rpwillis

This is a tricky one. Note I am not any sort of legal expert and this is just my understanding of the law which may be completely incorrect. As you pointed out in another post, this is a specific case. However, in general there is a world of difference between consumer and business law. Consumers have far more rights than businesses as far as contract law is concerned, e.g. the 7 day cooling off/right to return period doesn't apply to businesses. I know that schools (in general) aren't businesses, but I imagine that in the eyes of the law they are. An oral contract (sometimes referred to as a verbal contract) is just as binding as a written contract. The main problem with them is proving that they exist i.e that there was an agreement, however if you have paid for a service, it is highly indicative that a contract was entered into. Leaving ethics aside in the discussion, ultimately the only way to definitively answer it is to go to court. I would suggest talking to the provider as a first step. Don't forget the contracts are written by lawyers and are designed to cover them for the worst case scenario. The renewal process will also be run by back office staff as will be designed to cover the 'normal' situation where customers just continue as this is the most efficient way of running the process. If you speak to the right people, you may get the answer you want. Whatever you do, don't threaten them, for example, blackening their name, as that could land you personally and the school in all sorts of trouble - I note that you have avoided naming them so far. If you don't get the answer you want from talking to them, I can see 4 options: Talk to a lawyer. Potentially costly and ultimately only their informed opinion. Only a court can be definitive. Refuse to pay and hope they back down for the sake of their reputation. Pay up and use it as a learning experience. Use the application for the next year to try to salvage something from it. Whatever you do, don't rely on information from random people posting their opinions on forums!!! Any advice is only as good as you pay for (and their insurance covers) and this post is free advice! Good luck, Richard

I've not done anything with ePortal notices yet. Not seen any demand for it before.

You will need to use an external address, making sure that it resolves to your server and that you have set up your Alternate Access Mappings in SharePoint for it. Just use relative or server relative urls and they will resolved correctly. Richard

There is a sample in the SLK source code called ProvisionFromExcel. If you download the code it's in slk/slk/samples/provisionFromExcel. I haven't looked at it for a couple of years, but it can do the the basic provisioning. There's no documentation, but you should be able to work out the input format from the source code and the sample input xls. Richard SLK Coordinator

To clarify the original problem the default alias has changed in Exchange 2010 to be forenamesurname instead of user principal name.

Microsoft gives free external connector licenses for parents and other 'connected' users. See http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/7/1/771d8923-9b5e-40ee-86d9-213e0f41b2e8/AcademicGrantLetter(ExternalConnector)(NA)(ENG)(Jul2006)CR.doc http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/7/1/771d8923-9b5e-40ee-86d9-213e0f41b2e8/AcademicGrantLetter(StudentCAL-ParentGuardianAccess)(NA)(ENG)(Jul2006)CR.doc

I think that you would be better off moving towards a site per department now, with their own document library and link list and whatever else they need.

Best response I've seen to this question, which comes up again and again, is from @GrumbleDook at http://www.edugeek.net/forums/security/27074-external-vle-wants-our-upns.html#post264887.

Forgot to mention that Microsoft provide a lot of online training and recorded web casts. Some links are: Take SharePoint Server 2010 training at your desk - SharePoint Server - Office.com SharePoint Server 2010 - Learn, How To, Training | TechNet

You could look at online courses. Critical Path do a selection of courses and because they are US based in our time it's about 1700 - 2030, plus they are recorded and you have access to them for something like 30 days. There are probably others as well. Combined Knowledge in the UK are good, but don't have such an extensive online selection.

You can script it, but that would require running the script on one of the SharePoint servers, which is something the hosting company is unlikely to let you do. If doing it through the browser, you can use the Web Parts Maintenance page to simplify it. If you are not familiar with it, it just lists all the web parts on the page and lets you select which ones to Close, Reset or Delete with one click. The screenshot shows the page after I've closed all the web parts. To access the page just append ?contents=1 to the url e.g. http://myserver/mysite/default.aspx?contents=1 Note that reset does not open them again, it resets all the properties back to their defaults, losing any customisations. There's also no way to unclose the web parts from this page, you'll have to do that one at a time. Also note that closed web parts still partly run so will consume server resources and make the page slower than if they were deleted.

There are still places available for SharePoint Saturday in November. SharePoint Saturday is a free community event devoted to SharePoint, and this year is being held in Nottingham. There's more information at Home - SharePoint Saturday UK. It's got a fantastic line up of speakers and well worth attending if you have any interest in SharePoint, whether an IT Pro, Dev or End User. I'm attending so if anyone wants to talk SLK or SharePoint in education, I'd be happy to meet up. Richard

I’ve just released SLK 1.6 to Beta on CodePlex. This has actually been ready to go for a while, several months in fact, but I haven’t managed to find the time for documentation of the new functionality. I’ve now taken the decision to release it without the documentation so that people can at least start using it and feeding back any problems. The main changes are: Better handling of not quite fully compliant SCORM content Textual grading as well as numeric (optional) e.g. ABC type grades Quick assignment type. That is assignments not based on a document. This should make it much easier to use for a homework diary, especially if the assignment is along the lines of "Read chapters 1 & 2 of book y." Email alerts. The most requested extra functionality.

The last Serco Partners event I went to we were told it was a completely new API.

Yes, it needed to be recompiled due to the move to .net 4.

It's back again now. I was working on it last night adding support for producing thumbnails from it, renamed the file to get around it getting cached and then forgot to put it back. SalamanderSoft Limited - Free Utilities. If you want to know more about the thumbnail export there's more details on my blog.

The exact line I was using: C:\Program Files\SIMS\SIMS .net>CommandReporter.exe /user:Duncan.Wraight /passwo rd:password /report:"100% Attendance" /output: "g:\test.xml" You got some extra white space between /output: and the file name. Use C:\Program Files\SIMS\SIMS .net>CommandReporter.exe /user:Duncan.Wraight /passwo rd:password /report:"100% Attendance" /output:"g:\test.xml"

That's because at home they aren't logged into your Active Directory. Hence although they have signed in through their web browser, when they open a document in Word, for example, Word doesn't know that and attempts to access the document as the logged in user, who is denied as not in your AD, and prompts for authentication again. If they leave Word open when accessing a second document then it won't prompt them again, but if they close it before opening another document they will be prompted again. If you have an Enterprise license you can work around this by using Office Web Apps. Alternatively if you are using ISA or TMG, then if they select "This is a private computer" then all applications will share the same authentication cookie.

As it's a US based company you'll need to consider the Data Protection Act. If the data is stored outside of the EEA, which I imagine is likely, then the company has to have signed up to the Safe Harbour agreement. Preferably they would also be using a data centre in the EU.

Correct, it's just for the message that's it's an invalid email address so you can find it in the input file.

I've just knocked up a quick utility to validate email addresses in a csv file. So if you create a report in Sims containing Admission Number and email address and create a csv file from that it can check the format of the email addresses. It uses the regular expression ^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$ to do the checking, so it certainly doesn't handle all formats as defined in RFC 2822, but it's good enough for most purposes. More information and download at at Free Utility to Check Email Addresses.

As someone whose pulls out documents from Sims document server programmaticlly, if you're familiar with the business objects it's fairly simple to iterate through everyone and then interate through all their documents and save them to disk. It would take a long time to process, but nothing particularly tricky in the code.

No it's a general purpose PowerShell script to upload documents to a document library in SharePoint. It's a good base to start from, but will need modifying to do exactly what you want.

From your description it sounds like you would be better off storing them within the My Sites themselves. Unless you actually need them in the home directories as well, then exposing a physical directory just to show some files is a hack. I have posted some code on my blog on how to bulk upload files into SharePoint. http://blog.salamandersoft.co.uk/index.php/2011/01/using-powershell-to-bulk-upload-files-to-sharepoint

Slightly off topic, but conversely, if locally hosted and the internet connection goes down, then external users won't be able to access Moodle. You'll need to consider whether internal or external use is greater e.g. is it used mainly during lessons, or mainly for homework after school, and the reliability of your connection before deciding local or cloud.