budgester

We are planning on putting in Zimbra this year as well.

I'm so tempted to try some of these http://www.virtual-laser-keyboard.com/

I'd prefer an electric shock to the teacher who is supposed to be managing the room.

Surely in the days of Web 2.0 thats a web crime in itself ?

Yup, truly fugly.

If you want a supported VOIP Linux based solution you could look at http://www.splicecom.com

It's on the ePortal Data Controller

Using CMIS we log events to students, but it seems mostly that they are all negative. How do you break down student event information for students (good and bad)? Regards Budgester.

I can confirm, trying to connect to a RM CC3 active directory. "Failed to implement changes. Error: LDAP user creation error: 16: No Such attribute" I initially tried configuring with student and teacher accounts, and got the error about to many accounts (over 1000), but this error goes away when I only try staff (less than 200 accounts). Regards Martin

Well, not much of a chocolate lover myself. But if I so much a see marzipan I must eat it. My personnal favouriteis the long cigar type, in a gold wrapper. MMMmmmm

I had something similar here, so I scoped out hardware and software costs for both Mac and Windows, put them in a document with pros and cons. In fact when doing anything like this I tend to use the skills I got from doing D&T at school to help me prepare a coherent document, i.e. Brief, Analysis, etc. This allows me to layout around a five page informative document which will usually take a morning to do. It also means my SLT have gotten used to receiving information in an almost standard format, that they then feel comfortable presenting to governers. Usually this allows a other people to give input to the solution before the final go ahead is given and funds allocated. I usually include a timescale and the amount of work, any training that maybe required, and any other considerations. This allows me to point back to a document in the future when people turn round and say what they asked for doesn't work as they thought it would, so I can say well you never got any training on this software, or you asked for something that was only going to be used for KS5, so no you can't book it for a KS3 class. Regards Budgester

We are the the LGFL, I looked at Digitalbrain when it was first made available, then six months later, and decided that there was no way on this earth that I was going to make me eyes bleed and brain hurt by even trying to do anything with it. So I just run all of our services in house, mainly on Linux boxen, and these all just work. The only time we usually have any issues if when the synetrix netwrok has issues, and its usually the proxy server. THe digital brain stand at BETT always seemed extremely quite, not surprising really. To be honest the digitalbrain exercise is one of the reason why we will not be using the LFGL's attempt at an MLE/VLE.

Moving towards it with these http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome

This depends on the region encoding, if its region 0 then has no DRM encoding. Breaking DRM is not a crime, at least not yet in the uk, but it is in the good ole US of A under the DMCA. DRM is exactly that, Digital Rights Mananement which is supposed to make it difficult to unencode discs with unlicensed software, however your main issue is copyright, and usually the reason that people want to break DRM is to enable them to infringe on the copyrighted material. Of course there are good reasons to break the DRM as well, for instance I might want to watch a Japanese Manga movie that has been region encoded, if this is the original disc, I can either get a second DVD player with the appropriate region decoder, or get a software decoder on my PC, or many other ways. However I am usually wrong so take all the above with a pinch of salt. Your best move is to contact the copyright holder of the DVD and ask them if they will allow you make a copy of the DVD for a media server, get permission in writing (or an email and store it with your licenses), I find hinting that you would be more inclined to buy from there catalogue will increase your chances of getting this permission. Regards Budgester

It usually takes us around 20 minutes to do an upgrade, there must be something seriously off with you install if its taking 3 hours, and that includes eportal. Is that the database upgrade ? What database server are you running it on ?

The main thing I was wanting was an underdesk case, that is relatively vandal proof, that we can retrofit to our existing desks.

Just found the card in the bottom of my desk. http://www.pmergonomics.co.uk/ Any one use these ?

A couple of years ago at BETT there was a case manufacturer that produced cases that mounted on the underside of desks. The case would then slide out if work was needed on it. Does anyone know who these people were or use these cases ? Regards Budgester

It looks interesting, do you have a policy on data retention ?

We have noticed this as well, a brand new room arranged in rows, and the PC's were trashed within 2 weeks. We also notice that the damage happens with particular teachers, but SMT/SLT are reluctant to do anything about the classroom management of these teachers. Ho Hum

Speak to the Bursar first, see how they would want to go about it. Make sure you keep a list of the costs of cartridges and which printer they are replaced in. We also make sure we keep a list of which toners are replaced then if they go past a certain cost of cartridges we replace them with a continuos ink system.

Hi All, We use Serco CMIS and ePortal here, and I was wondering if anyone is using the School Self Review module from Serco ? If so what are your thoughts on it ? I'd rather have some real information from people that use the system than the lies that the sales people tell you. Regards Budgester

Very true, what would be sensible would be to have something like a standard API, with a SOAP interface for each application.

Shibboleth isn't a Single sign on system. From Wikipedia How many of your applications/systems are shibboleth enabled ?

Virtual Learning Environment Managed Learning Environment Pretty much the same thing as far as I can tell, except you run one yourself and someone else runs the other one (manages it) I'll be sticking with a VLE, until such time as our LEA can manage the access in an automatic way with disparate users such as we have. I want to do authentification against my AD, (Single Sign On) and our AD takes into account not only all our new students but also staff, temporary staff, adult education groups, governers etc, etc. Until our LEA provides a fully integrated service for all of our users, and I don't beleive this will happen. So unless I get completely outsourced with BSF, again which I don;t beleive will happen, we are very unlikely to be using an MLE. Regards Budgester