woody

We are using Its Learning. Very simple to pick up, they can set up SSO to your AD using ADFS. SSO to Live@Edu soon to become Office365. There are also plans to integrate the Office365 apps straight into the platform. After failing with two other paid for VLEs, this one has been a breath of fresh air. Of course, you need to do you homework to see what suites your school.

Looks like very light dusting at the moment: Farson Digital Watercams - Hi-def webcam on River Eamont, at Penrith

Hi I've been banging my head against a brick wall with 1 iMac out of 150 which refuses to take WGM preferences. Server and iMac both on 10.6.8. iMac bound to AD and OD (in that order) Tried the following: Re-imaging mac using Deploy Studio and same image used for all other clients. Clearing DNS (on windows DC) and re-adding records Clearing iMac from AD and OD and re-joining both. Applying policy in WGM on the individual Mac rather than through a group Clearing MCX cache Changing Mac name as part of re-image. Deleting contents of /Library/Managed Preferences Any other suggestions would be welcome Many thanks Mark

Can I just check on behalf of Simon that all you guys who plan to come are registering with Insight? Link is on Post #17 Thanks

Ok, I will use Chrome to register my colleagues as well but they have probably got 2 or 3 request from me!

Is anybody else having trouble with the register link? In IE the page just doesn't load. In Chrome, I get the register page which I fill out and then click on Submit Details, then next page tells me: 'You have encountered a bad link or a page that no longer exists.' Haven't got Firefox installed but just wanted to check first. Mark

Thanks dayzd I think I've figured it. The WGM settings were set up by a company as part of an Academy IT contract. This is how they have configured it: [ATTACH=CONFIG]15891[/ATTACH] I didn't notice the forward slash in the 'Allow applications within these folders' which obviously is allowing everything except those entries in the 'Dissalow' box. So I'll take this out and have a play to enable the correct applications. Thanks

Hi I've searched but can't find this specific question answered anywhere. We currently restrict applications via WGM, but this does not stop students bringing an app in on their flash drive and running it, either from the flash drive itself, or from the desktop after copying it. Has anybody come up with a solution for this? Ideally, I would like to restrict ALL aplications except those in the allow list. Many thanks Mark

Hi Simon just to add my support to this, we would be very interested in a tech fair. Not everybody from way up north can make it to the best events down south. So it would be nice to have something close to home. Thanks Mark

Hi we have had an unusual amount of reports of USB drives failing over the last few weeks - 8 or so. Some of these drives are flash memory, others are portable HDs but I was wondering if there could be a connection? My gut feeling is that staff are just not looking after them. All staff are using laptops of differing models, running Windows 7 enterprise. The usb media is their own and so is likely to be all different types. Failures include Windows asking to Format the drive when plugged in, or just not seeing the drive at all. Any thoughts/ideas? Thanks Mark

Hi I have a vista laptop that I have added to the W2k3 server. On the network, GPOs are set to redirect the documents folder on the desktop. XP laptops work great when the my docs folder is redirected and you select 'Make available offline'. But this Vista laptop just won't have it. The folder redirect works perfect. But when you select 'Make available offline in the properties of the 'Documents' folder, it synced the first time, but subsequent syncs fail almost immediately. In the details for sync errors, I get: $RECYCLE.BIN (\\server\share\username\My Documents) - An internal error occurred My Documents (\\server\share\username) - Unable to sync at this time. Please try again. RECYCLER (\\server\share\username\My Documents) - Unable to sync at this time. Please try again. Has anybody experienced this before? It should just work, but it doesn't and I can find anything on MS support or on the net. Ta

Yeah, thanks for all the advice guys. It is important to go over the figures at a basic level and see if that puts the management off the idea. Then if they come back and say 'do it' then you can start worrying about how it will work. I would have to bring in one of the big comps to manage the whole process, and put some redudancy into the package in case it doesn't work. We have already been stung once with a failing wireless network so need to get this one right from day one. Will keep you informed how things go.

Thanks for all your input guys. I mean, if we want good coverage for every classroom, how many APs are we looking at for each room to allow up to 30 devices to connect? Once they are on the network, it won't be too bad but my worry is the logging on.

We are moving towards being an academy for September and we have been asked to discuss the possibility of giving every child an Eee PC with windows on. As you know there are lots of issues involved with this such as battery life, security etc etc, but I just want to concentrate on the scale of wireless that will be needed for this. Here's the scenario. Each pupil will have a personal device such as the Eee PC. They will take it to every lesson. That means there will be 25-30 pupils accessing the network in one classroom. And there will be 60+ classrooms in use at any one time. Can we realistically provide enough coveridge and bandwidth to cope with that? What about roming? What about availability and probable conflict of channels? If you have faced this discussion before, or better still implemented such a system, I'd be very interested to know! I want to be positive about what they are suggesting, but I need to be realistic too. Thanks

Thanks for replies guys. I don't think it is quite the same as what Martin looked at psydii. I have had some success in that I have downloaded MSXML 6.0 from the MS website and installed it onto a PC with this problem, and it seemed to stop the BBC website asking for MSXML 5 when a pupils goes to the homepage. So just need to deploy MSXML 6.0 now and hopefully that will be the end of it

We have been having a problem for a while now where pupils are trying to access the bbc homepage and IE 7 is crashing. What is happening is that the BBC website for some reason is requesting that MSXML 5.0 be installed. This of course is restricted but it is causing the browser to crash. We have tried to install MSXML as administrator which works, but it is still wanting to install for each individual user. Any ideas?

Getting back onto how Matt from RM can help here. I have had the Eee to play with for a few days and I really like the simple interface, very similar to what Apple did in their early years with OS 7 onwards. And that is the direction I think the Eee could take a lesson from paerticularly for Education. Matt, I know that you have been interested in the wireless capabilities of the Asus and how to link it in with CC3. But please spare a thought for perhaps other schools who just want to use this as a standalone device. The way forward to build on the current distro is to allow easy password switching to the full desktop, and then have an app which allows easy setup, customization and lock down of the simple interface. File manager and the keyboard shortcut into the console needs to be removed from the simple desktop and there needs to be provision to easily add / remove icons from the tabs, and possibly allow to add new tabs in. To replace filemanager, there could be a 'My Documents' icon under the work tab, and here is where you could do something with linking in to networked documents if required. I'm sure this would be easy enought to do (I'm not a linux guy but would like to be one some day ) However, this would be really useful from primaries upwards, maybe even for home users who want to stop their kids messing about. Perhaps your guys could work with Asus on that one?

We too are buying vista and office 2007 licenses but downgrading to XP and 2003. I think a lot of schools are doing that. Which means that Microsoft's responce to becta: "Customers tell us that they are committed to Vista and Office 2007. You can see that in the sales figures," is a load of rubbish.

It takes on average here around 5 mins, little slower on older PCs, faster on the newer desktops. A number of things can affect install / upgrade speed: 1) Antivirus (sophos in particular when running run on-access scanning) 2) Age of your PC 3) Age of the Sims server 4) Speed of your network. 5) Peak usage times, ie just after an update when all the teacher's machines are updating too. Or at first login in the morning. Hope this gives you some pointers

It's in the menu manager in the Admin backend. Select Userguide, and hit delete top right.

I have had similar problems since updating to v3 of the console. More than half of the clients are greyed out and won't update or install from the console. I have always had the problem of clients not matching the policies even in v2 but with the clients that are connecting in v3, the policies keep failing to apply. I have been on to Sophos tech support and they have gone through the whole simple file share turned off, firewall turned off etc etc, but to no avail. However, if I manually install sophos from the share then the console picks it up and it works without any problems????? The other thing is, I thought simple file sharing was supposed to be off on xp PCs on a domain? All our PCs are XP and on the domain, yet on every PC I have looked at, simple file sharing is on???? Anyway, looks like we will be doing a lot of manual installs over the next week!

Ok, consultation document has come back from Place regarding questions asked on all range of matters. This one is interesting but not surprising: 70. Would there be any intention to buy in managed services? A. This is something the Academy will explore based on the chosen ICT solution, what is affordable and what meets our short term and long term needs for staff and students. So in otherwords, we are probably going to outsource but we won't own up to it yet. Has anybody been through this where the school / academy buys in managed services. Does the winning biddder then take on the current ict support staff? Things are getting scary at the moment

Just an update, they have now brought the date forward one year so we will be an academy in Sept 2008 rather than 2009!!! What's more, they are sending all staff and students from the mergind school over to our building, while their school get's knocked down and the academy built. That means we will have temp classrooms (portacabins) everywhere around the school, 40 we have been told. An absolute nightmare. I need to be careful what I say about it on a public forum so I'll leave it up to your imagination to reason out whether pupils' education will be effected by this or not. We still don't know what is happening to jobs. We have been told TUPE will apply and that the ICT support will stay in house for the 2 year interim period on our school site before every one moves across to the new buildings, but after that it's anybody's guess. My guess is that it will be oursourced. I plan to fight for that not to happen but whether they will listen will remain to be seen. I will keep posting as things advance. Who knows, might be useful for other people who have to go through this.

Thanks for that Uraken. I am meeting up with the other NM and his colleague next week so will hopefully start to talk about what we want to see.

Ok so it has been decided. We are to close along with another school and a new academy building is to be built. £22 mil on the building and £2.2 on ICT. We are to be amalgamated into the academy. Boy, the politics surrounding the whole thing is incredible. But my main concerns come from two angles: 1) A personal one. At an early stage we were told (this is both teaching and non-teaching staff) in a letter from the head-teacher that our jobs were safe and our terms and conditions and salary would be tuped over and fixed for three years. We recently had a meeting in which I found out that in actual fact, the three year thing was totally unsubstantiated, that Tupe would apply, but it had to be negotiated first. We are now trying to get UNISON to start the ball rolling on that one. 2) A concern for the ICT precurement. At the meeting, it was heralded that £2.2 mil is the most that an academy project has had to spend fo far on ICT. That's great! But I really hope that it does not get creamed by some IT provider who is rubbing their hands together and eyes are rolling round hitting jackpot $ $. A company called Place Grouphas been appointed to oversee the whole shebang, and they have got in some ICT consultants called NEXUS Associates who will help develope the vision for the academy. One of these guys is an ex Head of ICT teacher, one is a technical ICT person, and the other fits somewhere in between. They have met up with myself and the NM at the other school, to see what we have got now, and how they can make the transition smooth. Don't get me wrong, these guys seem good, but I am still unsure at the end of it all how much we as the people on the ground will be listened to. So uncertainty is definately the flavour of the month. I was wondering if anyone else on here has been / is going through the same situation, merging into an academy, and what has happend to your job, conditions. Also whether ICT has been developed from a clean slate successfully?