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Afternoon all I've decided I might treat myself to a new tablet but a little unsure of what to go for. I'd want an Android one over an iPad for personal preference (I am starting to come around to the iPad idea, however as I've had an Android phone for several years now would prefer to stick) and initially was thinking I'd want a 10" one but now starting to think I could go with smaller. Nexus 7 has always caught my eye but more recently the samsung Galaxy Tab 3.0 8" one. Would anyone recommend one? I'll spend up to about £200/£250 but then wonder if the rumoured Nexus 8 is true do I just hold off a bit more for that.... Thanks

Yes, it was in the CSM newsletter. The only Webinar I've seen sight of was of the Solus 3.7 beta which I'm not 100% convinced was what the CSM newsletter was referring to but I could be wrong. The beta Webinar was advertised at the top of Supportnet.

Supportnet Pre-Release note has planned to be made available before COB on Friday 28th March on it if that helps.

I can't remember (and can't log in to take a look at the moment) but I'm pretty sure Discover doesn't have a redeploy option and it doesn't have an automatic deployment option when it is allocated to an agent like SIMS/FMS do. To install discover on a new machine, you follow the process like @MrMat says however you select your Discover version you have installed and deploy that again as if you were doing an update and it will sort it's self out. You need to do that each time you add a device or a discover deployment fails/times out on a device. Hope that makes sense.

Most of my network is running on a similar spec to number 3, I've got about a 1/3rd of them upgraded with an SSD drive before I ran out of money.

You want a comment back that is linked to the Pastoral option in the course links part (I think Pastoral Overview is the actual name). We do this and then have the head of year / head teacher enter their comment in the review stage where they can view the whole report (and it's up to them to check and send any back that need correcting). The downside to this is that you lose access to the comment banks for the head teacher to use once it goes to review unless you want to unapprove it and then go back into List Entry.

When I had to do this recently, the built in Windows Print Picture option worked pretty well at sorting it out.

Well I suppose in the break down you could mark it down as ICT Resources to assist with homework and independant study and depending on how much you spend as the pupil premium ammount is £900 per student, it's unlikely to cost you that for a laptop. If it is, then I would be questioning it too. Measurable impact could be something as simple as moving from no homework being completed to homework being done (unlikely, but hey). I'm not arguing either way as to whether it should be done or not, however IMHO it should be no more the 1/3 of a pupil premium allocation for a particular student. I'm not sure whether Ofsted would agree or disagree with it.

The standalones that I wanted to log, I installed the printlogger and there is a config file you can alter to point it to a network share. Set this up and you can then still have a central loging as such, it's just not all in one file.

Not much help, but I'd be interested to know what you decide and do along these lines as I've had a very similar discussion with someone this week about the same thing. My gut instinct is we are buying the device and that in reality the device should remain property of the school. If you look at BYOD however, a number of companies suggest you can use pupil premium to support it for those students who can't afford it and obviously the way they are set up the student normally keeps the device at the end.

Secondary school, single network on the curriculum range here.

Will see if I get the go ahead, fingers crossed!

We use Schoolcomms which works pretty well and we've not had issues with the Email/SMS side of it.

Hmmmmm, can you do filtering based off a single IP then? No idea when we are likely to get a roll out or what conflict that is going to cause with Cumbria/CICT but would be good to know whether it's going to throw our setup all off....

I'm possibly in the market for a 15" laptop over the next week or two.... any sneaky deal's coming up? (Although I do like the look of the Lenovo on your website @ £250)

Have you deployed atleast one SIMS update using Solus3 (and it needs to be one which hasn't been withdrawn). Even if you have already installed it using Solus2, SIMS won't be automatically sent out until a deployment has taken place.

KMS (key management server) is designed to be installed on one computer/server and then your clients would connect to that server and licence themselves from that. Following the process you were trying to, you should be using a MAK (multiple activation key) which gives you a larger number of activations and doesn't check in with a server anywhere. So you can either install a Server 2012 / 2012R2 key on a KMS host somewhere and then update all you clients to use the KMS client Key or you can input your MAK key into VAMT and then use VAMT to send the new key back out if that makes sense?

To be fair I'm all for spreadsheets. Yes SIMS can do some of it, but it becomes such a faff at times to try and make it give you what you want when Excel can just do it. Excel has the added benefit of you can set it up, save it somewhere and tell people where to go and everyone can access it. If you do that with a SIMS marksheet/template, you need to either give everybody access to the assessment part of SIMS or create loads of marksheets to try and cover every possibility. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but for example trying to do this: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/128768-advanced-reports-excel.html Yes I've done it in a marksheet but only the head of year and SLT can access it as a year group marksheet. Our SLT want everyone to have access to this, so it needs to go out to Excel.

Well I've got SIMS and Discover done, discover was a little bit of a pain because I didn't want my database called Discover_1 when it migrated, but I worked around it. Lovely day for the Helpdesk phoneline to go down to so I carried on regardless and it's synchronizing correctly (from what I can tell). Just got Solus3 left now... Edit: Spoke to soon as if the server was showing me who was boss - reports suddenly started to take a long time to run and started throwing errors. 30 minutes later all was back to normal so I'm hoping it was just the server doing something, but it's made me leave Solus3 for another day....

Another thumbs up for AMC Computers, had fantastic service and great prices from them.

Dirsync controls the password sync, but it monitors AD for password changes and uploads them as soon as they occur (hence resetting passwords works). So any password changes you should be ok with and it's always worked pretty reliably with us. The only times I've had to force a full sync was when I was reorganising AD and taking users which didn't use to be synced and adding them to a new OU which was. Dirsync successfully created it but the password din't work until it had been changed. The other little caveat I've found and not quite pinpointed exaclty, I don't think the password will work within Office 365 if the user hasn't logged on internally before. I'm not sure whether this is all related to the same thing, some little quirk or something wrong with the way ours works. People change passwords on first logon anyway so as a double check that always fixes things.

If I get a password which has fallen out of sync (it normally happened after moving a user into a Synced OU from outside a Synced OU I think) I followed the steps in this (can't find the KB I pulled it from, but the steps are the same): How to: Force Password Synchronization between an onPremise Active Directory and Microsoft Online Services / Windows Azure AD - Knowledge eXchange This suggests you can do it using Powershell however: DirSync/Windows Azure AD Password Sync Frequently Asked Questions - TechNet Articles - United States (English) - TechNet Wiki

rsop.msc run as administrator should give you a list of all the policies and their linked OU's/locations and you might be able to work it out from there? I had a few machines, not newly built mind you, which were pulling an old GPO I removed a month or 2 earlier at one point for some unknown reason. Runnning gpupdate /force fixed that though.

I was under the impression, and will find out next week when I go ahead and do it I guess, that when you migrate the Solus 3 database across and update the connection string on the server the clients should automatically redirect to the new server. The bit I haven't worked out yet is how Solus3 detects that the GUI and deployment service have moved so that might be an interesting one come the next Solus release

Baracuda peeked my interest in December time around the time I was having a lot of issues with Smoothwall support but I ran out of time to investiagte it properly. The 1st year cost is still fairly high as you have a hardware purchase, but after that the cost drops considerably (and the hardware is replaced Free of charge after so many years too if I remember correctly).