Stuart_C

Firstly yes @Sivadam I have psoted this on Capita's formum as well but you do tend to get a quicker response here.. Just to check form you own peace of mind, are the Home Page groups dynaic in any way, i.e. are they automatically populated from other information, or can I freely edit them with without any worries. I'm asuing the former as mine are a little out of date and don't appear to reflect certain changes in the pastoral structure. But I wanted to ask. Second is there a way to completely re-set the home pages of every user? Looking at the manual I think that user defined panels always stay but again I'm not sure.

Just a couple of basic questions, I assume there is no technical reason why I can't add more registration codes into SIMS if I want? i.e it doens't muck anything up. And what exaclty does the it it mean by the "Links to Reg Mark"? (Yes I have read the help but I still wasn't sure). I want to add in a couple of extra codes to mark students who are here but out of lesson in a music lesson of off with the learing support. So they would be "Present/Approved Educational Activity" (Not decided which) and "In for whole session" Our Director Of Studies would like to be able to report on how many lessons students are missing for these extra lessons and how that compares to their performance in those subjects, which is why I think I need the seperate codes to identify them

I must admit it took me a few minute with step 4 to figure out that my command prompt was actually that of the remote machine But I did have a few enjoyable minutes logging off my technician.

I looked at it and I think that inTouch may be the future. However to get the best out of it you've got the be usning a lot of SIMS for a lot of things and then use inTouch a lot. Having said that we currently have SchoolComms and it's brilliant. There are a couple of extra steps becuase it's not part of SIMS but basically does the job very well. The new version seems to work much better with my Proxy and generally it's been a great product. It would work even better if our parents would all provide us with correct address that we could read but that's a different argument. And I thought it was cheaper than inTouch as well... certainly the install cost is but I can't rememebr what the running cost is.... Oh we only have a single user licence.

Thanks @Innatius. I just had a play with that and it works! Yeah.

@ ictech yes. technically but then switching it off is not what I want to be doing to the comptuers. So taking this a step further, bearing in mind only staff can lock a machine is there any mischief that can be accomplished by the students if I have fast user switching turned on?

@Steve21 - No Because the Computer's locked @FN-GM Hmm.. I was worried you might say something like that. I've got the fast user switching disabled/hidden. I don't really want the pupils able to "switch users"

My Google-fu is weak and I'm having a bit of a brain fail... As an admin how do I unlock an Win 7 machine that's been locked by another user?

I have to wait until Capita upgrade Hosted SLG but as it's report wrinting time and Easter is a week and a half away I think this will be an "Over the holidays" job. It willl also give me a change to get the new version of SOLUS 3 installed and see what happens. Plus I can let all the eager beevers find the problems and give Capita time to patch them

I'm running a valillia network her and it's fine, for most of the reason's above. You do kind of need to go though all of the GP settings yourself to work out what you can and can't do (I've had my 2k8 R2 DC's for a year and I found something 2 weeks ago that I didn't realise was there and probably was in 2003!). My personal feeling are that why should you pay for something you can do with windows. Our Prep school is currently looking at what I do with a possible view to getting rid of Ranger.

Cheers for that it seems to have worked. Now to change the shutdown scripts!

I recently revamped my power saving policies in order to reduce the power consumption of the school. I've now got my Win7 machines to go to sleep if they are not used for 120 minutes. The problem is that then they are not on when the shutdown commands are issued. Any suggestions how to get round this? I didn't really want to WOL all the machines to then switch them off, seems like a waste if they are already off....

We have Skype as a facility for students to chat to family (boarding school). The PC's with it on are those in the tutor's room in each house so are only accessable when there is a member of staff on duty to supervise (i.e. no getting up at 1 in the moring for a cheeky "webcam" session with their "friends"). We have also had a big push on internet safety recently trying to teach the pupils what effects there actions online have.

Better to ask for forgiveness than permission ; Thanks for the responses. I thought it might be the case but sOmerimes it's nice to have some reassurance.

Simple question, but I ask because one of our staff members has raises a couple of complaints because occasionally he wants to print out the staff bills and I have the following restrictions for staff: No documents over 40 pages. No more than 6 copies of any document No repeat printing within 10 seconds. I know in this specific case he could print half, wait 10 seconds then print the rest however I was wondering what other people's opinions towards restricting staff are. My personal opinions is that staff should be restricted. People will look for the easiest way out of a problem and a lot of the time that is not the most cost effective and that us what we should be encouraging. However the restrictions should be such tha if people are using common sense and doing what they should be doing then they don't really restrict. For me the big one is stopping people printing lots of the same thing on their ink jet printers and use photocopiers!

Had the same issue with my SmoothWall proxy. Needed to add some addresses into my "do not auth" list.

I'm reasonably confident it won't as part of the normal client update. Possibly if I was installing from scratch...

I'm just looking for .net 4 in WSUS so that I can deploy it for the next version of SIMS (I know it's not required for the next relaese but is for Autumn). Looking it WSUS I can't specifically find it. I can find it for the servers and I can find the "client profile" packaged but not a full version. Do I just need the Client profile pack and will SIMS be fine with that?

I agree with most of the comments aboeve however I will say I went with another vendor for my E-mail filter. I had a few issues with the smoothwall and found another product to be more user-friendly. Or at least less work for me

We've kind of looked at that. The thing is that we are OK with adding a qualification in general however it's adding the information in to EO to be able to manually add the qualification that confuses us (exam board, qualification etc). Having ths same issue with some of the BTEC courses.

I though that there was a manual entry in EO but wasn't sure. I'd prefer to do that as it keeps all the exams together. It also seems more "official" for the qualifications. I don't think the "achievement" idea is a bad one but I was wondering what others did to for a basis for our decisions.

The reason they need to be recored is so that I can finally put the nail in the coffin of the rubbish index cards that some people feel are necessary that contain each pupils contact details and all their exam results/qualifications.

So the music grade qualifications that pupils sit (Grade 4 Piano etc) are not run through Exams Organiser so don't really "appear" in SIMS. So I was wondering what your School did about them (apparently there is a similar issues with some of the BTEC exams but I'm not 100% on this). I talked to one school that simply records them as Achievements. This seems like a good idea (at least for the music grades) but I was wondering what other school's did.

No I only bought it for three years. Rubbish! Any other suggestion on audit software?

Yep. There are some entries in there and they do match up. It's just that there are some missing and some random ones that keep appearing.