Sherston

Hi, Firstly, we'd like to offer our thanks to everybody posting in this thread for their feedback on our products. This is really useful to us as going forward, it will help us to improve our products even further. This thread is giving us several things that we'd like to investigate. We are all out of the office at various stages this week, working at the BETT exhibition (on stand C50), which means that we can't look into everything that we'd like to immediately. We would however really like to meet anyone posting in this thread that is visiting the BETT exhibition. If you'd like to stop by and have a chat with us, please post a reply with the day that you're visiting or email us at [email protected]. We'd love the opportunity to thank the people involved in this thread personally for their feedback, and discuss any technical queries you have, as well as some of the technical aspects of this thread. We hope to see you at stand C50!

Further to our last post, we'd like to let everyone know that we have received a new version of the Mega Deal interface. This has been updated to include options to disable the Install, Shortcut and Info buttons visible in the Main Menu. We have not yet completed our full range of tests against this revised menu to ensure that this functionality is working, but we will keep users of the edugeek forums updated as this progresses.

There are a couple of other key combinations that are common across Sherston titles: Ctrl + M - Return to Main Menu (present in most Sherston titles) Ctrl + T - Access the Teacher Options (when at the Main Menu) Following feedback from the users of the edugeek forums, we are now investigating the possibility of adding an option in the Teacher Options that would hide the Install and Shortcut buttons from the menu. With this in mind, we are also wondering how people feel about the Info button that opens the user guide - would it be preferable if this was hidden as well? Any feedback regarding this would be gratefully received. Provided that we are able to arrange the development time for this, we will be pleased to offer the revised menu as a free of charge patch.

Would you be able to email screenshots of this behaviour to us at [email protected]? We'd be very interested to see this and attempt to resolve the behaviour.

It is possible to restrict installation and shortcut creation by turning on the teacher options password although it's perhaps not as intuitive as it should be. When the teacher options password is enabled, the Install and Shortcut buttons remain functional. However, for the installation to actually launch or for the shortcut to actually be created, the teacher options password must be entered. This is certainly something that we have noted and hope to be able to request in any future developments. Would you be able to confirm which programs you are experiencing these difficulties with? We'd be happy to try and troubleshoot these issues if you'd like.

Installation is still as per the enclosed instructions. There are no SCORM packages provided on the Sherston Resource Pack - but we have produced a number of packages covering Literacy, Numeracy and Science. These feature activities from some of our best-selling CD-ROM products and are sold as separate collections of packages. If you'd like more in-depth information on these, or to try them in the classroom, please call us on 01666 843224 or e-mail us at [email protected]. It's great to hear that this is working for you. Any feedback regarding the Sherston Resource Pack is much appreciated.

Hi there, Many thanks! We have specified a delivery date of September due to a combination of the time-scales that we are currently working to and the difficulties surrounding shipping to schools outside of term time. If you can provide us with an e-mail address and a mobile telephone number that we can contact you on, we will make a note of these details. In the event that stock becomes available we will be more than happy to contact you to confirm times when you are in school - but this will not be until late August at the earliest. There are seven titles that may be supplied on CD-ROM. These are: Alphabet Track Eye Track Idiom Track Number Track Phoneme Track Spell Track Word Track These SEMERC titles may be supplied on CD-ROM due to structural differences compared to Sherston titles. It is however worth noting that we are currently testing these as part of the hard drive and at present it looks likely that they will be supplied on the drive rather than on CD. Although we have developed MSI packages for RM CC3 networks, we are unable to supply MSI packages suitable for deployment via group policy at the moment. We do hope however that we are able to provide the SEMERC titles as part of the hard drive so that they are as easily accessible as the rest of the software. As always, if anybody would like to discuss any of the above or any technical queries related to our other products, then we can be contacted by telephone on 01666 843224 or by e-mail to [email protected] between the hours of 0830 and 1700 from Monday to Friday.

Hi there. I work for the Technical HelpDesk at Sherston Software and I hope I might be able to offer some comment and advice on some of the posts in this thread. We have now added the information to our website, in the News and the Products sections. There is a also a pdf with the information available here http://www.sherston.com/megadeal.pdf I suspect that the solution that you are referring to is some of the Sherston content that was offered on a caching server a few years ago. Technically, this new offer is a slightly different solution which has been designed for software deployment in one of the following ways: 1. Connecting the hard drive directly to a workstation and running software from the drive on a single user basis – it is worth noting however that this would be best done from a copy of the drive as running in this way would mean writing back pupil records to the drive that you would receive. 2. Using the hard drive to launch installers to install the software to the workstation or to the network. 3. Copying the entire contents of the drive to a network share and launching the menu system and software from the network. Whilst we have developed MSI packages for RM CC3 networks, we are unable to supply MSI packages suitable for deployment via group policy at this moment in time. However, because of the large range of titles provided on the drive, you’re likely to find that teachers won’t be using all of the titles all of the time – so it might be that you could package these as and when teachers request them. If anybody would like to discuss any of the above, or any technical queries related to our other products, then we can be contacted by telephone on 01666 843224 or by e-mail to [email protected] between the hours of 0830 and 1700 from Monday to Friday.

I work on Sherston's Technical Helpdesk so hopefully can add something here. We have used several installers over the years. Most titles over 3 years old can make use of the Sherston Network Installer CD. This is a separate utility that simply allows application data and save data paths to be specified. Anything released since 2004/05 has an installer on the product CD that does the same thing. A summary of which products use which installer is here http://shop.sherston.com/services/techsupport/PDF/FAQ/Compatibility.pdf I absolutely agree with the comments about wireless networks, our CD's can be bandwidth hungry. Our online services work extremely well across wireless networks however. We started making MSI's for RM CC3 about 3 years ago and they are fantastically popular. They're available separately from the "normal" product CD and have been designed to only work on RM CC3 networks. The network/drive paths for CC3 are hard coded in the installer which makes them an absolute breeze for non-technical staff to deploy (no need to modify the folder structure and no need to use the Application Wizard). It is true that we only make these MSI's freely available to customers with a site license. I'm happy to take feedback on what you would like from a generic MSI. Do you want to be able to specify the application data path and user save data? Or would you want the application data path to always be C:\Program Files\Sherston ? Michael, if you can contact us on [email protected] I'll see if I can get those 5 MSI's built and sent to you.