minimoo

For entertainment value: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ps95_fee_for_cctv_subject_access

Quick question - when people are syncing to office 365 / google apps class groups e.g. 11a_Geo - do you always use that naming ? and at end of year just delete those groups - or is anyone using a naming system that keeps the groups over >1 year for historical reasons?

Whilst i've never used replication etc, one benefit of having DFS setup - if it's setup at the domain level is users paths/shortcuts etc in theory all continue to work after file server is changed. i.e. if user's user area is mapped to \\domain\users\staff\fred - and \\domain\users\staff points to \\fileserver1\staff$ for instance. Any documents/macros or weird stuff like that store a file path continue to work as you would update the mapping to fileserver2.

Having worked in the same school since first implementing AD+Windows XP - to moving to windows 10 + APPV etc, assuming that the school puts some money into Hardware i.e. you aren't dealing with the same things falling apart every 10 minutes and unable to replace. I'd say the amount of 'requests' from staff has decreased - we used to get requests to install software for instance, or generate barcodes for textbooks to be issued to students. Now - it tends to be some online system being used instead. Equally, Windows itself is now pretty stable, so if you've automated updates/installs in some way, once a PC goes out, it generally doesn't need to be touched. I know our support/ticket system gets a lot fewer requests from teachers than it used to - but I don't know how much of that is they come and talk directly to us, or email instead. However as Alan says - there are jobs like 'documenting things' (or even replacing/upgrading things from one working system to another) which drag on and on as there's always something else to do. And some of those tasks are actually critical even if no one actually sees them. We've got separate door / printing / google / microsoft systems that we try to link up with same username - ok it's automated (and ok capita do sell something similar), but at start of year there's still a number of things that catch you out or need to be generated manually - and they can basically knock out half a day of time.

Solus 3 is typically going to be used to deploy 4 things: a) Solus itself (Solus agent + UI Console + Database + Solus Service) b) Discover Database + Discover Client c) FMS Database + FMS Clients d) Sms Database + Patches + Client For Solus(a) - sims typically do a release and it's very rare to see anything apart from a full release. When deploying a solus update, I tend to kick it off, then close the GUI on the server (and if i need to see how it's going check the text log files). A solus update will generally update the database, followed by console/server and then the agents. There's probably about 2 updates to this a year now. My approach is generally to kick this off to install 'whenever'. b/c/d tend to have a main release at the same time 3 times a year. The full releases should be applied for the modules at the same time really, once previous census is definitely done, as each sims release is designed for a specific term's census. It's very rare to have an update for Discover(b) apart from the time of the full release. For FMS, again, it's generally quite rare to see an FMS database patch arrive - although there's been some recently. For SIM's, Capita do seem to be pushing out database patches at a regular rate. My personal feedback to Capita on that is it's not particularly clear for us or useful - and I can't see how it can make life easy for them - as different customers are running with different combinations of patches! I've set Solus3 to email me when a new patch arrives - so for database patches, the emails I get show the patch name - we tend to receive: a) revisions of old patches (you can tell these from the name - i.e. 3.7.575-3.7.661, where we've got some previous database version. My assumption with these is that they are likely and old patch being revised, so I never apply them. b) new patches where it only shows the latest database version, or a description. For these I've been taking the approach of if Capita have deemed it important enough to send a patch to all customers, given they have the ability to limit and time the distribution of patches, that they deem it important enough for all customers to install - therefore I will deploy the patch at some point. If Capita's description of the patch contains "only applies to schools in Northern Island", like we had this week - I will generally ignore the patch and not apply it. As the database patch does not affect the client computers around the school, and will kick people off the server (database needs to switch to 'single-user' mode to perform a backup as part of applying the patch), I tend to apply these at the end of the school day. For workstation patches - the situation gets trickier - as they do mean all end users get the update. These tend to be pretty rare - happening more in the against the Summer release (where sims find they need to do something for results day... like this year!). The observation I've made, and why I say it gets trickier - is these updates tend to be where Capita have been more likely to break something in the update process -> for instance, they release workstation patch 1 then withdraw it. In the past you could get into a state where you couldn't update/install sims anymore. For that reason, I would probably be inclined to suggest that if you do choose to install "Patch 1" and then a "Patch 2" arises, it would probably be sensible to update to Patch 2 regardless of whether you specifically need it or not. Equally, if you don't need the workstation patch, I'd inclined to say you have a choice between ignoring them until one arrives that you do - or updating to it so you are always on the 'latest build'

Equally, we start with KS4/5 - but then our model has always been that ks4/5 is semi-fixed - KS3 fits in around that - however, the structure of the school and staffing has meant (up until now) that we aren't doing split staffing at KS3 - and it's subject specialists teaching the KS3 subjects. Current Funding situation is starting to put pressure on that however. @Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun "KS3 to the end was largely abandoned" - really? I mean, that report came out in September 2015 - so 2016-17 academic year we have just finished would have been the first year school' could have implemented any changes based on the report. I struggle to imagine that most secondary schools in the country have changed how they organise their timetabling in a year; it seemed to take us 3 months to decide whether to move what period and day assembly was on. So I'd love to see some evidence to support that comment

I assume that's creating it for September 2018 - and not 3 weeks time ?

in terms of the GUID - isn't that 128 bits? if a system using an integer id 2^32 - it's not going to work ? I know for instance in our particular case, we have a catering and library system that both require an integer (historically admission number was used) - in modern times the catering system is cashless... so requirement to add people before september. I could work out a way to potentially change to some other ID system - but it would need to be a standard integer - and I dont think a GUID maps to that We are lucky here on two sides - a) our LA doesn't get involved so no syncing issues b) we have >2000 applications for 200 places effectively so it's quite unusual to have students leave or join either mid year or between years.

Phil - thanks - that kind of confirms my point - the only field guaranteed to stay the same (and be numeric only) is the admission number at the moment - upn/uci etc have other strings attached. @CAM - remember there's a difference to "admitting" a student early on the 11th July with an admission date of 7th September - to admitting them 'today'. In the first case, it's marking them as admitted - which effectively gives them an admission number in sims that can't be reused (as it's a sequence) but as the date of admission is september, they don't appear until then..

Also - might be worth making sure you are on the summer release before importing CTF's (I know you mentioned the ATF) - but the release notes state (albeit under the AMPARK section): "The Country of Birth tag is now imported correctly in a pre-admission group CTF (via Routines | Data In | CTF | Import CTF)."

You can always set the date back both when searching for marksheets, or viewing data/grades in them. I'd probably be inclined to wait until after any performance manager days happen before pruning though - as it avoids the "i'm trying to find out the MTG's for my gcse group last year to compare to their results" sort of questions. I'd do a search for all marksheets and see how many come up (And how long that takes) and then decide if it's worth cutting back - you might find there are some old exams organiser marksheets around that can be removed for instance - and equally really old ones - but keeping last years one's is likely to avoid you having to do any work when queries come up mid year - after all, most GCSE/A2 courses are 2 years.

Edubase will show a school capacity field for schools (including free schools) e.g. for a random free school - EduBase - Alban City School - it's 450. I'm *assuming* that the capacity field here is supposed to be the PAN number

@PhilNeal - can we have a unique ID field that schools can use for internal systems/share in sims 8 ? we mark students as admitted (with a start date of 4th sepember) to get internal admission number - as the admission number was the only ID we could use that was unique - then delete students who never turned up. This does mean that there could be 'gaps' in the numbers issued - but as someone pointed out - the format of the admission number i believe is defined to be school specific - and the regulations seem to (mainly) only refer to the PAN (published admission numbers). The obvious question would be is there a within SIMS that we could(should) be using instead if a school requires something unique to link to? (i've never liked 'admitting' students to get a number and then deleting them, leaving gaps - but i've never found guidance that says says we can't do that) The requirements for the "admissions register" that Phil referenced are at The Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006 - note: I can't see a requirement for a number to exist at first glance. In terms of ID's in sims, unless there is something i'm not aware of: person_id (on sims database tables - accessible by 3rd party reporting kit reports) - Sims state this ID should not be used as it's not guaranteed to change (referenced as the internal ID @ Become a partner | Capita SIMS ) external GUID - assuming this is the 32bit string - not the most useful field for some applications that want a number upn - upn guidance basically says not to share/use ULN - from 14 year old only UCI - I believe can't be generated until students have done some exams? Exam organiser's exam number - IIRC - limit on number that can be generated so likely to be re-used at some point. admission number - unique number, no regulation on how it can be used AFAIK, only generated by sims when student is admitted. School's can define format.

@Paul_Featherstone Hi Paul - we've just done the Summer release, and have macro's not running again. I've just logged a case with support - is the macro's thing an issue again in the new release?

What's the rationale for now having a single network/setup?

So most of the data is on a separate network managed by a company ? - hence the low space usage? (Do students also have access to that?) I'm assuming that students may also have access to office365/google docs in some form - so that's worth bearing in mind in terms of space. We've used dell servers for years, and recently bought one of their compellent SAN's + 2 vmware boxes in front. As others have said - having DC + other roles on same box isn't great. In terms of RAID5 - I think you might find dell recommend running RAID6 over that these days - i.e. if you are thinking of running 3 disk raid 5 + hot spare, make that a 4 disk raid 6 setup. The "problem" with raid5+hotspares is if a disk drives, you kick off a rebuilt onto the hotspare, and during the raid build the raid controller drops another disk... see One thing to remember - whilst you might like a DC under warranty.. once student/staff data is off - i'd be inclined to keep an extra dc running - i.e. you could run wsus on the existing out-of-warranty dc01 (maybe with a rebuild to a newer verison of windows if the hardware supports it)

also maybe - https://www.404techsupport.com/2016/03/21/iis-wsus-private-memory/

We have a self-employed electrician that does all the electrics. Over summer we had him run in cat5 leads (Whilst wiring electrics next to the new sockets), drill holes in wall etc - and left us with the 100 ends to terminate. That is a rather lucky setup though to have. In terms of fibre - our experience of that was the reverse - we tried running pre-terminated fibre over a few hundred metres - it got caught on part of the run - ended up having a company out to run it without the end on..

I think there's three aspects here - a) initial design/construction b) 'major mid year reworks' i.e. redesign c) minor tweaks that arise throughout the year For C, I think cloud will have benefits ( swapping rooms/teachers etc). For A - I do wonder how easy that will be to do in the cloud. We've got a rather complex timetable when I've compared our NT6 file with other schools (more than happy to share nt6 files if you want to compare!). NT6 struggles and that's - we tend to leave it over night trying to jam periods on - I've found if we've got 20 periods not fitting and I run it over a weekend spending 2-3 hours of time on each period, that it'll get 5 things on. Now the cloud can speed that up arguably - can spin up 20 vm's on azure and have one spending 3 hours on a problem - but that's going to get rather expensive quickly! If I look at the speed of development over the last 15 years - I can't imagine us being able to move over to a cloud based timetabling module for 3-4 years! B's then tricky if you need to go back to the initial design having tweaked stuff - we've had teachers leave mid year several times over the last few years, and had to do a major rework in one instance.

Will do! Although I must say - does that mean schools are forced to use sims-id? At the moment for instance, we have AD/O365/GoogleApps/Class groups in exchange etc all linked up and automatically provisioned, running ADFS for federation etc across multiple applications (I also believe that @TheScarfedOne on here from salamandersoft sell software to automatically provision also) - presumably there will be an option to use a 3rd party OAuth provider, as from what I can tell at the moment SIMS-ID is a chargable product ? @PhilNeal - I'm quite concerned about hamsters welfare today - can you feed the hamsters powering my account today please? [Hitting https://myaccount.capita-cs.co.uk/search/all?q=sims-id i.e. a search for 'sims-id' to find documentation took 1.9minutes on the first attempt, 2.0 minutes on the second attempt. Pulling up hot-topics is taking 800ms so that's fine!].

@PhilNeal here's a question on the options module - I believe we are planning on starting students on a 4 A-Level program in September, and asking them to decide (in/by January) what 3 subjects that will do to A2 and what 1 subject they will do to AS - I'm guessing this isn't something the options module would be able to help with (as it would need to be able to take an import / start off knowing what students are currently studying?). If it can help with that, we'd look at using it live in December/January. I don't know if this idea of an A-Level program is unique to us though - as school's are handling the AS/A2 changes in a number of different ways. And on that note... how does authentication for students work? ;/

*wonders when a (usable) demo of the primary school version will be available*

If you do decide to do this and run stuff as scheduled tasks - you need to be careful what you call the system account when updating/editing - see: https://maddog2050.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/gpo-issue-deploying-a-scheduled-task-running-as-system/

Note: This is modified code of some scripts that are already on the internet - was just trying to find original source, but could only find https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/26888678/Profile-Fragments-after-Removal-Windows-7.html and https://github.com/Fuzzwah/powershell-scripts/blob/master/Get-PCsUserProfileInfo.ps1 I think I trimmed down to only work on localhost (as I run it as a group policy preference scheduled task (as local system)) over lunch 1) get profiles on local pc 2) skip loaded profiles or special profiles 3) grab the account SID details and try and work out if the account has been used in last 90 days [i think I added this later to tidy up 'staff profiles as I skip them 4) we had accounts for controlled assignements with 1516 / 1617 in the name - so always skipped deleting them in case a student saved work locally by mistake 5) 7 days grace for students before profile deletion 6) all our student accounts have year they joined in name - so only delete if it contains '0' or '1' Looking at script I should really tidy it up and make it more generic - but you get the idea. I was originally running this as a startup/shutdown before moving it to a scheduled task - we found that startup/shutdown script just delayed things! function Remove-Profiles { process { $ErrorActionPreference = "SilentlyContinue" # Get the userprofile list and then filter out the built-in accounts $profiles = Get-WmiObject win32_userprofile -computer localhost | ?{$_.SID -like "s-1-5-21*"} if ($?) { foreach ($profile in $profiles) { if( $profile.Loaded -eq "True" ) { Write-Host ("Skipping User Profile (as it is loaded) for "+ $profile.path); continue; } if( $profile.Loaded -eq "Special" ) { Write-Host ("Skipping User Profile (as it is special) for "+ $profile.path); continue; } $user = $null $objUser = $null #Create output objects $Output = New-Object PSObject # create a new secuity identifier object $ObjSID = New-Object System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier($profile.SID) # Try to link the user SID to an actual user object (can fail for local accounts on remote machines, # or the user no long exists but the profile still remains) Try { $objUser = $objSID.Translate([system.Security.Principal.NTAccount]) } catch { $user = "ERROR: Not Readable" $MaxAge = (Get-Date).AddDays(-90) $lastused = (([WMI]'').ConvertToDateTime($profile.LastUseTime)).ToString("u") if([DateTime]::Parse($lastused) -gt $MaxAge){ Write-Host ("Skipping Unreadable User profile (recently used) for "+ $profile.path); continue; } $success = $true try { $profile.Delete() } catch { $success=$false } if($success) { Write-Host ("Deleted Profile SID:" +$profile.SID +"for" +$profile.path) } else { Write-Warning ("Unable to Delete or Fully Delete Profile (possibly logged in, or file in use) with SID: " + $profile.SID) } continue; } if ($objUser.Value) { $user = $objUser.Value } $success = $true if ( $user.Like("*1516*") -or $user.Like("*1617*") ) { Write-Host ("Skipping Possible CA Account: "+ $user); continue; } $MaxAge = (Get-Date).AddDays(-7) $lastused = (([WMI]'').ConvertToDateTime($profile.LastUseTime)).ToString("u") if([DateTime]::Parse($lastused) -gt $MaxAge){ Write-Host ("Skipping Recent profile for "+ $user); continue; } # note, this wont skip controlled assignment logons if ( $user -like 'DOMAIN\*0*' -or $user -like 'DOMAIN\*1*' -or $user.ToLower() -eq "domain\demo" " ) { # Write-Host ("Attempting to delete profile for SID: " + $profile.SID) # The delete process can take some time per profile, timeout is also very high, be patient. try { $profile.Delete() } catch { $success=$false } if($success) { Write-Host ("Deleted Profile SID:" +$profile.SID +" for " +$user) } else { Write-Warning ("Unable to Delete or Fully Delete Profile (possibly logged in, or file in use) with SID: " + $profile.SID) } } else { Write-Host ("Skipping User Profile for " +$user+ " SID: "+ $profile.SID) } } } else { Write-Warning "Unable to communicate with - $computer"; } } } Remove-Profiles

I'm pretty sure Phil has already said about people being able to see/use options/exams later this year. Talking about options... we currently have an in-house web form, which I then type up - the ability to do this within sims will therefore be good - that's 3 forms i no longer need to maintain. In the past our only option would have been to use learning gateway I believe, but that would have been $$$'s to setup. I'm not familiar with rules around tender processes, but if it's a modular system that is gradually introduced (to secondaries), i'd class that more as an upgrade - as it is now, schools have added/removed modules over time. The "problem" that arguably exists with that concept is at some point database needs to move from being local to the cloud - and at that point, that is a major change. I can only assume that options/exams will somehow be based around their "service manager" concept - and given that we are probably at the start of a 5 year process - I'm not quite sure at what point you'd do a tender process in that context? (after the last module is developed in 5 years from now?) Cost will be the most interesting factor - historically over the years when Capita have increased the bill by 10-15% in a year, and we've contacted them and asked why - "development costs" have been the cited answer. That answer surely can't work in the current climate for schools - if anything, we need to see a cost reduction! I'd like to think that the plan is not to increase costs for schools - and maybe to try and reduce them down the line. Quite how you achieve that and keep shareholds happy - sounds like a big headache