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Yey. Ah, yes, I've just tested this with my technician who helpfully is a parent and receives his home emails on his Android. Just to confirm to anyone reading this, you DO need the extra $ after the end ($ParentalSalutation$) - it isn't a misprint. Ah, I suspect I opted out after we had a demo a couple of years ago which I loved but school refused to buy it, so I'll have been receiving unnecessary newsletters - but I kept pestering them and finally we've gone with it - that explains why I wasn't getting updates. Peter

Yippee! I've not requested it anywhere other than here - I've just found a 'forum' page on their website which is 'coming soon' but it would be great if EG could be used instead/as well. (Is MIS the right forum, or another forum for parent messaging?) Yeah, at the moment I know the passwords because I've set the Mem Data and Passwords identical as I'm the only one mailing so far. However I'm due to handover some of them next week. Just a heads up to anyone who follows this thread, if they don't already know, there is a mailing list for SchoolComms updates which I only found a couple of weeks ago - I was about 6 releases behind and hadn't known about it. Click the (rather large but still completely missed when looking for it) button link at the bottom of most schoolcomms pages (in the blue footer bar). Peter

What level are your admin ladies - ours are 'School User - Email only'. When they login, they don't get prompted to run it - I have to login as me first. Is there another setting which forces it to run at login without prompting that I haven't found? Peter

Hi, Just wondered if the Schoolcomms people could either comment on these, or pass them on to the relevant people. 1) Are there any plans for scheduled import instead of a user of sufficiently high level having to log in daily and run the import manually - it does seem to be an ancient approach to data synchronisation. Our Year/Faculty PAs will only have "Send email" privileges when we release Schoolcomms to them. I'm the multi-user administrator and run the import before I send any message, but once I hand over to the PAs they won't be able to do this. 2) Are there any plans for additional $variables in messages - $ParentSalutation would be the first I'd look for, and again seems a logical development that I'm surprised hasn't come yet. 3) Probably less-used and less-popular option, but could users of a sufficiently high-level create messages but send them 'on behalf of' another user, or set the reply-to address of a given message. Say if a PA is absent and their line-manager or myself need to send an email from their faculty/department, but replies need to come back to that PA. Their own account is set to reply-to themselves, but my emails (multi-user administrator) come to me. Peter

Correct, it's simply a checkbox (either copy the message to email, send the message to email only (not to phone voicemail), or send email notification only) and field for the email address. Peter

Well, I've just been through this lot. Can't say I was looking forward to it, but it wasn't as bad as I'd anticipated. I did everything the install guide said (port 443, btecng pearson endpoints, opened two ports for communication), plus opened extra ports 52222-52250 as per a post from aliaspeter earlier in this thread, and all seems to be working. Not sure whether I needed the extra ports, as I think I put them in before realising a different issue. My proxy is set as proxyaddress="http://192.168.x.y:port/" - I know there's been discussion on the required format, with or without the slash, but it works for me like this. I had missed one step but using their Diagnostics tool told me where I'd gone wrong - fair play to them for creating this, and to those people on this thread who read that paragraph in the install guide and mentioned it here; I'd completely missed it several times. Note you do need to stop the ECS service on your server before it will run. One thing to make sure you're all aware of - make sure you force a Test Violation when you are testing, so that you and your exam team know how to resolve it. To force one, press Ctrl+Esc (which would usually bring up start menu). You'll get a pretty screen saying you've lost focus during your test, and to call your invigilator - who won't have a clue what to do and nor will you if you haven't experienced it. There is a super secret process to unlock the test and allow you to continue, which I WON'T post here as it is a public forum - Pearson want you to ring their support line in the middle of the exam and get straight through to a very helpful person who will immediately help you. Of course, you will always get this when you ring Pearson so there's no problem, is there? Also one to note, if you do find the test crashes or suchlike, if you force a Test Violation you then have an option (following the super secret process) to terminate the test - this does allow the candidate to re-login to the test. In my minimal testing, I was able to restart the test from the beginning with another 60 minutes on the clock (whilst other candidates only had 57 minutes left) - not sure what happens if you crash out 45 minutes in with 75% of the test complete, whether you get another 60 minutes and have to restart all questions again. With regards the TestPlayer deployment, my experience (RM CC4 network) is that it doesn't matter where a test user logs on, whether they've already used TestPlayer in another Room/Invigilator or not - the settings stick with the PC (albeit in the users' AppData folder) - maybe to do with how RM set up Roaming Profiles, I don't know. We are therefore deploying one copy of TestPlayer wherever it's needed, without setting the MSI properties. The first time it is run on a PC, it searches for the Invigilator PC - as long as the exam team, invigilator, whoever you choose selects the right Invigilator PC in the room once, then next time anyone logs on to that PC it will use the same Invigilator PC. If you need to change the Invigilator PC used for an exam in a given room, that's when a problem occurs and you need to delete the config files*. If a user moves to another room for a resit another day, they get the settings of the PC they've moved to - if it hasn't been used before, it searches for an Invigilator. If it has been used, it uses the Invigilator in the room. It doesn't, in my experience, try and use the Invigilator in the old room. (*Config files: c:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\TdpClientData) Hope this helps anyone else setting up this software. Peter

Hi, Ah, that sounds great. SchoolComms can send out Student Reports that appear in AM Individual Reports, so that would be fantastic and save any manual mail-merging or emailing at all. I've passed this on to my SIMS colleague; I may be back.... Peter

Hi, I've just been told by my SIMS colleague (who knows her stuff, so I don't usually doubt her) that mail-merging from Options is case of pre-printing letters with boxes in a certain place on the paper, then getting Options to over-print the choices in that place on a piece of paper? As we're moving very swiftly towards paperless communication (been using SchoolComms since September, and I'm not aware of any paper letters gone home in that time) I'm a) amazed that Options is so far behind if this is the case, and b) looking for any other way of mail-merging or otherwise reporting on Options? I'm happy with standard Microsoft mail-merging to email if I can get the data into word/excel/csv somehow. Any ideas? Is my colleague right? How do you do it? Peter

http://www.flocs.com/products/sysmess/default.htm Used sysmess for years. Works with AD users, user groups and stations. (And I guess station groups) [*Edit: And 'anyone logged on' as a wildcard] Looks old/outdated because technically it is - hasn't been updated in years - but that's cos it doesn't need to be. Peter

Our kids are hell-bent on Minecraft at the moment. I've been blocking all I can, but discovered http://minecraftedu.com/ so I'm considering getting a staff/sixth former to set up and allow controlled access. One year 8 student is aghast that I've blocked his server that he's setup on a paid host out of his own pocket for a school club he reckons he's setting up. Peter

I speak reasonably frequently with a chap in the Capita 'Extra Modules' marketing department. (The team that tries to get you to buy InTouch, SLG, Emerge, Agora etc) We have 'an understanding' shall we say, about one comment I made to him a while back: SIMS as a core product is (generally, SOLUS3 aside) a good product. When it comes to extending those features, be in text/email messaging, a VLE/Parent Portal, Staff Professional Development, iPad apps (leaving aside today's BETT announcement) etc - SIMS are better off leaving them to their Technical Partners because they all do a much better job than Capita's own foray into these technologies, and when Capita release a SIMS update, the Partners release their updates alongside/soon after - and they work from update x.1, not the 3rd un-withdrawn release of update x.4 that has some new features temporarily disabled whilst they fix them. Peter

5 miles over a nice moor road, barely passing half a dozen cars. 10-12 minutes depending on weather/road conditions due to being steep up and down. (Unless someone parked badly or won't give way on the 1.8-car-width bridge - quicker to give way than shuffle into the only bit of the curved bridge which can pass 2 cars, but some people are either too arrogant or don't know where reverse is!)

Are your clients looking to internal DNS servers, or going straight to firewall/internet? I've got the DNS zones like you, but I also have duplicate entries in our Smoothwall because some VLANs don't look to the DNS servers. Peter

Your welcome. :-)

Fairm - PM sent. Peter.

Yeah, yeah... :-)

Thanks Rawns - I'm not into Twittering but I do have an account so I guess I could work out how to do it. (Yes, I'm a Network Manager who doesn't particularly 'get' it :-()

Hi. Just wondered if anyone knew if anyone (individuals, media, Edugeek) did a blog/feed of the BETT show? "Company X on Stand 123 have just announced their brand new Technical Thing that is going to change the way education works in future" kinda thing, but round all the major (or not-so-major) exhibitors? Engadget do them for the big tech events like Apple, but not aware of any re BETT? I'm due down on Friday, travelling Thursday night, but struggling with flu and unlikely to get there. Peter

Hi, Just on your bullet points: 1) If functionality is switched off, could it be hidden completely from menu's (or greyed out) rather than saying 'not available' after being clicked on. 2) As well as an earliest date, we'd need a latest date - we don't show today's behaviour, or possibly even yesterdays', to parents in case the year team want to intercept and upgrade/downgrade the behaviour. 3) I think we only show that a behaviour event has taken place, and possibly the number of points - we don't show any detail of the behaviour to parents. Peter

Yes, should have said, we do the same with not running AirServer until staff use it. I've told them it's so they don't have to scroll through 100 devices in the Airplay list, but as you say it benefits the network. We use Ruckus v9.7 firmware (which I don't think is on public release yet) to do the VLAN routing. Peter

In that case, I can't see any reason why you would struggle. All our issues related to our PCs being on separate VLANs around the site, and our iPads being on another VLAN isolated by the firewall, so I had to bridge the firewall as well as the VLAN links with all necessary AirPlay/Bonjour traffic. We've yet to knowingly see the well-documented feature you mentioned, though we did discover it on AirServer's support site minutes after I had told the staff AirServer was ready to go! My heart sunk when I read it, but nobody has complained yet. Peter Peter

Erm... Iris... Hate it, hate it, hate it. And so does my most technically-competent teacher, despite being on their offsite training/demo course and the onsite handover training. We've got both Coffee Pot and Discovery. I think he prefers Discovery as it seems to work better - wifi up to their server, no problem. The coffee pot is currently wired, reserved DHCP IP address in every VLAN, proxy exceptions for every reserved IP address, stores video on a mapped drive that everyone can access (until it's uploaded). I've bought a wifi Ethernet bridge to strap to the coffee pot stand ('drip' as someone called it above) in the hope this will reduce the potential for issues down to one IP address on one VLAN. We spent how much on it ????? Peter

I rolled AirServer out to 100 classrooms just over a week ago, with 130 iPads. I've not had anyone complain about not being able to see them in the way you describe. Are both iPads on the same wifi subnet, on the same WAP? Peter

Yes, it does show up in the iOS version, but I've not noticed any new profile settings or license deployment facilities. :-( I've read somewhere that someone reckons it now works without passwords from Meraki, but I think that's just the 15 minute timeout that existed in iOS 6. Peter

Any news on this Glennda? Meraki support told me last week that Apple haven't given them the API for iOS 7 yet, and there's no roadmap from Apple mentioning anything about new MDM features. Not sure which bucket he's had his head in for the last 6 months. Peter