BKGarry

Hello fellow edugeekers, After dealing with one of those lovely windows updates that makes you have to rebuild your mandatory profile in order to make the student login time acceptable again, I decided enough was enough and started some research. Almost 5 years ago all users had roaming profiles, but we ended up with constantly having to reset profiles to get over issues with drives not mapping at times and GPOs not applying so we moved all of our students to mandatory profiles, which is fine most of the time. I have recently stumbled on documents about UE-V, which seems that it could be amazing. I am toying with the idea of removing all profiles from AD and using this, so that there is a new local profile on machines when they first login and then using UE-V to allow settings to follow the user. I am looking at doing this for everyone, as years 9-11 and staff have their own laptop assigned to them and 7-8 and 6th form have pools of laptops to share. I would turn on the GPO setting to delete profiles that haven't been accessed in x amount of days to be deleted on restart. After looking through the forums I didn't find a definitive thread on this so thought I would start one. Has anyone taken the plunge into UE-V, as I think it will speed up login times greatly and the ability to reset just one section will be awesome. Would be great to hear your views and experiences on this, as roaming and mandatory profiles are so old hat now and this looks really good.

spots witch *bows down chanting "we're not worthy"*

Within SIMS you can publish cover as a webpage, if you do that to a shared area or IIS area you should be able to put it in as a HTML section. In SIMS you can set the location it publishes the HTML in Settings > Cover > Global Settings and for the Cover Manager the html button is two or three buttons down from the print button in Arrange Cover

I wish I could juice up one server from another, but the only slots available are RAM and that's one of the things that isn't giving me hassle :-)

Anyone frequenting in the fox before venturing home

Ok. All servers are the same power edge model with a 2.20ghz dual core processor 4gb ram and 500gb in case storage. 1-primary dc, DNS and dhcp 2-secondary dc and DNS 3-sims and Bromcom TWF/MCAS 4-remote desktop for Mac users and spiceworks 5-safecom printing and KMS 6-cashless catering and access control 7-root certificate authority (using IAS) 8-iis (windows 2008 r2) for moodle and HAP+ 9-backup Radius cert and Symantec endpoint security 10-Main file server, with all profiles, shares, home drives 8tb of storage on SCSI aray an 14 LTO4 tape loader.

We have 1300 client devices which 1200 are wireless. With about 1150 users. I will list the other details when I get home a bit later.

The head didn't seem to fazed by the outages :-( To me it is unacceptable that the disk array is not responding as expected with the RAID not allowing a single drive failure. I am looking at splitting it, that would be about 10.5k each year, as it really is a 2 and 2 jobby, what is planned. My most important thing at the moment is backups, we have a nice shiney tapeloader, but we have not got software to backup from all the individual servers to it some April (as the commvault server is offsite and controlled and licensed to the managed service) For Symantec Backup exec to use these tapes I am looking at 6k for Microsoft DPM with a nice 20tb server I would be spending 5k, but how can I justify buying new hardware purely for backup when we have a tape loader :-/

At the moment I quite regularly get disk failures on the SCSI disk array (locally attached to one server) which has 3 RAID 5 virtual disks and 14 physical disks in total. When one drive fails raid decides it doesn't want to continue working, windows looses all the disks, with this no one can work as all staff and student profiles, home drives, shared drives and network installed applications are on this one disk array in one server. I have to replace the disk and reboot the server to get it recognise there are disks there still. This can take between 30mins and an hour depending on how temperamental it feels like being. this has happened once in the summer holidays this year and twice since then. Then what happens if we get a 2003 exploit and all our DCs and everything is on there and there is no support to fix it. On the plus side, the head doesn't want new shiney things, she just want innovative use of current shiney things. but people don't like the shiney things as they don't work like the regular things.

Warranties finished in 2013 and the build date on them is January 2010 model is Dell PowerEdge 1950 I am already having trouble getting HDDs for the disk array ad having to buy SAS2 over the SAS1 drives already in there. I am truly scared if something else fails in them - - - Updated - - - I'll see ICT direct at BETT tomorrow :-)

That is going virtual @ephyelyon we are using 3.5tb of space at the moment and yes @machin05 they are out of warranty I don't want tonnes of physical servers anymore :-(

Good afternoon all, I need to tap your collective wisdom and advice here, Currently we have 10 physical 2003 servers, which are 5 Years old and were put in as part of BSF. We are currently in the process of coming out of our service contract and are taking our IT services back in house. Over 2 years ago the LEA contract finished and the data centre was dismantled with use having a contract direct with the old contractors and have a completely onsite solution (which is a plus) I am currently fighting the battle that we need to replace our servers, especially with the age of them and 2003 server coming to the end of its life. The business manager is on my side but the headteacher is saying that we don't need to do this and that we need to improve innovation on the front end. I am trying to put forward the argument that a lot of innovation on the front end needs a decent and modern back end to work but I am failing to win her over. I have costs of how much it will be to do it, and managed to get it down to 21k mark for hardware investment but still cannot get it her to see my side of things. Now I need to come up with something that would really make her happy and allow us to move past Win 7 laptop clients (we already have some iPads but trying to use the shared is a nightmare) and we have no physical computer rooms, so whatever I need to impress has to cover what we can do at present and show something awesome. Also I need a backup plan in order to upgrade all of our current server OS's to 2012 r2 with minimal downtime and maximum impact, with the domain upgraded and being able to support a better range of devices. Kind of getting lost in it all now, and don't know how to try and get through this, to thought I would tap up the wisdom and ask if anyone has any suggestions on how to keep things working to their best and try and improve everything. Look forward to the advice and any suggestions that come through this,

@zag In 2012 R2 you can use Work Folders to achieve what you want :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5Zwux5hS_M

@hardtailstar there hasn't been a flake in in NW Kent at all. Some rain this morning, that's it. :-)

bingo Thank you @JRowley and @synaesthesia your help has been invaluable

Thank you, don't suppose you know a way of getting it to display a list of the current policy names?

I really need to learn powershell, I can see a big youtube session coming up on that. @synaesthesia will that set it for all users? as it didn't quite work for me :-(

@EduTech I am now being dense, I have got the Azure AD working but cannot find the setting you have screen shot (trying to get away with not using powershell)

powershell it is then, time to get it all working on this PC, I cant remember what steps I had to do before, I know I need azure powershell, time for some fun :-)

Is that the same as removing the tick for? As I have already done that and users can still make the groups :-(

Hello All, This one has snuck up on myself, Delivering the first chapter of Groups in Office 365 - Office Blogs This seems to be a tool with great potential but the students have been in and started creating lots of silly groups at the moment, I can't seem to be able to stop them creating them at the moment, and even though I am logged in as a Office 365 admin, I do not seem to be able to delete them. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to achieve this? Kind regards

There is a Nova Satellite Setup in the Setups directory. I use it all the time and just copy my files by either USB or the OneDrive for Business to it. Works fine for me, there is a Capita guide available on SupportNet about the Nova Satellite Setups but you will have to remember to manually update this satellite version of Nova each time you update SIMS. :-)

I actually can't wait. I'm not going to the teachmeet this year, which is a shame as I have never had so much inspiration chucked at me at once, but I am always the naughty boy who calls stuff out from the back. I have always wanted to have groups on people start at one end of each row and the task is for each person to run to the other end and get as many freebies as quickly as possible. :-)

Period 1: 08:50-09:50 Period 2 (splits below) Years 07-09 09:50 - 11:10 Break 10:10 - 11:10 Period 2 Years 10-13 09:50 - 10:50 Period 2 10:50 - 11:10 Break 11:10 - 12:10 Period 3 (all years) Period 4 (split as below) Year 08 and 09 12:10 - 12:40 Lunch 12:40 - 13:40 Period 4 Year 7 12:10 - 12:40 Period 4 (first half) 12:40 - 13:10 Lunch 13:10 - 13:40 Period 4 (second half) Years 10 - 11 (and Sixth Form) 12:10 - 13:10 Period 4 13:10 - 13:40 Lunch Period 5 (all) 13:40 - 14:40 Period 5 14:40 - 15:05 Learning Conversation (if on that day), after school enrichment, or leave for home This looks confusing, and took us a while to get our heads round the new timings, but this does allow them to get server quicker for lunch etc.

I have quite a few gold areas, so they are complete, the mystery things with the tetris blocks that are the clues confuse me. Something to do with button combinations. Although the QR code one was good. I love the joke of its a 2d world that discovers it is actually 3d and that you have to collect 32 blocks :-)