rpwillis

Been a Capita partner for the entire life of the company!

I would avoid trying to use pupil identifers in parental account names. It breaks down when they have multiple children in the school.

Parent accounts are always tricky. I've used various ways of linking accounts in the past, but is using SLG ADP I don't think that there is a way in AD. However, in Sims itself it's easy to create a report with all the details in - just add the AD Provisioning fields. Be prepared to have a data cleansing exercise before creating the accounts. You will find that the same person has been entered multiple times, especially if they have more than one child at the school.

I've done a lot of interfacing with it. There's no read based api, and we had to commission them to build some procedures when we needed to write back.

Even if you don't use them for your Sims support your local LA Sims support unit may be able to help you for a smaller charge. A better option would be to ask local schools how they use it and whether they would be prepared to help either for free, reciprocal help or I'm sure less than £1000 a day.

Personally I think working with xml is much easier. Amost every language has apis for xml documents which tell you if it's well formed and valid. CSV parsing is always dodgy due to the number of different formats it comes in. Especially when you start getting separators (,"') embedded in the data values.

No, csv output is only to file. You might be able to find a utility which can take xml input on stdin and convert to csv though.

Whatever you use, do make sure that you regularly test restoring from backups. Otherwise you could find that the first time you find out it's not working correctly is when you actually need it.

No it's home based, remote working.

You've probably already seen it but Microsoft have a free e-book on virtualisation in schools Virtualisation with Microsoft®Hyper-V (New eBook) - Microsoft UK Schools blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs and several blogs posts on savings from it, among others Halving the cost of servers at Leicester College with virtualisation - Microsoft UK Schools blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Education IT cost savings - Neville Lovett school, virtualisation, and a £23,000 saving - Microsoft UK Schools blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Virtualisation saves big money at Wootton Bassett School - Microsoft UK Schools blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Richard

Yes, afraid so. Richard

Due to a number of new orders, we are looking for an experienced network technician to install and support our products over the summer. You will be based from your own location. You will be responsible for remotely installing and supporting our range of products into schools - primarily our Active Directory product. This will involve liaison with the customer to determine their requirements, installing the applications and making sure that they are running correctly. This is a strongly customer facing role and you will be dealing with them on a day-to-day basis. Skills Required Active Directory Xml Configuration files Attention to detail Self Managing Customer Facing This will be a short term contract role for approx 4-6 weeks. Rate will depend on experience. Starting immediately. If you are interested in applying please send your CV with covering letter, availability and desired hourly or daily rate. All applicants must be able to legally work in the UK and due to the nature of the sector we work in we will require all employees/contractors to be CRB checked.

SalamanderSoft is a small but growing software house providing integration and SharePoint products and services to the education sector. As part of our growth, we are now looking for an experienced network technician/manager to install and support our products. This could be a part-time or a full-time role, with flexible hours, and will be based from home. To date, I have been responsible for the whole business including all development, installation and support work. I am now looking for someone to take on some of the installation and support tasks. I will continue to do a lot of this as it is important to me to stay in touch with customers and gather their feedback. You will be responsible for remotely installing our range of products into schools. This will involve liaison with the customer to determine their requirements, installing the applications, making sure that they are running correctly and providing on-going support for them. This is a strongly customer facing role and you will be dealing with them on a day-to-day basis. There may be the possibility of some on-site work. The main products you would be dealing with are our range of integration tools linking the school MIS to Active Directory, SharePoint and other systems. For the right person there will be opportunities in SharePoint administration and no code development. I am looking for someone who: uses their initiative and gets things done. I'm not looking for someone I need to manage on a minute by minute basis. has expertise and experience maintaining Active Directory, ideally in a school environment. has knowledge and experience of Sims.net and/or Facility CMIS. is comfortable with scripting, especially Active Directory. experience with SharePoint and/or Moodle would be a definite advantage. is able to work effectively with minimal supervision. demonstrates great attention to detail. is able to effectively work from home. is comfortable and flexible when dealing with customers. The customer is always right and gets what they want! is pro-active in their approach to problems. preferably Microsoft certified or working towards it Salary will be dependent on experience. If you are interested in applying please send your CV with covering letter and availability to [email protected]. Benefits and salary will depend on the experience of the candidate. All applicants must be able to legally work in the UK and due to the nature of the sector we work in we require all employees to be CRB checked.

It's probably having a problem finding the My Documents for the IIS user. Try setting Load User Profile to True on the application pool.

If it's set up correctly for them then it could just be a case of clicking add column on the ribbon and choosing the grade type. You could probably create a button with the Content Editor Web Part if you wanted it on the page.

I'll have to disagree with that. You could very easily store grades in a custom list. You could even set up content types for different types of grades so that they only need setting up once. Easy enough to get the students in as well using a csv import, opening the list in Excel, scripting it or using a 3rd party tool. If you are already running SharePoint definitely have a look at that. Bringing in any sort of system such as SharePoint or Moodle just for this would probably be overkill and would really need to be considered in terms of using the platform as whole across the school in multiple areas and the overall school IT strategy. If you just wanted to record the grades an Excel spreadsheets on a share would work and could be an interim solution wil deciding on strategy.

Unit-e is a completely separate product with a separate partnership program, api and fee structure. There's a list of partners at Capita FHE - Our partners.

I think that Shireland Learning Gateway moved to Synetrix/Open Hive rather than Open Hive came from Shireland. They may well have had a lot of influence on it though.

If all you need are ical files, surely it's a lot simpler just to convert the report output to ical format rather thean import to Outlook and then export out again. ical is just a text format so should be simple to convert csv or xml format. You can probably use an xslt stylesheet with xml format. As someone who has integrated Sims timetables in Exchange I know it's not easy. BTW be careful of the change to and from BST.

I've given it a go with SharePoint Learning Kit. My comments: 1. It's not obvious how to start it. I randomly clicked around until I hit the 1. The mouse pointer didn't change when hovering over it, so no visual indication you can click. 2. Bar charts display differently in IE and FireFox. In IE they have lines across. 3. When you finish the test, you can't see the results as the state is changed and a new page shown before you can read it. 4. At the end you change the state to suspended instead of submitted. The user is then forced to submit as a separate action. 5. Teacher and student review mode do not show the answers. Same on your Moodle site as well. Hope this helps and good luck with getting it finished. Richard

I think that @zag is talking about reports saved in the document server, which I don't think can be accessed via Command Reporter. When one of our customers moved from Sims to another MIS last year, I wrote a little utility for them which extracted all the documents from the document server for each pupil, so it can be done.

Not really an easy way. On the SharePoint server you need to go into c:\windows\assembly and find Microsoft.SharePointLearningKit. Ignore the version displayed in the list view, this is the strong-name version and this has to stay the same across all releases. Right click on the file, choose properties and look at the version tab. It's the file version you're looking for. I'm not sure at what point I started setting that though. Definitely from 1.5, but possibly not 1.4. To distinguish between 1.3.1 and 1.4, 1.4 has the drop box in. Richard

Yes creating parent accounts is a potential minefield. The quality of the contact data is generally the poorest quality data in the system, and whatever you do make sure you take account of parental responsiblity and court order, on an ongoing basis. If that changes, they need to lose access immediately. I've written more at length on this at Yes parents need their own logins, but they should be on a per parent basis. If they are based on the student then parents will be sharing the same login which is a big no-no to me. Think about estranged parents - you could say we'll deal with separately, but at what point in a break up will you get to hear about it? Richard Willis – SharePoint Learning Kit Coordinator, SalamanderSoft Owner » Creating Parent Accounts for your VLE from Sims, Facility CMIS or other MIS.

I've done a fair bit of work with the document store, pulling the documents out and converting to pdf. However, as @matt40k said, all access should be through the Sims API. Anything else isn't supported, will by-pass any security and will be at great risk of showing the wrong documents to people. Yes, they are Word Xml files. Should open straight up in Word if you've got that installed and double click on them. Not a suitable format for presenting to parents as it will rely on them having the correct version of office installed.

Worthwhile checking the T&Cs again to see what requirements, if any, the company have to inform you of the end of the subscription period. If they haven't followed them, then I imagine that they would have trouble enforcing the rest of the T&Cs.