

We point our Start menu XML to a folder within ProgramData (since we update the start menu every hour via a SCCM Script) So the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\StartLayoutFile value is set to C:\ProgramData\School\Windows\Start Menu\W10Pin\Student.xml Our Student.xml looks like

Yep Teams is soo much easier. As we just had the 1 student we created a Team that all of their teachers were in so they didn't have to switch between different ones for each subject. If your students are all in the same class all the time, then something similar might be easy to setup. Staff can then choose to share just a single application, so even if they have the main screen image frozen to deal with other tasks such as registers/behaviour etc the students are still only seeing that same image the other students are. Just needs staff to ensure they don't tick the "Share Whole Screen" option