Gongalong

That seems rather bloody-minded! On an unrelated note, I'd love to figure out how I stop my shirt getting untucked, short of duct tape/super glue.

Apologies. I should have included something a bit more general.

Agreed. But I know some like the formal thing.

There's a poll at the top btw, for those with devices that can see it. I think it must post the thread even before the poll is added. Sorry for the bewildering options, I got carried away

Is this in a school? (just curious)

Hi folks, Apologies if this has already been discussed lots, but just curious for those IT bods who work in schools what the dress code is, or at least what do you normally wear? We have nothing formal at our school, although (as a Network Manager) I was asked to wear shirt and tie, which after 2 years has "deteriorated" to smart jeans, shirt with no tie, and trainers (my shoes fell to bits).

I've made the recommendation, but we'll see whether it makes it through the politics...

Apparently we've got Cunninghams coming in already, as they are recommended by Tucasi. We'll see...

The Dude. We use it just with PING to keep an eye on everything important. We've overlaid a map of the school so it's easy to stop where an issue is.

Interesting reading. We're currently with Tucasi and have a set of 5 year old tills. Tucasi have stopped developing the cashless catering side of their system (Schools Cash Office, SCO) as they're focusing on online payments only (purportedly 7 customers with the former and 3,000 with the latter). We have an issue currently where the tills keep going offline, and support are struggling to figure out why and don't seem very motivated. Also the online payments side is a bit fragile. The difficulty we have is a compressed day, with a 20 minute lunch break. Currently we use barcode cards which scan very quickly. Our Bursar has looked at biometric systems but it takes 2-3 seconds to scan a fingerprint, which is just too long to get 1,000 kids through in 20 minutes. I'm not sure if she's spoken to Nationwide/NRS but I'll point her that way.

We use the dude also with an overlay of the school. Great stuff! Any indication in Event Viewer what's causing the crash, have you turned off auto-restart?

Interesting, because logins have definitely slowed down since the Summer hols (when Ranger 8 went on). It seems to be load dependent i.e. when more users try to login or are logged in. When it recurs I'll try on a machine with no Ranger installed. We have another problem with Ranger Remote 11 which won't allow teachers to add, edit or remove rooms - they often use different rooms, and some have moved over the Summer. The workaround is to use the Ad-Hoc room field.

Poll: What Classroom Management Software Do You Use?

I find the Windows Snipping Tool surprisingly useful (when PrtScn and Alt+PrtScn can't hack it). No direct upload facility though, unsurprisingly. NetMeter is another fave, for keeping an eye on bandwidth usage.

Has anyone noticed a big drop in the quality of RM's Ranger support? It seems like it has been outsourced to India. I used to get near good quality answers which would often resolve the problem immediately, and now support struggles to even grasp what the feature is I'm talking about.

Nope, not referring to the members of this site. Do you have any Windows tools/programs that you couldn't live without, whether rare discoveries or not? Only recently I came across Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection Manager which has made it so much easier connecting into various servers. What have you found?

Hi folks, Has anyone come across a bug with Ranger 8 where Windows Explorer is closing when browsing to "random" folders? I've got it logged with RM, but just curious to see whether anyone else has encountered it. TIA

Ta. Yes, spotted I was out of luck today :-)

I can't seem to find the video of the first draw. Do those who get drawn get PM'd also?

We're going to take a step back and just review what we want to do first, just in case Unify isn't the answer. I'm trying to get those involved to understand it's about objective rather than just selecting one product. Even so Unify does look good (coupled with the Site Creator and Office 365 Sharepoint). I think we will have to extract from our LA's email system and migrate staff mailboxes to Office 365. I'd love to know a bit more about setting up Office 365, and administration, but at least the mailbox side will be made easier by federating with Unify.

We might be integrating with RM's Unify (which has its own flavour of SSO, an AD syncing tool), and they talk about refederating it. I'm not clear on what (re)federating does, but if we refederate with them does it mean (a) that we wouldn't need ADFS except that (b) we'd need it initially to get the accounts across?

Hi folks, I'm looking for an overview of what's required in setting up Office 365, ideally from someone that has been through the process. My understanding is that you sign up with MS, install a sync tool on your AD, and redirect your MX record to them. Is there more to it than that? (aside from any mailbox migration) Are there things which turned into a can of worms and/or were very problematic? Very interested to hear your thoughts. TIA

Hi folks, I'm interested to know what others have done within their IT departments that you would consider "good practice" i.e. has helped keep things organised, improved efficiency, improved stability, monitoring etc. For example: temp sensors in critical areas, asset registers, cabling diagram/schedule. Any suggestions?

The aim of the report is to get the same email address that Schoolcomms uses IYSWIM, as that seems to be the most populated of all the various fields. That is to emulate the Registered Users report in Schoolcomms. Those email addresses in SIMS seem to be under whichever parents are marked as primary, under the "Family/Home" section. Of course in some instances two or more parents/guardians are marked as primary, so Schoolcomms returns multiple records for the same student. Would the above still apply to generate a report that brings back that information?

I've had to create another SIMS report for what are Year 7's now, and have identified a few email fields in SIMS (Basic Details > Email (own) and Primary Email, Email > email_address and Primary Email). But only around 25% of these students have populated email addresses. When I pull that same report in Schoolcomms around 80-90% are populated. Am I using the right field to pull the parental email address?