bossman

Ahh well @elsiegee40 thats Kent closed for the duration....hehe! Hope you keeping well and the family is good...Merry Christmas

Well I'm sick as a chip.....hardly any snow but the temperature is rising only -8 this morning at 4am its now risen to -2 so there maybe a chance of snow and maybe we might have to close cos there's 2" of snow on the ground....isn't it grand when it snows darn sarf....the country comes to a standstill and its all over the news...we get snow up here and its just a given and nothing is said....we just carry on as normal up here except we put our coats on.

My Bad Garacesh.... got Ofsted in this morning didn't realise the post was in windows 10 appreciate the humour though......F*ck you!! haha!

@Garacesh We still using Windows 7 pro atm.... I guess your using Windows 10 which I think Solidworks has issues with...according to many forums and websites...

@Garacesh Could it be that the path you are allowing access to is different to the one you have stipulated? We have the following path rules in place: %userprofile%\local settings\temp\solidworkslictemp.* - SolidWorks license temp file. C:\SolidWorks Data\* - To allow users access to the SolidWorks tools addin and Data %SystemRoot%\temp\TMP* - SolidWorks TMP files in Windows\Temp folder Never had a problem since using it many moons ago...!

Its cold up North.....tha nars! Been -12 at 4am this morning......had to put me top coat on to go and feed the chickens.....as you can see its now -6 and rising....had to take me coat off as I wouldn't feel the benefit of the warmer temperature.... John Snow says "Winter is coming" beware the Ice King commeth!.....all you Southerners beware.....

Yeah...this year we buying ourselves return tickets to Cape Verde to see our daughter...just love to buy stuff for myself.....Merry Christmas to me!!

Wow! No snow here....seems all you southerners have had the best of the snow so far....we just have temperatures of -12 degrees C so it just might be too cold to snow...its now risen to -5 C so I can take me top coat off now as I've begun to sweat a little...Its tough up North tha nars!! Enjoy your snow darn Sarf! hehe!

+1 https://www.customlabels.co.uk/product/3m-polyester-laminated-asset-tag We have a laptop with a plug in reader and asset management software on which we export the data up into the cloud for backup. Works well for us...and not that expensive either so they can be replaced as they become damaged, depends where you place them on the equipment as to whether the students scrape them off.

@enjay We use Cunningham's for our cashless catering and have been for the past 6 years, been on a VM server for the past 2 years and we have had a good relationship with them, we don't have hardware support as we can rebuild the tills as they are only computers with touchscreens and then we pay to have the software installed by them and they then maintain the software as for the biometric readers these too can be purchased if they fail and we don't use the reval units anymore which is where most of the hardware support used to go. If you don't intend using a physical server plus reval units and team up with ParentPay online services then you only need the software support which is peanuts compared to hardware support which is in my opinion overpriced and we hardly ever used it once our reval units were taken out of the equation.

@CAWJames We currently have a 2 host Hyper-V with 3 Synolgy RS3614xs+ NAS units, 2 of these having SSDs for caching plus 8 4TB Drives in RAID6 for 24TB storage these are clustered for failover using the Synology's own software and one unit for backups using Veeam on one of the hosts. 5 Year warranty with Synology plus technical support all for approx £4k each with drives, we coupled these with Dell R710s which have 2 x mirrored drives as the hosts and for the past 3 years have been more than happy, we run 20 various VMs of OS flavours. We found a great company that helped me design and implement and offer their technical services at a very reasonable rate. Synology have improved their technology vastly and offer even better units with the same warranty and expertise.... great value for money IMOH check them out: https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/RS3617xs+

@Undermanager Have a look on here: https://www.skillsworkshop.org/category/resource-type/scheme-work Don't know if these are what you are looking for but there seems to be plenty of these sites around.

Hi All, Simple ask: Require a supplier for the following: Casio Remote Control for Casio XJ-A Series (Preferably White) Recommendations please

@johntaylorluton We purchase our PDQ software through a UK software house below: https://www.softwareparadise.co.uk/products/PDQ_Deploy_Pro As for Zendesk I have no idea as we use our own in house helpdesk.

@manamaga2512 Speak to your line manager or SLT and explain the situation to them as I did, what they then decided was that under no circumstances did they want any downtime during the week even when students had left as Staff required access to the systems, so they decided with my input that the best time would be on a weekend on an evening remotely and they would pay me my overtime. It has worked very well for me as I can log in remotely and run the updates manually and be certain that I can sort any problems out without impacting too much on the Staff and Students. Win! Win! for both parties.

Google for Education here! Never looked back since moving the school forward, Chromebooks just work extensively and so quick and reliable, only flaw is the online office package within Google obviously doesn't function as well as Microsoft's but will eventually be as good if not better! This factor relies on the office package being installed locally for use with the Sims on admin workstations but once Sims goes Web Based then it should be an open format across the board and we will be nearly 100% in the cloud. Staff love the simplicity of Google Classroom plus the ease of Mail and Team drives, sync stream tool requires a little more work but will eventually get there..............so all in all a very good product Google! Anyone else moving from 0365 to Google?

+1 Google classroom here! We did have a web app which @webman wrote for us called "Student Work Viewer" which pulls in all the users from AD into year groups and presents it in a tabulated form which you can also put in a search for that student, still works to this day but we have stopped giving Staff access to it now as we use the above.

@MrWu You could be right, it does seem rather large, ours is only 4GB

@MrWu Whats the timeout setting on your Sims connect.ini file on the workstations? This is ours: [sIMSConnection] ServerName=ourserver\sims2014 DatabaseName=sims commandtimeout=100000 It could be that it is actually timing out as the SQL instruction is taking too long to run.

@pcstru In other words it doesn't! Again assuming something that is not clearly defined! You are basically being asked to do something which is not a part of your role (See line above) If as you have stated above that you are not contractually obliged to write policies defined or otherwise then the answer is simply "No" Something we both agree on and its not just "some" its all of those teachers who have been in education all of their lives from leaving school to College to University back to Teaching, they have no understanding of the real world in which we live and work but yet seem to want to overpower and treat others like students in their classroom, this is quite demeaning to other professionals who have more qualifications and experience in life than they ever hope to gain. I should have stated "We as a group of IT professionals" my bad, not generalising just typo, its not an assumed group of like minded people it is factually us on this forum of those who work in education, I should have been more specific. Many opinions are shared but one fact remains that there has been an increasing amount of IT staff within education who have suffered or are indeed suffering from mental health issues and/or overwork because they are not in a position to push back for fear of reprisal from those very teachers who have found themselves in managerial positions but don't have the necessary managerial skills to treat others in a way which they should be managed. It seems very transparent to me, I have had many members on here PM me because of the way they are feeling about certain positions they have found themselves in due to poor leadership decisions from SLT and teachers who have systematically pushed them to their extreme limits of mental capacity without a care. I agree totally with this the only caveat I would make is that the union we have to represent us is not as good as the Teachers Union but I wish it was.

@pcstru Question then? Is it in your contract to write policies and do you receive the remuneration that should go with this? If the answer to this is yes then you are contractually obliged to write these policies as I have previously stated and receive the remuneration package that it incurs, what I have also discussed prior is that we as a group are constantly bemoaning how we are put upon by SLT to do things which are not in our contracts but because we fear the outcome of those in a position to so call "delegate" (shirk in my way of thinking). If as I have stated earlier it is not part of your contractual duty then you don't do it............simple really. The original poster asked which policies should he write? A myriad of answers came their way with some stating its part of what they assumed was their duty but was not in fact written into their JDs so they were in fact taking responsibility for writing those policies even though they were not receiving the remuneration for taking that responsibility. We also discussed delegation to which you stated you would not delegate these tasks or duties to your technicians which we both agreed was a valid point to which I had already made. The point I was making which is simplistic in its entirety is this: You are either contractually obliged to write these policies or not, if you are then because of the responsibility which surrounds school policies which in my opinion is at an SLT level the person who has been contractually obliged to write these policies should by rights be a part of the SLT team as this follows logical reasoning. All too often are members of the SLT team taking the remuneration for duties that they themselves should be undertaking because they are in receipt of remuneration specific to that responsibility and then passing the workload by way of "Delegation" which you declared you would not do and taking the remuneration for work being completed by someone else who is not. This in my honest opinion is poor management skills and only leads to a dysfunctional level of staff productivity and generates ill feeling and poor dynamics within the school as a whole. Just my opinion but I do feel very strongly about this and the people on this forum who are tasked by delegation to fulfil these tasks adding to their ever increasing workload and thus pushing them into decline whether it be their mental status or their health as a whole.

@pcstru I see where you might feel this falls into contractual obligation but when one looks into the responsibility of the policy writing itself this can only be done at SLT level in my opinion as this level of management responsibility is required to actually carry the necessary weight to all the other members of Staff otherwise it becomes just another useless piece of scripture which Staff choose to ignore at the schools peril. I therefore, have to disagree with what you are saying in terms of who should be writing these policies due to the level of membership required to impose to other members of Staff the relevance of such school policies. This is just my opinion and you and anyone else has the right to theirs...................just saying like!

@pcstru I accept that this would inevitably impact on the IT dept at operational level from the IT Network manager's point of view but this should still in effect require only an experienced input from that point with no reason to have to write the whole policy as this is an SLT responsibility if I'm not mistaken unless that IT network manager is part of the SLT team. This is the crux of the matter in that there is a great disparage within Education as to roles within the support teams. Some schools revere their support staff and therefore certain support staff actually reach the SLT member status to which they thoroughly deserve in my opinion and therefore have a valid input into writing actual policies not just partial input. What are your thoughts?

@sparkeh If it is within your job specifications to write these policies then that's what you have to do as you will also receive the remuneration as part of your role if this is what it states. I am not saying that NM's or Technicians shouldn't do this at all but only when they are not responsible for these in their JD's as they will not receive the remuneration for the responsibilities yet the SLT team members will, Its not a case of whats expected, some peoples expectations can be very high and therefore those members of staff who are on the receiving end of supposedly delegated tasks can feel overwhelmed at times and this is indeed multiplied greatly when they don't even receive the remuneration for this. This only leads to bad feelings and poor performance which then effects the team and whole schools dynamics. Does you JD specifically state that you write these policies out and that you are specifically responsible for them or are you just assuming that you are? I am quite clear in my JD and my role within school and I keep to those rigidly as it suits both my team and the school for me to do so, they would not take kindly to me having grandiose thoughts in relation to my standing within the school dynamics.

Not at all young man, I clearly understood what you said it seems the other way around in that you don't seem to have grasped what I and others have stated on here over the past few posts, We, as either NM's or Technicians, should only have an input based on our skills and experience levels towards the definitive policies. We should not have to write the policies ourselves and then have SLT verify them as this is not part of our job spec nor at our low pay-grade which doesn't cover us under the responsibility process and thus we receive no remuneration for the extra workload which in fact the members of the SLT do. This is not delegation this is getting someone else to the leg work and then reaping the rewards for their hard work.