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We have had a couple of occasions where staff have claimed that some of their email in Exchange Online have gone missing without them having done anything. In one case I found the email in the Recoverable Items area so they had been deleted and then purged from Deleted Items (in less than 24 hours). In the other case we don't know when the folder (containing a number of important emails) was disappeared and so far I've not been able to find anything, so it looks like it was quite some time ago and it has now been purged. I know Outlook and OWA all ask for confirmation when permanently deleting items. The question is has anyone discovered any third party mail clients which will allow emails to be deleted permanently (straight to Recoverable Items) or come across any reason why emails and folders can 'vanish without doing anything'? Thanks

Have you looked at this document, it contains a troubleshooting guide for this. http://h20565.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c02520788

I've heard on This Week in Enterprise Tech (Twit TV) that the best long term storage option is actually DVD or BluRay. A quick Google seems to agree: Long term data storage. What is most reliable. Question inside.? - Data Storage - Storage The biggest issue will be the readers for what ever storage technology going obsolete and making it impossible to read back even if the media is good. Someone suggested putting it in to several of the major players online storage, Amazon Glacier, Google Drive, OneDrive for Business, etc. The idea being that at least one of them will still be with us and that they will at least make sure the data held within them is still available. Further to that is that the actual format of the data goes obsolete and there is no software to actually understand it. At first thought I would suggest that if this is true then we would need to leave the data in our current MIS systems and hope we can afford the live storage to cope with it. That way it would always remain on a suitable storage media and also remain in a usable format. It would also help if the likes of Capita would build a system that could handle some form of offline or split storage so that the archive data could be put on something very slow and cheap.

Sorry about the delay in getting back to this, unfortunately this was not the solution, as it was only happening to one particular model of laptop that was sharing a common image. In the end we have reimaged the offending machines (with the same image) and this time SOLUS installed SIMS to the right place. Capita suggested we look at the Windows 7 Virtual Store to see if that could be the cause as they had seen problems with sims.ini before, but by then we had done the reimaging (it took them 2 days to get back to us so we gave up)

We have several 64 bit Windows 7 machines where SIMS has installed to the "c:\program files\" folder rather than "c:\program files (x86)" folder. We have: Uninstalled SOLUS3 and deleted the c:\program files\SIMS and c:\program files (x86)\SIMS folders (this was left over from a previous SOLUS3 install). Reinstalled SOLUS3 from the SOLUS3 server UI. Waited for SOLUS3 Agent to download and install SIMS. In SOLUS3 server UI we have install to default location selected. Other 64 bit Windows 7 machines do not have this problem and I think they even use the same base image, though I would need to confirm that with one of my technicians. We were running SOLUS 3.6 until early December when we upgraded to SOLUS 3.8. The first SIMS install on these machines was done using SOLUS 3.6 and installed SIMS to the correct place. We currently use different desktops for the 32bit / 64bit installs we have, so having this install to the wrong place breaks the existing shortcuts (I know I could use batch file to start SIMS based on which version it finds). Any thoughts as to how to resolve this and get SIMS installing to the right place?

Not wishing to take this to far off topic. Was the password expiry flag set through the amin website or PowerShell?

I had something similar recently. I started in the servers event logs and in my case it was because the Office 365 password had expired. Resetting it and reinstalling dirsync fixed it.

I missed out that we had just had a Ruckus network installed at the same time as the iPads going out. I had not thought Thanks. Problem solved. I will pass this on to Smoothwall.

This may help (or not) as we have now managed to replicate the problem. This seems to break the iPads ability to browse. On the iPad we are signed into our staff network. WPA2-PSK authentication, DHCP on the main Windows DHCP server. We can browse the Internet fine. We then switch to our guest network. 802.1x RADIUS authentication against Smoothwall and valid user account will do, DHCP on Smoothwall. We can browse the Internet fine. We forget the guest network. iPad automatically picks up the staff network, but is now unable to browse. If on a working iPad I am attached to the staff network move to the guest network and back to the staff network everything works fine. It seems to be the act of forgetting the guest Wi-Fi that breaks everything.

I have one ipad here which has a very strange problem. When connected to our staff Wi-Fi network with proxy settings configured the iPad cannot browse the web. If I install Fing on the iPad and scan the network it can see everything on the network including the Smoothwall proxy. It can also scan all devices for services, except for Smoothwall. I can also ping the iPad from devices on the network except from Smoothwall. I've had Smoothwall support on and their conclusion is that it is the iPad itself. The iPad has been reset from General > Reset > Reset All Settings (and also Reset Network Settings) and we still see the problem. We get the same problem if I have the iPad on DHCP or static IP (with an address different to the DHCP). The Smoothwall engineer did a packet log on the device and for an ICMP ping we get this: The strange twist to this is that if I then move the iPad to our guest network which is on a different VLAN and uses a transparent proxy on Smoothwall everything is fine. I would like to get it back to the staff network as it will allow the device to see the Apple TV's. Any thoughts on what could be causing this problem?

I always use Multimedia Installations and are based in Leeds. Give Paul Dawson a call on 07801417494.

I'm glad I am on paternity leave at the moment. I bought a couple of HDD's from dabs and they are being delivered by Yodel. Just hoping they don't deliver during the school run later today. Edit. I just checked the delivery details and it turns out its coming via Royal Mail and cannot be tracked. :-( To be fair to Royal Mail we do tend to get the same driver each day and he has been very good.

You already have a lot to do but I would also see what is causing the biggest problems for your users and get some of them fixed or at least explained. Getting some user problems solved will only help keep them on your side and may also help when you need ask for money to solve the bigger issues.

We've just had rain and plenty of it. Our building site looks more like they are trying to build a sand castle with a moat. Perhaps I should ask the local MP for a duck house.

I would like to give a thank you to Sahara Systems for service beyond the norm for many companies. We have a set of their wall mounted speakers where one of our little treasures thought it would be a fun to smash the wired remote control. Despite not actually stocking spares for them their engineer took a look through their stock of returned speakers and sent us a replacement free of charge.

I hope your house survived without to much damage. Thankfully all we got was a bit of wind and that want to strong.

Congratulations.

Not sure if this is what you consider bad but I have noticed this link turning up recently. There were a number of others from the same site (bym.sitescount.com with different URLS). The seem to have vanished for the moment, so I they reappear I will post them also. Men's Health - Muscle in a Bottle

This is the script I use for this purpose. I set it as a start up script in a GPO. As @mac_shinbobi suggests you could have it logging to a file somewhere and the modification would not take much effort to add. 'Action: Fixes a problem where the SusClientId registry entry is the same on several client workstations. ' If SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\SUSClientIdReset = 1. If so then quit ' Otherwise delete ' SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\SUSClientId ' SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\SUSClientIdValidation ' Stop and restart the wuauserv service ' Force wuauclt to check for updates. Dim objShell, strKeyPath, strValueName,strComputer set objShell = wscript.createObject("wscript.shell") const HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = &H80000002 strComputer = "." Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2") Set objRegistry = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\default:StdRegProv") strKeyPath = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate" strValueName = "SUSClientIdReset" objRegistry.GetStringValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, strKeyPath, strValueName, dwValue IF (dwValue = "5") THEN 'do nothing ELSE 'Fixes problem with client machines not showing up on the server due to imaging method objRegistry.DeleteValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,strKeyPath,"SusClientId" objRegistry.DeleteValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,strKeyPath,"SusClientIdValidation" Set colServiceList = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("Select * from Win32_Service where Name = 'wuauserv'") For Each objService in colServiceList If objService.State = "Running" Then objService.StopService() Wscript.Sleep 10000 objService.StartService() End If Next objShell.Run("wuauclt /resetauthorization /detectnow ") Wscript.Sleep 10000 objShell.Run("wuauclt /r /reportnow") 'Set reg value for SUSClientIdReset for checking against later. dwValue = "5" objRegistry.SetStringValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, strKeyPath, strValueName, dwValue End If

Thanks for your responses. To distil the report I am sending to the principle and perhaps help others in a similar situation. There is no straightforward technical solution, fundamentally it is problem with the users. Lists provided to admin staff must include a year / reg / class group so that all students can be uniquely identified. Staff must read the information presented in dialog boxes before continuing to ensure the select the right student. Provide a list of the similarly named students to admin staff to help them be aware. Added a quick note in SIMS to help highlight them. Shown staff how to resize some of the dialogs so they can make the columns larger. Shown staff how to change the screen resolution so that the dialogs will have more screen area to work with so making the columns wider. Considering adding an additional character to the appropriate preferred names so that it helps identify them within SIMS & PARS. Consider adding these students to a group and adding a highlight code in PARS. Not much use as it does not show up in the student selection dialog. Considering changing their photo to include a similar warning to the quick note. This is not ideal as photos are not shown in all areas of PARS. Teaching staff should enter behaviour through their class timetable as it will ensure they select the correct student. TASC are going to make some minor tweaks to the PARS student selection dialog as there is some wasted space which will allow the reg group column to be larger. On some of our machines that is too small and the entries are truncated, additionally the column is not resizeable.

This is exactly what is happening with one pair of students and the parents are not happy, rightly so. Now I (so I am told) need to fix this and stop if from happening again!

That is an important point. It has been suggest to us that we add an additional character to the students name (say #) to help identify them. I will look at whether PARS uses their preferred name or legal name. If it uses the preferred name then there will be less issues with 'changing' their name.

I agree with this however that is what I am being asked to provide, though my report back is likely to include a number of points on which the staff themselves should take action rather than rely on the technology.

Recently we have been having problems where students with identical or similar names, for example Fred Smith and Fredrick Smithe are being confused by admin and teaching staff alike. In one case we have a really good student and a really bad student being mixed up, much to the upset of the good students parents. The Principle has now asked what we are going to do about preventing this from happening again. Our office manager is would like if there is a way of getting PARS (and SIMS) to produce a popup every time they deal with one of these students. Whilst I guess this is technically possible should TASC & Capita wish to modify there software I am not aware of anyway to handle this as it stands. I personally think that needs a procedural fix to the problem, that is to read the name and form before continuing rather than a technical fix. However I would like to know how your staff make sure that they always pick the right student when there are those with similar names.

It also depends if you are hosting your own services as you will want static IP's, I am sure you can get them but the upload speed will be much more limited. I guess it will depend upon load you put on the line as to whether it is suitable.