BFCIT

No problem at all DaveP - we are also new adopters of Show My Homework - so far its appeared slow, doesn't work in IE 11, so Chrome has been deployed across the network. It looks good when its working and teachers/parents have been quite keen to give it a go. Just hope there is no more down time as it is very easy for people to get put off unreliable services.

Thanks for that DaveP, any other issues a new subscriber of SMHW should be made aware of?

Was also reported down from Parents at our school too. Is unscheduled down time a common occurrence?

Hi All, We recently purchased 24 Lenovo desktop computers for one of our ICT suites. After the 2nd day, five of these are failing to power on. I had the same issue with one of these when I was building these computers on to our school network and it turned out to be due to current building up on the circuits. Lenovo technical support team suggested this was a static build up and that we should just disconnect all power and re-connect a couple of hours later and try again. As I am sure you appreciate, its a royal pain in the backside to have to do this regularly and it means that in some lessons not all students are able to use a PC. Its also impossible to gauge just how many PCs will turn on making it an unreliable ICT suite. Previously we have been able to disconnect all power and hold the power button for 10 seconds to drain any charge, this does not work with the Lenovo M700. Have any of you got experience with dealing with a problem like this, is the problem likely to stem from the electric feeding the room, is there anything that I can do/purchase to avoid this issue? Thank you

bump anyone?

Hi all, Over summer I have been tasked with creating two reports: 1) The creation of a report which uses information from the DFE, ICO and any other valid sources for best data handling practices in a school context. Applying not only to data stored in SIMS or electronically; but paper too. The main focus of this is data protection. 2) Creation of a policy/best practice strategy that can be used in the event of an incident by a third party or an internal school member to maintain integrity during the investigation of any issue that requires the assessment of ICT equipment. Such as chain of custody etc. The ultimate aim is to create a 'go to' document that will promote the necessary steps to ensure investigations are being carried out lawfully without interfering with the integrity of any potential evidence. I was wondering how this is done in your schools? Do you simply follow DFE or ICO guidance, have you created or had input in the creation of your own policies that are used across your school? Would anybody be so kind to give me some insight in to your own policies and what areas you have covered? If anybody is prepared to share there policies it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a bunch,

Thanks for the additional ideas and the advice re: SLT authorisation

Thanks for the ideas guys. Some food for thought.

Hi all, I am curious to learn what you would consider an acceptable gift from staff to student for approx £20. The head of the student tech team is leaving in a couple of weeks and we would like to get him something for all of his hard work. We are struggling for ideas. The best one so far is a voucher for Game. Anybody any good ideas? Thanks,

Thank you for your rapid response, I will be sure to take a look at the above link.

Hi All, Currently we provide our staff with their own SIMS SQL username/passwords to access SIMS in school. They receive a generated password and are then change it to one of their choice when they first login to SIMS. I have done a little bit of research on password management within SIMS and can only seem to find information about single sign on, linking SIMS with AD, which is the opposite of what I am trying to achieve. What I am interested to learn, is whether or not SIMS has an inbuilt password management section that we can use to make all staff users change their passwords (in line with password rotation in our password policy) and whether we can stipulate the complexity of the users password, like you can with Server 2012 and Fine grained password policies. Thank you,

Thanks for all the input guys and girls, appreciate it. Yet to make a decision, my main concern is the traffic priority for 3G when using an MVNO, so it may be worth paying a couple of quid more a month just to go with the main players. hmm decisions decisions!

Hi All, My contract with o2 finishes this month. I am happy with the phone I still have, it works fine and I don't see the need to upgrade at this point in time. As such I was wondering if any of you have any experience with SIM only deals and can comment on the networks, signal, reliability etc. I have noticed quite a few such as Life and TPO that piggyback on to the EE network. I probably use around 1000 minutes a month talktime, unlimited texts is handy and around 2-3GB a month of data (more is always welcomed) but not at ridiculous cost. Do you have any recommendations or suggestions on who are the best providers, and reasons perhaps not to go with Life and TPO? Thank you..

Hi JJames I am not too sure, So @student. is a subdomain contained within your parent domain group which all staff belong to? If it is syncing with Active Directory, could you not just create a new ou at the root domain, move your students in to there - I would guess you would need to ensure all of the group policies move with students.

Personally I would stick to internal SIMS, we recently had a fault in our fibre entering the school that led to almost 5 days without the internet, this was not our Service Providers fault, this was BTs fault and it took them an age to respond, figure out the fault and get us back up and running. It was bad enough losing the internet for that time, if our SIMS had have been hosted online our school would have come to a standstill. There is truth in the fact that services are becoming increasingly cloud based, but unless you have the money to ensure you can maintain internet connectivity, redundant broadband links to school etc I would avoid. You would possibly want to use a microwave isp provider using point to point, rather than go through to the local exchange for your redundant broadband supply. As others have said there is plenty of software out there including Microsoft's Own Remote Desktop Services that would enable staff to access SIMS away from school. In terms of data protection, I sleep much better at night knowing that I am in control of the SIMS server and I know exactly how and where the data is stored and the associated security that governs the server.

When you created the group initially using the gui did you not get a drop down option to choose which domain you wanted the group to utilise?

Got to love this forum - had the same problem bothering one user here, your suggestion solved it Winner - nice one!

Office365 but can perform administrative tasks within exchange admin panel and connect to it via powershell

Hi Steve, Thanks for the reply. It is not a local exchange server, it is a hosted exchange. Thanks for your input none the less.

We use LCWS, picked up over 5 times, are very flexible and happy to come at a time that won't disrupt school routine. Great guys, recycle for free and take practically anything. Computer Recycling | Data Destruction Services | LCWS

Hi All, Having a few speed issues with Outlook Web Access. We utilise exchange online. A number of users are having to refresh the page or close the browser and reopen it for emails to load within OWA. For example I open my inbox, I then speak to somebody on the phone who is sending me an email, or an internal colleague that is forwarding me something. Quite often this does not appear within my inbox without me refreshing the page or totally closing out of Internet Explorer/Chrome and reloading email. Please note we are using Internet Explorer 11 and the latest version of Chrome. Our school business manager just notified me at 12:45 that she hadn't received any emails even though she has kept her inbox open on the OWA page. I asked her to come out and go back in and an email from 11:27 appeared, over one hour old. Is this just affecting our school or is this something that is quite common? Does anybody have any idea how often OWA is set to performs its 'check for new emails' process? Has any one managed to fix this or improve it? Thanks in advance.

Hi Foofighterjim, We are also Smoothwall users, Skype is very hit and miss for us. Sometimes it spins around and connects, other times we just get the 'skype cant connect' message. I have tried two alternative methods with a lot more success: 1) Make the source IP an exception from the filter and change the proxy settings on the source computer in line with this exception. This works 90% of the time for us and enables a decent connection with Skype. 2) Use Skype Beta (web browser version) Hope this is helpful. Fortunately we only use Skype on rare occasions and as such I am in a position to overlook the process and give them unfiltered access via smoothwall and then simply disable it afterwards.

Hi, We are also an RM School using CC4.5 and have purchased the mid range dell optiplex 3020, they have been great for us for office/admin use, (not got any in a classroom) but I think they are up to the task of dealing with most school based applications. We also have Toshiba C50 and R50 models that are compatible with CC4 and these represented better value when we purchased our laptops. RM do supply these I believe, but you can always get a quote from another company. You do not have to order the hardware from RM for it to be compatible. I shopped around and managed to get a quote better than that of RMs, RM matched it and we were then happy to proceed. It is worth shopping around especially with budgets being so tight in schools these days. I personally like to consolidate purchasing from as few sources as possible but will always go to lengths when bulk buying for the best possible price.

LosOJos, thank you so much for the efforts you have gone to in this. We are trying to automate the process as much as possible but I perfectly understand and accept the points you are making and appreciate you explaining the alternatives that we could have a go at. We will raise a call with Capita Phil just in case there is any technical issues causing this slow reporting. Thanks a bunch, BFCIT

Hi LosoJos, Please see the attached pics: Structure shows the 4 filters used to collect data for each of 12 subjects so there are 48 filters after the generic stuff at the top. Filter and Filter 2 images show the type of filter in use - not too complex. There are also ten further filters at the end which are simply collecting the data held in different aspects but without result sets in use. A grand total of 65 rows in the report. Thank you