Jamman960

Hey all, Could anyone that uses Fee's billing try something for me? whenever I run an exception report (Reports>Custom Reports>Fees Billing>Billing>Exceptions) I get a database timeout error. I originally ran the report against the whole school with just the zero charges option checked but have since tried it with a single class(14 pupils) and it still times out. We had a sims consultant in the other day assisting our finance manager with our summer term bill run, upon finding the problem he phoned the helpdesk who told him the problem is resolved in the march release... I've tried it out on my test setup running the march release and still have the exact same problem. I'm going to report it on supportnet after my week off but thought I'd try and find out whether this is a problem with fee's billing in general or our database. Cheers, James

Smart Tech released a tech bulletin in 2006 regarding the D102 board - http://www2.smarttech.com/kbdoc/84872 (knew I'd seen it somewhere!) Apparently its caused by the D102 violating the USB2 specs, I would have expected intel to have sorted it out by now though.

I know where I can possibly get a 2gb scsi Jazz drive from although the machines may have been thrown out(p2 350's) by now. Will check this weekend.

The only server based parts of sims are the SQL database and the document server, both of which shouldn't be affected much by windows updates on the servers although there is always a risk of updates causing outages but that could happen with any server/workstation. I hope they keep sims up to date.

I find "email me or it won't get done" works fairly well here - staff seem to get the idea when they find that once they actually bother sending me an email the job tends to get done within the day Hope it works out for you, I guess you'd need to have staff with a sense of humor for it to work well, staff in most of the schools I've been to wouldn't accept it easily

I've got it up and running on my laptop at the moment, the changes aren't too big to be honest, I just doubt many teachers will take the time to get the most out of the new features without being told all about it etc. I'm sure our secetary will like the late registrations panel though The manual does say that "Careful Consideration should be given when adding new panels to the home page. A number of these panels have frequent refresh intervals, so a large number of panels displaying on several workstations could lead to performance issues, and all areas of SIMS may show a reduction in performance as a consequence." - this is going to be fun to deal with in a large school, any teachers that do decide to use the new features probably aren't going to be bothered about how many they add or how frequently they refresh themselves. The only panel I can see with a configurable refresh interval is the "My Messages" one which allows the rate to be set at between 30 and 300 seconds.... defaulting to 30 I'd guess that an option to select the default panels will appear in the next few releases but role based allocation probably won't be possible until System Manager 7 turns up.

The latest gadget was my new phone - a Samsung Omnia 16gb Cant remember what I brought before that my wife has stopped me spending all my money on random gadgets lol

Voted

Hmm, I was told that we could set it up centrally based on the staff members roles and was given the impression this would be functional from the march release - it'd be a bit pointless to start setting it up centrally in june once everyones muddled through and got their screens as they like them. This was at the Sims south east(independent) user group meeting last thurs.

Got a couple of projects on the go at the moment, I'm creating a web based pupil achievement system to replace the schools current paper based one and sorting out the schools broadband connections... hopefully it'll all be done in time so I can have an easy time of it while the kids are off at the end of term

Disabling it via Administrative tools > Control Panel > Display > Prevent Changing Wallpaper generally stops most methods of changing the wallpaper including via IE if I remember correctly. I've got the context menu disabled also though so that might be why.

Thanks for the advice guys, I'll get to work on the vlan setup

Thats the main reason I've had the line installed where it is, our current adsl line tops out at 4-5mbit, luckily we have a pole on another exchange right on the far edge of our site, we should finally get decent speeds once I choose a new ISP(definatly not going with BT Business Broadband again!)

Thanks for the replys, I thought as much At the moment there is no fiber connection to that building, its connected to another building via cat5 which is then connected to the main building via fiber. I guess I could put another cat5 line in for now then use media convertors for the rest of the journey. All of the switches are vlan capable so I'll give that a go first. James

I've just had a new line installed especially for broadband, its not in the same building as our servers as the telegraph pole nearest to our main building is 2km+ away from the exchange whereas the building the new line is installed in is connected to a different exchange only 900m away, I'm trying to decide which route to take when connecting it up to our servers. I've come up with 2 ideas so far - 1. Connect the router directly to the nearest switch and v-lan the port off from everything else then configure the switches between there and the servers with v-lans so that only our ISA server is connected to the router OR 2. Use one of the many spare pairs on our internal phone cabling to extend the line to the main building. this would add around 150m to the cable length over potentially bad wiring(our ex phone company sold the school extra cabling and claimed it could be used to extend the lan however as the total distance is 150m+ and there are multiple joins in the cable it'd never have worked) How sensitive is ADSL to bad cabling/extensions? I'm looking at having ADSL2+ installed with upto 20mbit down and 2.5mbit up, option 2 would be the most secure and would reduce the effect of any network outages on our net connection. James

Correct me if I'm wrong but mixing between group policy and winsuite won't be a walk in the park, most of the restrictions will have to be applied via user group policys applied to the students OU which will take affect wherever the students logon although I guess if the same restrictions are being applied via GPO and winsuite you'll be able to remove winsuite at a later date and not notice the difference. I'm not sure whether group policy would override winsuites policys though - I've never had the misfortune of dealing with winsuite other than ripping it out to setup a new vanilla network

Enlight cases are usually brilliant, our supplier used them for several years until they moved their service center to europe. They are nice solid cases in general with the exception of their All-In-One cases which are a real pain in the arse.

The Omnia HD is due to be released in June, that'll be running the latest version of Symbian. Officially Orange now only supply it to business customers but places like Car Phone Warehouse, Tesco's etc still sell it to consumers.

I'd avoid the XPressMusic 5800, it looks far too plasticy imo I'm finally Getting an Omnia tonight - orange are still doing it(got it via tesco's). I Managed to get the phone for £10 on orange as a new customer as opposed to £175 as an upgrade T-Mobile discontinued it last week... shortly after DPD(courriers) managed to lose the one on its way to me :/

We have sims but the amount of extra form filling involved in giving an individual student 1 point is a bit ott, you'd have to search for the pupil within the behavior section then fill in details of why your giving the point etc, it'd end up being a training nightmare with the number of points issued here.

Hey all, I'm currently looking at the way we handle what we call "plus points" within the school, at the moment teachers have to put their initials onto one of four plus boards we have in the main lobby(one per house) and then at the end of the week the signatures are totalled up by the deputy head and certificates are given based on the total number of academic/non academic points pupils have recieved. I'd like to bring this into the 21st century with a web based front end/sql back end etc. Has anyone else taken this on or have a good system in place already?

If its based on SQL you may be able to get MySQL working with a bit of tweaking, heres a thread that may help: SourceForge.net: FreeNAS: Help

Is anyone else having difficulty getting the "hall of fame 09" on World Maths Day 09 to load from beind their school firewall? I just get the loading screen and can't login half the time. when I load it either at home or on a direct line here the page loads without any problems and I can login also. We're using ISA server 2006/Smartfilter

I trialed a few around christmas, mainly School Comms, Parent Mail, Clarion Call & School Post. I found School Comms annoying as you had to use their interface to send messages, it'd do stupid things like miss a line when you press enter etc. Also it wouldn't show the actual email addresses it was sending to, instead it'd tell you to look at the pupils account within sims. The web interface for clarion call was basic in appearance and overly complicated to use for non technical staff. Parent Mail was one of the cheapest we found however they force an email template upon you - every message has the schools name in big bold letters at the top and the email background is colour coded based on the urgency... green for not important, red if an immediate response is required. I just got the impression they had too much of the primary school attitude... as if parents aren't going to read mails from the school unless we make it clear how important the message is or have the schools name in big bold letters etc My favorite was School Post, we mainly wanted to use the system to email parents. School Post is fully customised for the school where as all of the others carry their associated branding... this was important for us as an independant school. School Post is basically a CMS with email notification for various groups. any publications the school sends are shown in the web interface and you can choose the response options including simple web forms or direct email reply's. They all offer text messaging at around 6-10p per message, most except School Post require you to buy "packs" of 1000+ messages, school post will invoce you based on how many you use each month. Cost wise Parent Mail was the cheapest followed by School Comms, Clarion Call and School Post. Unfourtunatly in the end our head told us to forget the whole thing and get the receptionist to build a list and mail our parents from outlook

I'm currently trialing it in our IT suite and plan to roll it out to the whole school once the final version is released. I'm quite impressed with it and the staff that have used it so far like it also. I'm glad they've merged studio and primary into one code base and by the looks of it have stopped charging extra for the "network" version.