Marcs_Dad

One other thing to look at, is the device security permission. Make sure that all user have at least Print Allowed under the Security Tab in Print Management.

This was indeed available when XP was still in use, but the functionality behind it was removed by Microsoft after this. We enforce single logons for students, with a two logons for staff (to allow for users who have their own office machine and classroom). Our system is a function oh HAP+ (Home Access Plus), so you may have to look for a third party application as mentioned above. When a user exceeds their logon limit, they are asked if they would like to be logged off their other session (or session for staff). It works really well, and also logs who is logged on where live, and historic logons. Good luck with your search.

If you can connect to the remote devices then the command ipconfig /registerdns will be your friend. Below is a one liner that I knocked up some time back to do just this. You will need to download psexec.exe which is part of the Sysinternals suite that Microsoft now own and provide free. Good luck :-) echo off rem Use - Forces a client to re-register DNS record rem rem Usage - RemoteRegisterDNS.bat TargetComputerName c:\psinstalls\psexec.exe \\%1 ipconfig /registerdns Save the listing above into a file called RemoteRegisterDNS.bat and then run it from an advanced command prompt with a computer name or IP address

Just came across this thread, but we have been running a system across the board for all users since September 2017. Our system relies on Sophos Enterprise Console (Device Control) and a GPO to manage the Bitlocker side of things. Here's a quick rundown of how it works. 1. All members of staff are issued with their own 8GB memory stick that is BitLocker encrypted and issued to them via an Asset Management System (so we can track down any lost devices). It is a bit of a task to encrypt them all (130 odd) in advance, but it was a one off. When we encrypted them, we saved each of the encryption keys so we can bail them out. 2. A Sophos device control policy was created and distributed via the whole client computer estate. Only the devices mentioned in step 1 were enabled. If a user tries to plug in any other removable storage device, it gets blocked by the Sophos policy, and logged (by user and computer). 3. User owned potable storage devices can be enabled, but have to be allowed via the IT Technicians Office. User owned devices are only enabled read only. 4. If a user owned and enabled portable storage device is detected, BitLocker will kick in and ask the user if they wan to encrypt the device. If they encrypt the device, it becomes writable. 5. Visitors to the school need to run their portable devices via the IT Technicians Office. 6. Students can also bring in their portable storage devices for authorisation, but most just use our remote access provision. The students are really caught in the cross fire as it was the staff I wanted to control, but it had to be across all users. Summary. The system has worked well so far, and our GDPR Policy makes it very clear that anybody playing fast and loose with PII data is making a serious career decision. If a school issued device is lost or stolen, then we simply remove it from the device control policy.

This is no surprise. Check out this with regards to my issues with another Capita acquisition. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/educational-software/199240-longest-wait-support-capita-mls.html Capita were also in the news yesterday, with regards to a little matter of failing to send 40,000 medical result letters to patients.

I recently had another run in with Capita-MLS. I had a problem witht syncing AD accounts after migrating to the Reading Cloud from our on premise offering. After two weeks I received an email from level 1 support telling me to use the AD troubleshooter from their website. I had gone through the troubleshooter before placing a support call, then end result of which was the troubleshooter telling me I needed to place a support call. I kicked off at this point, demanding SLA's and stating that two weeks waiting for a reply to a level 3 serious issue was not acceptable, and that it was there troubleshooter that had told me to place a call. To be fair and transparent, they said that I had not informed them about already running the troubleshooter, and this was true. A remote support session was arranged, and the level 2 technician spent over two hours to get everything working, so well done to them. When you actually get through to their support, they do seem to be able to fix the problems, but a two week wait is unacceptable, making the product not fit for service. As mentioned above, you would imagine that they have extra resources available to automatically deal with periods of high demand!

Thanks for the information with regards to an alternative. I will pass this on to our librarians.

I understand your logic, as ECDL did that with their agent. It makes troubleshooting much easier, and even allows any problems to be fixed before calling the help desk.

** A bit of an update from me ** I raised a separate support call with Capita / MLS on the 04/10/2018, logged as Level 3 - Major. Today 18/10/2018 I received an email with a link to a troubleshooting page on their website. This link was for the troubleshooter that I had already run, which informed me something like "You will need to contact our helpdesk". I suspect that their SLA is 14 days, but I have requested that not only do I want the call escalating to somebody who can help, I also want a copy of their SLA agreement.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45784482 Nice of Microsoft to mention that this is "Isolated cases", which is not great if you are on the receiving end!

New skills! Less faff for teachers! All our staff and students can login from home, including staff having FULL access to Sims without the need for Sims Learning Gateway. Of course, these does require that the user has a computing device, internet connection and electricity. Good luck to you with your laptops, and I hope you have all the data GDPR compliant on them.

Desktops all the way and installed nearly 350 during the last year. Rant starts ## Bloody laptops are a waste of taxpayers money, and in one case at my last school, one "Senior" member of staff had three allocated for the various roles she was in charge of (two of course ended up supporting her kids through Uni). Rant ends ##

Funny how big firms like this can get away with charging for products that are not and may never be fit for purpose. I tried to raise a support case on one of Crapitas other companies today, guess what it crashed, three times. I ended up using good old email and got back a nice reply saying how busy they are at this time of year. Good luck pal, I feel your pain!

My vote would go for Paxton and their Net2 access control system. We use it for attendance and access control for all staff and Post 16 students. We use the fobs, but I know that the cards work just as well. With a card printer you can make your own fully fledged ID cards (we don't). Paxton has great features such as anti pass back, so students can't fob in or out for each other. It also has a great extra feature for auto printing during fire alarm, which prints out as soon as the alarm goes off (using an input from the fire system). The system is not used for time/attendance checking for staff, as this may have caused a problem with the Unions at introduction. For staff is is simply for recording who is on site & access. We do use reports for the Post 16 lot however, especially if still signed in on site when the fire alarm goes off. Good luck.

*** Update *** I got a response via a phone call after four days, and the Support Technician had my problem fixed within 10 minutes (very knowledgeable chap to be fair). I asked them why they were so busy and he simply replied, "it's the same as this in September every year". Just a pity that the Management can't help them out by providing more support techs at peak periods. Regards

Keep the faith brother, and don't start to doubt your talent. It's an impossible job, especially when you have nobody else to bounce off. An establishment that is only employing you term time with no holiday cover is planning for a disaster (unless it is so small that it runs itself, which I doubt). Don't throw the towel in just yet, and get to speak to your line manager about the situation. These systems are so complex nowadays, with the network team expected to sort out all the various technologies without any training (apart from forums like EduGeek etc). Even major revision changes of key software is problematic, because you take a working system and potentially break it (depending on how well the supplier has sorted out the bugs and issues). One solution would be to hire in a Company to support you with thee issues, and to perhaps help you get everything up and running, which you can then manage. You cannot be expected to cope by using google to fix your problems, and if your origination does not agree, then they are fooling themselves. By the way, i'm running a 500 desktop estate and with two technicians as well as my self, and still running good old Windows 7. Windows 10 can wait. Good luck Dave

Oh dear! I'm retiring in December so wont be able to beat your record :-)

Hello Mate, I have a very similar infrastructure to you (vSphere 5.5 etc) and I have a 2012R2 server which randomly locks up withthe only option to perform a reset on the guest from vSphere. Nothing at all like your experience i'm afraid. Could I pose a couple of things to try though which may help to pin down the underlying problem: (1) Are you using DRS on vSphere? (2) Have you tried migrating the guest to another host? (3) Have you tried migrating the datastore? (4) How do the vm guest performance figure look during normal use/slow startup etc (look for latency issues) (5) Can you stand another DC up to help with the failure on the PDC emulater? Sorry if you have tried all of this all ready.

Our librarian raised a "major" incident support call with Crapita/MLS over 48 hours ago with still no response, has anybody else had a longer wait? Please keep the replies down to Crapita and or MLS as we all know how bad some support services can be (QNAP support for example relies on email which is only answered every 24 hours. It would be quicker to use telegrams). Habe a good day y'all.

Thanks Pete, I aim to gather some more information then to try and escalate the problems through the Capita/MLS Helpdesk. It seems that MLS pretty much force people onto the hosted version, only for us then to find out it my not be fit for purpose. I doubt I could roll back to on-site Eclipse now, so we have no other recourse than to jump through all the hoops. If I can get enough data together, then I will attempt to get Private Eye or the BBC involved. My current thinking is that this is one of the busiest if not the actual busiest time of the year for the system, with the librarians attempting to reconcile all the books out with the leavers etc (reminder letters and bills for missing books etc, along with preparing for the new year 7 students coming into the system. So the busiest time of the year = poor performance for everyone.

Hello All, I'm just after a quick response from anybody using the MLS Reading Cloud system, hopefully saving me having to waste a couple of days troubleshooting for Capita! Short story. We went over to the Reading Cloud from hosted Eclipse about 6 weeks ago, and apart from one or two initial niggles, our librarians are pleased with the system. That should read, were pleased with the system until last Thursday, since when performance has fallen off the cliff. Now we have used the same ISP, Net filtering and Anti-virus companies for years, and we have not made any system changes or application changes. The librarians contacted the Help desk, and were told that the problem must be our end, even though it has been working well for over a month. We have started going through their recommended settings and can find no problems at our end. An interesting point is their choice of internet speed test provider (https://speedof.me/) which informed me that I was the lucky 1,000,000 visitor to the site. Their provider showed that I was getting a download speed of 18.27 Mbps and upload of 13.11 Mbps. When I performed the test using the recommended app by emPSN/KCom I got readings of 92.83 Mpbs and 93.93 Mpbs respectively. This I guess can only be down to all the adverts that the site served up. I have attached the results purely for your information. To the point. Has anybody using the Reading Cloud noticed poor performance over the last week? Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any feedback. Dave P.

No problem, I'm really pleased that it solved your issue as well. I was told in the dim and distant paste that you can give the "Everyone" group full share permission, but control the actual date with the security permissions. No doubt somebody will explain why this is incorrect, but hay ho!. Thanks for your tip about the Sims.ini file. I am going to perform your trick for that one. The Sims.ini file is a mysterious entity, which seems to have differing values on every client that I examine (even though they all work). Regards Dave.

Hello all, I am also currently migrating to SOLUS3, and experienced a similar problem. You would expect that a (404) error would indicate a problem at the Capita end. After failing several times to download any of the available packages, and prior to placing yet another support call, I tried the "Open in browser" option. This was successful, until I pointed the browser to "Save as" and pointed the target to my "Update Repository" which is hosted on a remote share. This time I got an error, and a light bulb moment which reminded me that I had only created the remote share with default permissions. A quick review and share permission change and bingo, the downloads are now working. I gave the "Everyone" Group full share permissions, and then gave the computer account hosting the Sims Deployment Service, "write" security permission. The SOLUS3 Deployment Service runs on the host server as a local service, and giving the host server account "write" permission on the remote share gets the job working. To be fair, the Capita SOLUS3 documentation makes this very clear. But as with most things Capita, there seems to be many obstacles to overcome. For example, when I pointed SOLUS3 to the currently used SIMS.ini file on the server, it complained because the entry contained a reference to the "SIMSDotNetDirectory". I removed this, and all seemed well, until that was, I tired to run a system manager database backup the next morning. After removing the DotNet reference, the system manager interface will not load until you put it back. When you put it back of course SOLUS3 complains!!!! This now doubt will involve another support call. Anyway, I hope my experience with this problem helps somebody else. Regards Dave

Thanks