skunk

Having the overlap is fine, BUT, if you are using profiles / AM and have promoted your students then anything you have set up which has the end period in the next academic year (e.g. reporting period) will show students from two year groups. Aside from that it has not caused me any further problems.......yet.

Ok, silly question, what is the difference between the Lite, Pro and Enterprise editions.

Just worked out they changed the IP address of the smtp server. Would normally have the DNS name in but had put in the IP when DNS failed for a few days last year. All happy now.

Not been able to send outbound emails since last Thursday (scheduled Maintenance), anyone else in Cumbria seeing this? We use our own mail server, not the CLEO webmail system. Inbound are fine.

IIS Webdav should work. We use Sun's Secure Global Desktop remote access solution with a terminal server on the other end. Home PC's don't get to access the directories directly.

I agree with BECTAs overall sentiment, there are problems in the MIS market and here are a few: There is nothing out there that is significantly better than the offering from Capita that would make me wish to go through the pain of switching MIS. Is it perfect, no far from it, but then I don't pay an annual six figure sum for the software. You pay peanuts......... Secondly I imagine that most of the SIMS development budget goes into the ridiculous changes forced upon Capita (and all MIS suppliers) by the DCSF. How a startup company could cope with that I don't know. I am fully expecting a termly census on toenail growth to turn up shortly. On a positive note however, the interoperability between my Bromcom server and SIMS server seems to be going fine. I would love to be proved wrong on my first point and if someone can point me at a better (by a large margin) solution you will have my eternal gratitude.

Will be "forgetting" to call Stone next time we have a large order then. I would hate to be accused of funding "research" that supports what is quite obviously a bad idea. How can the economics of outsourcing work? If you are a company with a sales force, personnel department, share holders, premises, etc then you need to pay these people out of the money you charge to schools, so not all of the school's money is going on IT services. They are funding all these other people as well. Is that good value? Well at least you know that toner will be changed at 4am for you, when you have purchased 24hr support from an outsourcing company.

This may help. http://lh5.ggpht.com/_U8sQHzBuECE/SyDtXl27WNE/AAAAAAAAABw/dK-D7HG-e94/s160-c/Edugeek.jpg Although not me when Mandy sees it again.

I'm all for online testing. All we need is the funding to achieve a dedicated suite of 200 pcs that only get used during exams and mocks. A permanent facility just for exams with the requisite 1.5m between workstations. (with side booths for the students who need readers / writers / huggers / etc). Black Box servers supplied by the Exam boards, that they manage remotely to host the exams software locally. I am not attempting to take the mick with these suggestions, they are very serious. That is the only way that online testing in all subjects would not significantly impact on the use of ICtin the rest of the school.

Sivadam, if you wish to see the reason why the Autumn Release is being delayed then you are quite welcome to visit our site.

I have issues with both companies mentioned on this forum as we use products produced by both of them and are generally charged a great deal by both for very little. The idea that SIMS is BEST, just made me shower my monitor with tea, really? Really? REALLY? If it is, then heaven help us all........now I am going to go away and cry that this may in fact be the reality!

You will need to tidy the addresses first as this causes a lot of the problems with duplicate contacts in the first place. I seem to remember that tidying the addresses may have resolved some of the dupliacte contacts, but couldn't guarantee that.

Why are you not going on the webcam this year? Could this be the reason http://lh5.ggpht.com/_U8sQHzBuECE/SyDtXl27WNE/AAAAAAAAABw/dK-D7HG-e94/s160-c/Edugeek.jpg

We had no end of permissions problems on the shares when we moved to Win 2K8 32 bit. When installing the server, put the actual file paths, not the mapped drives. You only need to use the mapped drives for the client install. SIMS is not supported on R2 and there is no release schedule for this to be supported, they are currently just investigating it. Windows 7 should be supported in the client environment with the Spring 2010 release.

Judging by the amount of conjecture and loud sound of no-one who is post-BSF complaining I would say that any gagging, contractural or not, is working a treat for the MSPs / Schools. Would you slag off the people who are paying you, on a public forum? My experiences are

We are currently operating a 5 year cycle for desktops and 3 years for staff laptops. We now buy pcs with a 5 year warranty (thanks Stone) and then have them recycled at the end of their life. This will probably change and we will press the oldest into use as thin clients (edubuntu). Staff laptops may have to be squeezed out to 4 or 5 years as more staff are using them regurlarly unless the SLT wish to give me a larger budget.......*hint* Servers are also on a 5 year replacement plan, cannot afford another blade enclosure/SAN for another 4 years anyway.

If Microsoft try to sue, the distros will claim the patent is invalid, years of legal rubbish will follow, lawyers will get rich and we in the UK won't care because you cannot patent software in this country.

We are/were having a similar issue. If you place the exported fireworks html and image files inside the dreamweaver site with the HTML file in the same directory as the file you aer importing into and the images into a folder one level down in an directory named images and then run the import it seems to work. Dreamweaver doesn't seem to copy the files into the correct loaction when you run the import, they must be there before you import.

You should have a policy that shows the person running SIMS who should have access to what. I would start with saying no one has accesss to anything, then add the permissions that they require to perform their job. IIRC if you create your own permissions groups then with regards to Capita support, you are on your own.

You could try some of the suggestions on the supportnet site. The article covers lots of ways of increasing performance: KB89234 Loads of useful stuff there. We are using a similar setup to you, but have got 4Gb of memory on the virtual machine. I will be running through the performance increasing measures listed over half term.

The second design is cleaner, but not great. The first one as others have said is too much dead space. What I will say is that whatever the design it must be easy to update pages or else no-one will bother. Static HTML pages are unmangeable in the end. Most CMS, be it Joomla/Drupal/Sharepoint/Alfresco should be easy to train staff to use once set up correctly.

We are replacing our leads with hardwearing cable, so that when it is dragged accross the floor/rolled over by the trolley/kicked...etc it doesn't cause the casing to break and expose the wires. Also sticking warning signs all over the place about turning off before unplugging. Students do not touch the trolley's plug so no need for the Blue type plug. Whilst the plug can/should be an RCD type, this does not stop charge held in the trolley kicking back if the cable is defective. Daily visual checks for the poor science techs who use it as well.

Go Jenson, stunning drive, great season, cannot wait for next race, see what a non-pressured Jenson can achieve. Feel sorry for Rubens, bad luck just heaps on the guy. Well done Brawn. Can't wait for next season, politics and all!

Is the climate changing? well yes obviously, lots of graphs, bearded people shouting, politicians smarming, so something is up. Is the climate getting worse? Frankly who knows, and for whom, the human race is about the most versatile animal on the planet (cockroaches don't count they piggy back on us), as a race I think we will survive. Are we to blame? Who knows, but since we stopped letting CFCs into the atmosphere it has got cooler, the CFC reduction allows more ozone to exist in the upper atmosphere, which is a greenhouse gas, which will heat up the climate, f*cksocks this is quite complex. I don't believe people who get quite so religous about anything. Should we do anything? Well yes, whether we are causing climate change or not, our resources are finite and I for one would like my grandchildren's children to be able to eat. So anything we can do to reduce the strain we are putting on our resources is good. Otherwise pure economics will screw us right royally, when there are three lumps of coal left, will the Chinese sell them to us. Unlikely I think.

I hope this means that no-one has installed CS4 in their network as opposed to damning idictment of the teachers using the stuff