wpjon

Hi, We are having the same issue, everyone who has reported the issue to us has yahoo email accounts. Was previously working ok. Jon.

I don't think you can change the size of the blocks, but have you tried pressing f8 to go into group mode. I find this makes it easier when scheduling linear blocks.

I've just checked the sims permission spreadsheet and it states curriculum manager, timetabler and class teacher groups. The fact the class teacher group has permission to change it is a bit strange and inconvenient.

I seem to remember reading in one of the manuals that it automatically sets to the current academic year for users who don't have permission to change it themselves, users who do have permission to change it have to do it manually. I wouldn't have thought many people need to have permission to change it, only the timetabler and whoever assigns pupils into classes.

We use a similar system to @vikpaw, but create a dynamic discover group with all the year groups in and then assign all the staff as supervisors, this way we can add a marksheet for the discover group to give all staff access to the a marksheet. When new pupils arrive/leave discover will automatically update the group memberships.

@kevin_lane managed to achieve this at our school, he has done a blog post with how he managed it but the basics of it was to make a spelling mistake in word, right click on it select Language and then Set Proofing Language, in the menu that comes up tick 'Do not check spelling and grammar', then save the document as a template named normal.dot, over right the normal.dot in the exam users profile on the server and then use group policy to disable the options menu etc. His blog post is on the recent blogs and goes into more detail.

I've not heard anything since last Tuesday, hopefully it will be something which can be fixed soon, it is getting tedious for the admin staff who send out texts/emails everyday and they keep getting this issue. @MaximusR, we're a secondary in Derby.

I have raised a case today and emailed Simon to let him know we are experiencing the issue. @MaximusR: I have noticed that for one of the users when they cannot access InTouch if I use the green forward and back buttons in SIMS after a few clicks SIMS will crash, have you noticed this? Jon.

We use integrated logins and one of our receptionist is getting that message daily, all I can do to relsolve it is restart their SIMS for them to get InTouch working again. I haven't noticed it with any other users though, but the receptionist uses InTouch more than anyone else. I did think it was a problem with their SIMS install so I redistributed it to their pc today to see if it sorts the problem. Jon.

We ran the SIMS Spring 2012 Update (7.144.36) which installs everything it needs. It will install the initial spring release and then the spring update afterwards. Jon.

We're a school in Derby too and had issues importing our ATF file, the main one being about a Unique Key, our SIMS support team passed our ATF file to Capita who said the contacts in the file were a mess. I ended up removing all the contact details and importing the ATF without them, we'll import contact details through CTF files which we will get from the primary schools.

We have seen this, it seems to happen to us when a sims deployment through solus3 ends with a status of 'partially successful' and solus doesn't seem to update the version number of the clients which have updated successfully. Redeploying sims to the clients which solus reports the wrong version for sorts it for us (so long as the deployment finishes with a status of successful).

Have you tried swapping the network cards between a Lenovo and one of the netbooks and installing the relevant drivers? If the Lenovo suddenly slows and the netbook speeds up this would point to the issue being with the wireless cards in the netbooks. If there's no change you can rule out an issue with the network cards. Could the issue be due to cheaper components in the netbooks which operate slower such as having a slower bus speed therefore slowing the data transfer between internal components?

We only have a couple of SMART boards but my understanding is that if you want to use the board as a mouse you put all the pens and eraser back in their holders below the board and use your finger. The SMART board drivers will detect when you are using a pen and will annotate the screen rather than pass the input to ActiveInspire.

We recently moved discover and solus 3 to a new server with a different name. Discover was fairly easy. We installed discover on the new server and moved the database across. Then on the client there is a config file for discover located at c:\program files\sims .net\discover, I can't remember the name of the file, but there is only a couple of config files to check and one has the database server's name and instance in, we used a startup script to find the old server name in the config file and replace it with the new servers name on the clients. Solus 3 was trickier, we detached the database and attached it on the new server and ran the installers. Then we launched the UI and changed the settings so everything pointed to the new server, on the clients there is a config file located at c:\prgram files\solus 3, and also a reg file which contains the name of the Solus server, again we updated these using a startup script through group policy. This all worked fine with the server and clients communicating properly. We did come across one problem with the move which was caused by Solus 3 being installed on the old sims server (we had moved sims to a new server before Christmas but hadn't updated Solus with the new settings). After the move Solus thought the old sims server was still managing the Solus UI so we couldn't remove it from the definitions for the sims server in Solus, we think this wouldn't have happened if we had uninstalled the Solus UI on the old server before stopping the services and detaching the database, or it may well have been a bug with our setup, either way it only came about because we moved both sims and Solus from the same server. We ended up with doing a fresh install of Solus and redistributing the clients. Jon.

Thanks @Cache for finding the CRs, two of them were ones I had posted when first looking at this before Christmas (I thought they were familiar when I was reading the description and then noticed I had posted them) and I have voted for the other.

Thank you all for your suggestions, HoDs really need to check the report in its template so they can check that staff haven't written too much for the comments as the comment areas are a fixed size. I had suggested using the class check sheet and whilst that would enable HoDs to check spelling and grammar they couldn't check that all the comments fit in the sections and they would also need to check the grades etc separately to make sure the comments reflect the grades. When I saw how slow it was to generate the preview I thought I might have set something up wrong and was a bit suprised that when a subject teacher previews a report it compiles the students complete report for all their subjects, but it appears it is set up correct and hopefully there might be some improvements with Profiles before our next reporting session.

We looked at the review part, only the HoDs need to be able to check the whole report including comments and grades from AM7 and to check that it all fits in the template and the review option only provides the comments. Thanks for the suggestion.

We are using Profiles in SIMS for the first time and finding it very slow for staff to preview their reports. We have a template which has one page per subject which has a few grades along with two free-text comments. The data entry is fine however the SLT want the reports printing by staff to be checked by the head of department before the final reports are printed, so at the moment each member of staff have to preview the report for each pupil in their class and then print the page for their subject. This is causing a couple of problems as it takes about a minute for the report preview to generate and then this produces a document with the students report for all their subjects so the member of staff has to check which page number to print to print their report. Is this normal or is there a better way which I could of set the template/reporting session up. The old system we used was to mail-merge the data into a Word template and staff could then print one document to give to their head of department for checking. Thanks, Jon.

We had this problem and just spent three days sorting it. As Synack mentioned it is due to having folder redirection enabled. When folder redirection is enabled for a folder (we only had the desktop) Word 2010 on Windows 7 will always look on the server copy of the profile for its templates and various other files. We had to enable folder redirection for AppData and then enable offline files and this resolved the problem.

We will shortly be getting InTouch installed and I was asked by one of the admin staff whether it will cope if the mobile numbers it uses have spaces in them. All the mobile numbers in our system currently have spaces in to make them easier to read (eg: 07712 345 678), does anyone know whether this will cause a problem for InTouch? Thanks, Jon.

We've had this on some of our boards, Promethean refer to it as 'spiking' normally updating the firmware on the board and ensuring that you are using the latest version of ActiveInspire sorts the problem. We have had one board though which had this happen and we couldn't fix it and had to have it replaced under warranty.

Have you enabled the enhanced error logging for a user who is experiencing the problem, KB84895 on SupportNet shows you how to do it, this should give you a more detailed error message. The message you put is the "friendly" error message and could be because of a number of issues.

I had a problem with this when I tried it, on the page of the setup where it asks for the path to the public key it was putting a "/" after the path to the key. I had to manually find the key at this stage and then the install went through fine.

It took us a while to figure out how to enable multiple users to use the same profile in Windows 7 but we have it working now. What we did was: Set a users profile path in ad to a standard xp profile within a share on a server, eg \\server\share\profile Ensure the user has write permissions to the share and ntfs write permissions to the folder of the share Log on to a Windows 7 machine as the user, make changes to the profile as required and then log off, this will create a profile ending in .v2 in the share Change the owner of the .v2 profile to the local administrators group Change the ntuser.dat to ntuser.man Set the profile path in ad for the users who you want to use this profile to the original profile path (without the .v2) We had loads of problems until we found out about making the local administrators group the owner. By using this method the user will get the xp profile when logging on to an xp machine and will get the .v2 profile when logging onto a Windows 7/Vista machine.