Boredguy

Can't say we've had any issues with it, but we also updated the NTFS permissions so that the "Users" group is read only on the majority of the C Drive so they can have write access to a handful of locations (which includes the user profile folder). Been running OneDrive for the past 12 months with no problem

Did you remember to disable the CCTV cameras in that zone instead of the ones outside

We've had all bar 6 laptops returned so far (and thats because the students were isolating for the last week and a bit of term so they should have been using them, but hadn't since March!) Just busy reinstalling all of our Geobook to repurpose some of them for Exam use so they just have ExamWritePad installed (since JCQ want laptops to last an entire exam session without being plugged in), some will be going to our SEN unit for some incoming Y7s that apparently need devices (and a few extra for those with broken bones so they are out of my hair at least) Not sure what I'm going to do with the Dell's and HP 250's we got, but everything is being wiped and rebuilt on to our domain (only the first batch of 12 laptops we got were purely DfE configured, rest we had unmanaged so we joined to the network and used AoVPN for filtering) Only devices that were the students were those assigned and provided by the LA to students that were Looked After or had a social worker assigned. Everything else was added to our "asset" register even though they fall below the minimum value.

to be honest, you would be better setting up a standard local user and not a admin user, as even the DfE laptops were configured for the students to use a local user account. However if you have the infrastructure available, setting up Always On VPN with device tunnel might be a better option.

It does not also help that the information from the app is purely a recommendation, and not a legal requirement, which adds additional confusion

Well it went from at least 21 day gap to 3 months to get more people done, and now it's dropped down nearer to the original 4 weeks again

Bah, tried a couple of times to see if I could move it forward, but our local centre had no other slots

It is possible to have OneDrive running with only a select group of users. It just comes down to not using the Known Folder Redirect aspect. We set all our students to use OneDrive last summer, and in January we set it up for Staff as well, but as an additional duplicate of their account (we left their mapped network drive) Then in May we updated the staff policy so that the Redirect policies for Documents etc were set to be the OneDrive folder and no the network drive. Once I've resync'd all the staff areas next month, the network drive itself will be removed from our staff so they are the same as Students. Basically as long as you have OneDrive deployed out with the /allusers switch, and the correct policies in place you can then use 2 AD groups to have your "OneDrive Only Users" and "Local Drive Users" to set the folder redirection that you want (since OneDrive creates a dedicated folder in the C:\Users\ path)

It is handy when they left us that nice little tool. Makes DB shrinking nice and pain free

The bios wipe is something we've known for a while, but strangely not something I've managed to get to happen on our bunch =/

Just a little update as no doubt we are all going be reinstall them. To get the 1E Geobooks to PXE boot with a suitable USB NIC (we went for the Star Tech USB31000S) make sure in the Bios you go to the Boot setting and enable the Network Stack Driver Support. Should then happily work with MDT/MECM etc.

We started with 1 class yesterday morning, and the whole year group by the end of day. Shame we've another week of lessons to go =(

We can easily do 150 station a day with MDT as other than pressing F12 and selecting the correct image we want, it's all automated

Solus is never proper broken, if all the agents were purple, but you can access the Admin console on the server, it's just the deployment service that went hiding. Worst case it's just running the setup file again to repair it.

Considering the number of students off in this neck of the woods this week @sippo, not that surprising

The Deployment service uninstalling after updating to 312.50 is a known bug, and your SIMS support should have made you aware of it when they told you 3.12.59 was out (as that updates the Update URL to be EES and not Capita) Basically extract the Solus 3 Deployment update from the Admin panel and re-run the Server Solus3DeploymentServiceInstaller and it should resolve the issue. Our Support company had a EXE version of the file available to download from their site, along with the instructions.

In that case, disabling the accounts in SIMS would be the easier method that way a valid user could still access it outside of the admin offices if needed to.

Isn't there the embargo feature in Exams Organiser for just that reason? And only the Exams Officers should have rights to it, certainly how it's been here for many a years, never need to revoke access for result days

You have to manually go into the user in System manager and either reset the password, or untick the account as being enabled, however depending on why you are needing it done could cause issues if they still need to take registers etc before the end of term.

That warning is if you have set the paths in the SIMS.INI file to be "C:\Program" etc for some of it. It likes it to be empty which then causes chaos for some of the other apps, so I just ignore that warning.

Might be worth checking the Concurrent deployment value I posted earlier, that might be bottlenecking your clients, as if it's set to only a few at a time, it has to wait for them to complete before the next one.

You really can do with a shrinking of the Solus 3 Deployment DB, as it should not be that large. It might still be set to full recovery mode for that DB instead of Simple. You can either select to shrink the DB yourself via the SQL Management Tool, or your SIMS EES support company should have a script to do that

Thats a bit shocking by your support company then. We had a e-mail from ours back near the end of June regarding the need to update to .59 and because the deployment server uninstalling was a known issue a helpsheet and the installation files were all available via their portal (we'd already done the .59 the week before to try and fix another Solus issue)

Well Solus 3 is designed to ensure that clients always get the latest version of SIMS that is installed on the server, so as soon as you deploy the Summer/Spring/Autumn update to your server, it will attempt to wake and push the update out to all workstations with the agent as well. You can speed up the deployment by checking your Solus 3 Deployment service is not too limited (Settings -> Solus 3 -> Deployments, make sure Agents Concurrent Downloads is set high enough, Ours is maxed at 99 concurrent downloads instead of the default 5 set by Capita) That same section lets you set the Auto Download option and time frame. Ours only deploys out to stations from 6am to 6pm so when we scheduled the SIMS update at 5am it doesn't take long. Stations pull the new version soon as they boot up. That same fix should resolve the Solus 3 agent update deployment as well.

Good point, however our connect.ini is configured to access multiple schools DB's within the MAT, so we can't use hostnames as they don't resolve at each site