TheCrust

Nottingham High School are looking for an IT Technician to support the IT Services team in providing outstanding computer and telephony customer services to students and staff. Applicants should have experience of providing first line support to customers, working with different versions of Microsoft Office and Windows and the development and use of the Office 365 suite. Candidates will need excellent organisational and communication skills. For more information: Vacancies | Nottingham High School

Thanks @noelmm and @chrispounds - your input is much appreciated. As Kerry said: if enough technical staff and examiners complained to the exam boards, sooner or later they have to start getting the message, surely....?!

Hello folks! A little late to this thread, but we too are having difficulty with this CMI Plus e-marker software. We've realised it's a bag of [rubbish] but are inevitably caught up in the middle between those exam markers who want to use it and the exam boards. So far, we've not got it to work on any of our school devices, local admin or not, compatibility settings or not, filtered internet connection or not. The only success we've had is the one laptop that came in from outside. Instead of using our filtered BYOD network, we put it on the main network as a completely unfiltered "pass through" device - and it worked. The examiners are saying that nobody else in their teams have reported any difficulties, but this clearly cannot be the case if there are staff in other schools trying to use school devices or their own devices on school BYOD networks in the first instance and their experiences are as you've seen yourselves. It is frustrating! @noelmm Are you able to share those contact details you have for AQA? Jim

Hi everyone, We are looking to replace our Siemens phone system that is getting very long in the tooth. We've had proposals for varied solutions from Mitel to Panasonic - and a couple of responses suggested Ericsson-LG's iPECS solution. We had a demonstration of the iPECS setup yesterday and I'm wondering if anyone in Edugeek-land is using an iPECS system? If you are, could I ask for your feedback about what specific features you use and how you find it? Thanks in advance! Jim

We hadn't got around to building a service plan when 1607 was first released to SCCM - and found SCCM decided it was one of those updates we had allowed SCCM to auto-approve and deploy so had it not been for a swift bit of "remove this from the update package" intervention, we would have had the whole school trying to update itself to 1607. Service plan created, but now won't deploy to our test machines. I have done something wrong... somewhere!

Pete, Which version of 10 are you using? I'm guessing Education v1511 at the moment, or did you leap straight in to 1607? We're testing 1607 here in preperation for moving to it from 1511 later this year and, while we had some issues with login speeds and start / desktop redirections with 1511, they do not appear to be in any way improved under 1607 like we had hoped they would be Cheers Jim

Hmm. I think we could be seeing the results of some behind-the-scenes fiddling somewhere. While I don't deny there are loads of benefits to cloud computing, this is one of the downsides: you're at their mercy if the provider does something that either alters your service availability, or how that service presents itself to your users (who don't necessarily understand when things are no longer in your control, having understood for years that you were the keeper of all things with a plug on the end) That said, it may even be a Windows or Office update to blame. Let's be honest, past history wouldn't rule it out either How do you deploy your updates? Our SCCM server shoves them down as part of the initial OS deployment task sequence, and then maintains the machines up-to-date after that point so in order to test the theory an update may be to blame by building a completely update-free machine, I have to do a bit of fiddling of my own. I'll have a crack at this as soon as I'm able and report back, but are you able to test this yourself in the meantime?

Out of interest, what is your client OS? We are deploying Windows 10 Education v1511 site-wide along with Office 2016 via a SCCM OSD task sequence. We're working through our departments and batching each group of staff up into O365 as we update their devices - so they migrate to O365 at the same time their device is updated. For the bulk of the rollout we have done this term, it has gone swimmingly: we could link O365 accounts to Windows accounts via the "Add a Work or School account" option in the Settings app, sync OneDrives via the OneDrive for Business client included in Office 2016, and sign our users in to Office apps and get the 'Sites - School name' and 'OneDrive - School name' in the open/save dialogues. Except in the last fortnight, we have started to experience problems: sometimes the 'add a work or school account' option either isn't present or that part of the Settings app doesn't work, but mostly we get a OneDrive for Business client that refuses to talk to the user's OneDrive (despite it having been "touched" via the browser first), and the 'OneDrive - School name' option is missing in the office apps. This doesn't happen all the time, and the bulk of our users are fine, but your experience is sounding a bit familiar to me!

Thanks again for the comments and feedback - it is much appreciated. My next question is who has NRS in the East Midlands that wouldn't mind accomodating a visit for us to see it in action? We would happily travel further if needed - thanks to @rad for the invite - but for the moment if anyone is local to the East Midlands, that would save me losing a day to commute out with the Catering Manager, take a look, and get back again.

Thanks folks. We're currently EMOS/Infineer. While it works, we are finding the system is getting long in the tooth and the catering team feel it is starting to become unreliable so it is time to look at replacing it as a whole. We may stay EMOS, we may not - at the moment it comes down to potential systems meeting functional requirements, and cost. In addition to the physical bits, at the same time we are looking to tie in to online payments (so ParentPay, Wisepay or the like) so we can largely do away with the physical revaluers we have around the place. Currently we have a mixed bag for authentication: fingerprint verification for year 7 and upwards, contactless card for year 6 and below. This means whatever we do, we will probably be looking at a near complete re-registration of students and staff on-site if we move to an alternative system because I believe our EMOS system doesn't use Biostore. Yes. That will be entertaining. Fun times ahead! Thanks again

Nottingham High School are looking to recruit an IT Technician to support the IT Services team in providing outstanding computer and telephony customer services to pupils and staff. 37.5 hours per week 52 week / full time contract Salary £17,921 - £19,211 (dependent upon experience) City centre location, Nottingham. Nottingham High School vacancies page

Hi everyone. Our kitchen team are looking to go out to tender to replace our current cashless catering system and given the online, networked and integrated nature of a lot of catering systems, they have involved us in IT. Given it's a bit of a new thing for us - buying catering systems is not your average everyday occurrance for a school's IT team - we are looking for a bit of crowd-sourced opinion to help guide our initial investigation of suppliers. We have a small list of people that should be worth a look - such as Cunninghams or Nationwide - but would be interested in hearing some wider views on what is in use in case we've missed any other obvious players. Would techs in schools with more than 1300 students (so at least a similar size to us) mind sharing which catering systems they use and perhaps give a bit of general feedback as to how their school's catering teams have got on with that particular system? Thanks in advance! Jim

Yes Rob We had them exclusively at my last place so I know their build quality. I had one of the older 30-bay ambassador cabinets run up the back of my foot while towing it down a corridor once. That hurt. I can tell you, I felt every pound we'd spent buying it smashing into my achillies tendon!

Thanks for the thoughts. It was the Lapsafe Diplomats I was thinking about to be honest - but I do appreciate the risks of goodness-knows-what cheaply-made non-CE tat the students may think is OK to buy from eBay and plug in to a mains-powered charging socket. Cheers again!

Hi everyone. As we are intending to make more use of our BYOD facilities, I am looking at providing secure storage and charging facilities for our students. While I accept that with BYOD, the responsibility for ensuring a device is properly charged rests with the user, we all know as technologists that batteries have a nasty habit of not lasting as long as we'd hope they might. And we also know as support staff that students do not always think the day through until the last possible minute. Does anyone else here have charging bays / stations / areas for student use in their school, and would like to share the rough percentage of charging bays to students? At the moment I am thinking about 15% coverage - but this is a purely arbitrary figure and given the cost of them, some crowd-sourced info from other schools already doing this would be helpful! Thanks in advance!

Old place was Simpsons characters with Springfield as the domain as @korifugi said. Names like "Sideshowbob" and "Sideshowmel" for our VMWare hosts, and "Krusty" was the VMWare vCentre server monitoring them while "Krabappel" did the online examinations... we had a little fun and at the same time kept (some of) the names relevant (ish). My new place has servers named after Tolkien characters and locations. It's bad enough not being completely sure what they do at the moment being the new guy, but spelling them is a whole different challenge altogether having never read any Tolkien. Osgiliath? Rhovan-what-now...? Minas...where? I've always worked on the basis that naming is relatively arbitrary - as long as you have appropriate documentation and try to avoid abusing netbios character limits, it shouldn't matter how your servers are named - but I think that being deliberately obscure can sometimes be a good thing depending on the environment. Most users could probably take a reaonable guess what ABC-FileSrv-001 and ABC-MailSrv-001 do, but how about "Bart", "Lister" or "Mordor"?

I haven't, I'll be honest - we were using a legacy VBScript proceedure. Hadn't touched it for years as it "just worked" but I'll build a test script featuring that cmdlet when I get a moment and see what happens. I get the impression the Windows 8.1 printing model is a bit flakey at times anyway. Sometimes when adding a printer manually, even one listed in the directory, it doesn't appear under Devices and Printers until the machine in question is restarted. Same goes for making a print device the default printer - changes just aren't always reflected in the window as instantly as you might have expected under, say, Windows 7.

@mattpant Apologies for the delay. I think it was the lack of inclusion of either a "Programs" or "Startup" folder, I can't remember which as it's been a while, but here is a brief outline of our redirected start screen folder structure.

52-week permanent contract, closes 7th April https://www.hirewire.co.uk/TheLongEatonSchool/NG103NP/MS_JobDetails.aspx?JobId=59363

I followed the advice given in this thread - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/139452-app-inventor-2-without-compromising-security-i-think.html - the way we do it essentially leaves students with a shortcut to start the emulator themselves, but that's fine. We tell them to log in to AppInventor, start the emulator, then try to connect. It works a treat for us.

This is ringing a bell with me, but it's been a long day and I can't remember exactly why. There are two possibilities floating around in the back of my mind: 1) This could be something to do with the 100Mb "system" partition Windows likes to create itself when you let it do its own thing as part of setup. I know we had problems with that very early on in our Windows 7 deployment but can't remember what as it's years back - now we force Windows (even 8.1) to install into a single partition when we build master images prior to sysprep/recapture. 2) Are you using the correct SCCM capture process? We used to use the WDS capture boot image after sysprepping our images for redeployment as the thought was it would give us more control over the process but I know we had issues with that too, something about it not generalising an image built using a SCCM 2012 task sequence correctly. We now run the inbuilt SCCM capture image task sequence, using the SCCM capture boot image, and that works fine for us. I can't remember if the issues we had deploying images we'd built ourselves were as a result of one or the other (or both, or neither!) of the points above, but we haven't seen that sort of problem for a long time since so I hope my ramblings prove some help!

Not to hand, but I'll dig one out for you if I remember when I'm back in the office. May need a prod to remind me. Our WLAN was WPA2 PSK, but somehow had been set up to use TKIP encryption which is apparently not a supported setup under Windows 8.1 (despite having been fine under 7 previously). Changing it to AES sorted that and made the world of difference for us.

Did you get any further with your problem @mattpant ? We have the same problem with our Windows 8.1 clients: inconsistent deployments. We map printers as part of our login script process. This vbs script worked faultlessly for our Windows 7 clients, but since we moved to 8.1 I've noticed it is not as reliable. A suite of 30 computers may see half of them map fine with no issues and the rest are a little wayward either partially mapping (we have two queues, one colour, one mono) or not at all.

I found our problems were caused by a combination of factors. The first was the mandatory roaming profile for our students was messed up - it wouldn't allow the GP-assigned backdrop to be displayed for instance, so something wasn't quite right with it but I never bothered to find out exactly what as regenerating it from scratch as a test was quick and as it sorted that particular issue out, I ran with the fix and moved on. This alone helped speed up logon times on wired machines. I then discovered that our Desktop / Start Menu / Start Screen layout redirections weren't applying properly which caused a slight delay - if I remember it correctly, I nailed it down to the Start Menu structure not being quite right. I think Windows 8.1 is less forgiving than previous versions of Windows appeared to be to this and tweaking the folder structure sorted that problem. Finally we discovered our wireless network wasn't set up as optimally as it could have been. While it worked fine under moderately light use, it clogged up quickly as the load went up. Tweaking the WLAN and adjusting the corresponding settings on the laptops via a SCCM-deployed script sorted that final piece of the jigsaw out and logon times on laptops were significantly reduced. Been fine ever since. Hope that helps!

Cheers - I had checked companies house, but not having used 1&1 hadn't realised their website could well be based on a template.