Stuart_C

I have just set up a trust between the two domains we have here however I would like to stop the computes on our accademic network having the opportunity to log into our admin domain. As windows has already addedd the domains to the "Log in to" drop down dialogue box on the log in screen is there a way to stop it?

Thought I'd add the day generally goes quite well and the pupils enjoy it. I just wish it wasn't such a pain to set up evey year.

The news that is outputted is always the same articles in the same order, this technically stops you having to generate "random" news. Some of the stories are single articles. There also seem to me a number of stories that are drip fed to the students and everything in intermingled. A couple of the stories are cut down versions of the major stories (hijack/Space) It outputs a news items about every 2-3 minutes for the 2 hr period (yes I know that's a lot of articles).

OK as I seem to have created a monster I thought I'd give you a run down of how we use the software. This project of for our year 10's. The whols year (about 100 pupils) is taken out of lessons for a morning for this project. Setup: We use 4 classrooms, the main computer suite and our two computer clusters (37 computers in all + 5 in the rooms). Pupils are free to use their laptops if they wish. I setup 1 computer in three of the rooms with the "random news" generation software. The 4th room has two computers running the interactive story simulations. The availiable suite computers are divide up and given a group number. Thus each group is allocated a specific number of comptuers (normall less that the group size, which is deliberate). The year is then split into groups. A small core of the brighter students are assigned to the two major stories (8 students total, 4 each story). The rest are broken down into groups of about 10 to form news teams (the staff decide who is in which groups, in the real world you can't choos your workmates! ). Students have to decide amongst them selve who are the editors, reporters etc etc. The exercise. The brighter students then have to interact with the major stories. They make descisions in a "choose your own adventure" style to determine how the story plays out (for better of for worse!). Their most important job is to produce press statements based on the news they are given and then conduct press statements including fielding questiuons form the "reporters", i.e. the other students. The rest of the students task is to produce the the two newspapers (broad sheet and tabloid). They must pick up the random news from the computer in their classroom, attend press conferences and generally produce a newspaper. The challanges lie in that 1: They need to be organised, get to press conferences on time (conferences don't wait for late reporters) and make sure they get all the information they need. 2: The flow of news is gradual and often contradictory, the software tries to simulate news stories in the real world, i.e. "there is a report of an earthquate in x" then "Early reports say 500 people are dead" then "Earthequake actually in y and 1000 people are dead" and so on. Also some stories are not appropiate for a boradsheet but they are for a tabloid. Pupils must decide what it relevant. 3: There are deliberately less computers allocated to a group than there are members meaning that they can't all sit down and work together. 4: There is always some (teacher introduced) late breaking news update that throws everyone's nicely prepared paper's into chaos with about 5 minutes to go. 5: The deadline is the deadline if you paper isn't submitted at the end of the exercise then it's tough luck, the real world is a harsh place. Timescale The day starts at 9, there is approximately 30 minutes briefing (timescale, putting people into groups, where you are working, expectations, working out who does what role.). The day then runs through with a deadline around 3 hours later (with 10 minutes or so afterwards for cleanup!!!). Each major story has 5 press conferences scheduled throughout the day. Each paper must have a minimum of 5 stories. I'm just running the random news software now to give me an idea how long it lasts and the stories it produces. I'll also try and give you an idea of the main story simulations. I'll update you later. News.pdf

Well it' output's the same news stories in the same sequence every time so it's nt that advanced! As the program plus addins is 4Mb I could probably zip it up and send it to you. Having said that perhaps distributing it illigally is the way forward. Whilst no one will respond to legitimate requests I'm sure if we did something wrong the lawers would be on us ASAP which would allow me to start a dialogue. Actually I did try a DNS lookup of newstrea.co.uk and found that the wedbsite is owned by Pearson Education and was renewed last year! When I phoned them I got some random woman who so didn'thave a clue what I was on about and didn't know anyone who whould. Great help. I'll sort out some screen shots tomorrow if you are interested.

Sorry, I don't think I explained it very well. the software mearly generates a news article e.g. "Earthe quake in Chillie, 200 dead" and spews these out of the printer at random intervals. These storys the pupils take and use to put together their news paper using word/publisher in the computer suites. The interactive bits of the software work on sililar lines however the story changes slightly depending on the responses. I need a physical printer in each room used creating a physical output as there might be three groups in a room and they each need a copy of the news article to take away, read and use to crate their article. With network printers the problem is physically finding them and setting them up. With USB printers and parallel lasers when the software prints nothing appears in the print queue which is odd, the printer is there and works fine in other programs but nothing comes out.

We have a VERY old piece of software we use for a year group activity called "NEWSTREAM" (Apparently it's Copywrited Actis ltd 1997). For the activity we devide the whole year group into teams and they have to produce a broadsheet and tabloid newspaper. Newstream software has a number of different packages, the basic one just churn's out random news that the kids use for the paper. Other packages are specific major news scenarios that one group of pupils interact with this group then give press conferences to the rest of the year group which change as the day goes on simulating the flow of news. My problem is the software is old and rubbish and for reasons ebyond me only seems to work with parallel deskjet printers and network printers. The former I am running out of the latter are hard to arrange to go in classrooms. Has anyone HEARD of this software or knows of an update as so far I have been unsuccessfull in finding one.

Just in case you haven't found a solution I have spent the AGES on this. Everyone (well Domain users) needs control over the wordshark-shared folders. I would then look at 1: XP Patch and apply the MS patch and the driver update (the restart the machine). After receiving an number of complaint's E-mails about me taking over 6 weeks to fix it (2 weeks waiting for the software from the HOD, and this at the start of term when I asked for it before the summer hols as I knew it would be problematical) and it being a necessity for students, I've not heard anything in a while so I assume it's fixed.

We have it here (vsn 3). Having just bought the SEN department new computers I have spent AGES trying to get the software to run! It is not particularly one of my favourites at the minute.

I don't know... Basically I just hit delete, SIMS tells me thay they can only be made inactive, hit yes and SIMS removes the from the list of system manager users. I've not had the problem of dupliacte usernames, we use a . syntax and I've yet to have someone with the same name. This sounds a little obvious but have you tried creating a user JUST in system manager, deleting them and then craeting another one with the same username just to see what happens? If you don't create them in the main database they shouldn't interfere with anything.

Just out of curiousity is there a reason people use 3rd party tools to create users when Win2K3 server has a number of tools to create them relatively easilly for you? I understand buying tools to do things the server doesn't but to do things the server does? Personally I quite enjoyed rying to figure out how to use "dsadd" and script my user creation, now it's easy and I feel like I learnt something.

The help desk is perfectly helpfull. You just have to patiently explain that the solution they sent has only a passing resemblance to the problem you logged becuase it contains some similar words. Then ask to talk to someone who knows what they are talking about (they do exist but they lurk in the background). Back on topic we use SIMS though it's mostly used by our admin staff. We use Admissions, Nova T4, Assessment Manager for writting reports (Don't say anything that makes me cry as it is). We have never really had anyone "in charge" of the databse as a whole. We have just had a new Director of Studies and I've raised the issue of database usage. We need to stop using assessment manager for reports and start using profiles (which is hopefully in the pipeline) and we are moving to nova T6 next year. Currently we only scratch the surface of the databse with SIMS and it does things we already do. I have just started to push for more usage of SIMS. I suspect that none of our teacher know how to use the reporting engine and we don't use half the features we have (or could have). I don't know how it is with other schools but I fear we suffer from the "SIMS dosn't do exaclty what we do so it's rubbish and we won't use it" attitude. When we should look at what SIMS does do, what we do and mesh the two together.

Can you? Aw rubbish! I spend about an hour on monday using DSQUERY and DSMOD (and Excel!)to populate the E-mail address field for all our users. Though having said that your method is only easy if you have your users in a single or limited number of OU's. If there is a large number of OU's then it's probably easier to use DSQUERY to get the distinguished name of all the users then DSMOD to change them so I don't feel so bad.

Personally, MIS + Excel + Dsadd + mkdir + subinacl = all users created in 30 seconds! Love it ..OK admittedly it took me about a day initially to create the excel spreadsheet I use to take my SIMS export and create the dsadd commands but after that away you go. You also will probably need to make use of another windows command line tool called "subinacl" which allows you to modify the security on folders. For some reason I found that if you use dsadd to create the user it doesn't create the home drive and seure it the same way it does if you use the manual way of user creation.

Jus started a big clean up and tidy up. I've just deleted the old users from System manager though realistically you just make them inactive. I've also made sure all the staff who have left have left according to SIMS staff. (DONT get me started on how we actually use SIMS here I have enough of a headache at the minute) I still have to delete some staff from system manager and then create in SIMS and re-import into system manager again (No Comments! I just do OK!) I can't see why usernames would be a problem if the old user has been deactivated? But then I've never tried it?

So I got our accounts department to E-mail the bank... a few E-mails go back and forth and eventually one comes back to me about me contacting some random company... reading down the E-mail to understand the whole conversation I notice a sentence that makes me wonder if this hasn't been something of a waste of time... I feel that the problem is that I was not looking for a "Print Device" to print hte cheques when we wish to pay someone rather a "Company who prints" to actually print the stationary So yes John was correct! It looks like I may have reached the wrong conclusion when I read the origianl E-mail! Our accounts manager made the same mistake though....

OK first off let me say that I work for a boarding shcool and I am well aware that the answer the sensible answer to my question is "don't even think about" however pressing on... Does anyone allow students to connect their laptops to their network? Either Wirelessly or cabled? If so what have you done to secure it and prevent them from spending most of their time looking for adult material on the internet, spreading virus and generally being pains in the backside?

Well I was quoting the e-mail from the bank though what you have said makes a lot of sense... I have slightly given up and told our finance department to ask for a list. I'll see what comes back.

We are running 2K3 Server and XP here. Personally I don't really feel that I gain enough to warrant the cost's involved in upgrading. Whislt a lot of my machine's run OK now the cost's of the Memory I would have to buy to make some of the older machines run VISTA is huge. I've got it on my machine, because I can, but network wide I currently think the cost out weighs the benefit.

As long as the stationary isn't changing dramatically then they will likely be an A4 sheeft, the top 3/4 is largely blank and the bottom is a standard cheque with perferation to remove the cheque. The printers then puts in all the deatils when it's printed and then signed. Really I'm not sure why it "has" to be an APEX aproved printer, especially when finding out what an APEX aproved printer actually is is quite hard.

If you could that would be great. P.S. Why are you here on your day off?... At least I'm at work as an excuse!

Sorry., Our accounts manager has been sent an E-mail from our bank. We have just had a new financial package installed at the College and it looks we need to change so a different style of printed cheque. The first line of the E-mail from the bank says "Firstly you need to ensure that you are using an apex approved printer". having done a bit of research and the best I could find is this but I couldn't find anything specifically realted to printers. I don't even know if this is relevant. Now the office's all have HP laserjet 1505n's and if it's some random cnvention then I'm guessing HP are likely to conform to it, either deliberately or accidently. However I just wanted to be sure as we are talking about issues with our financial system here.

They also seem to have left track changes on... Would appear they used to have SIMS but have moved to CMIS. Perhaps the job description should include "Must know procedures for putting documents a website" or something to that effect.

Didn't he mention some training days and other bits and pieces, that will push the price up. I think our bill is about 6K though that was last year and we have now dropped FMS/Fees and the old MENTOR products. Does anyone else actually use the LANDesk thing? Does anyone know what I'm talking about? ) We seem to be paying for it included in the "support" but appart from them remotely accessing my server occasionally, going "oh yes you do have a roust backup strategy and your server is upto date" that's about it and I feel we are wasting the opportunity of getting something out of Capita.