ChrisJ

It's a bit of a pain due to the way Facility holds the information. It's possible to get the information out of Facility through a good chunk of SQL work. But you're then not able to insert it into your SIMS database as you're not allowed to do direct work on it. Plus Facility holds Doctor names against each childs record, whereas SIMS holds a surgery name against each child. Doctors are then linked to the surgery. It would probably be cheaper to hire a temp to do manual entry than it would be to get a SQL bod to automate the process.

Even though Facility was originally an Irish product and still has a lot of core functionality based off Irish procedures

A few of the projectors in our classrooms are held in cages. Getting some new projectors and I'd like to just replace the mounting plate with an appropriate one to make use of the existing mount & wiring. However, there are no identifying markings on the cage and they were installed way before I was here. I've been informed they were purchased with the projectors through Tempus. So I'm hoping they might have used them elsewhere and a clue could come my way. Just being hopeful and trying to avoid installing a new mount

Skydive with it?

Probably not using the NetSupport system. When I was there and we had to connect to schools outside of the BGfL we used GoToAssist. I was never a fan of that system, but I do know the recently introduced Live Chat system can link with a remote support system. So there may be chances of that coming along. But gone will be the days of phoning up and saying "Here is my IP address, come have a look".

Just worth noting that if in iTunes you try to buy a free app before you create your account, it then lets you create an account without a payment option. You do not get this option if you go via the create Apple ID option, you need a form of payment. Odd, but it worked for me

At Link I did put the daily restart of ePortal services in at quite a few schools, but we never made it standard practice to do so. However, one of the first things I did when I started here was to put the scheduled tasks in place to restart the services Worth doing.

Birmingham schools are configured to load ePortal via IIS. Might be worth seeing if doing it via Tomcat makes a difference. Try http://schoolname.misportal.net:8080/ePortal and see what effect that has.

It is the strong leading trend and nobody can resist the charming of iPAD. The effect on iPAD is overwhelming in the human history.

I do find it amusing seeing a Chinese company taking legal action over copyrights and trademarks. Sent from my iPed

Painfully. But from what I remember there's some stuff in settings.xml (E:\Facility\eportal\Facility\ePortal\webapps\eportal\conf\settings.xml if you're a Birmingham school) that defines the different user types. You can create a login-type here and then define the user-rights below to say if they can go into assessment, etc. I never really had much luck with the settings in Controller, but tried not to play with it much as it often caused it to fall over playing with those settings. I might have a nose around tomorrow if nobody else gives any thoughts by then.

No takers then. Shall be "binned"

Anyone here attending either/both of the upcoming events Link2ICT are running? One on the 8th to show our options with Progresso or SIMS and then the winter conference thing on the 28th. First time for me on the recieving end of one of these events

When I was living with my ex she had my banking password, but no others. Changed it when we ended. We just had an issue here in school with a group of girls sharing each others passwords on a site called Stardoll where one girl had been sending nasty messages from another girls account to make her look bad. I could this sort of thing becoming a common scene if people aren't protective of their passwords. Also it turned out one of them had created multiple fake accounts to post positive messages about herself to make her look more popular.

Yep, that's why I'm seeing if I can send them to a better home before I look into arranging disposal

Got two 5.1 Promethean amps (AV-3016) where I think the caps have gone. One has the lovely buzzing twang noise when you power it up, the other makes no noise, so may be truely dead. No longer needed, so I don't fancy reliving my old GCSE electronics days trying to fix them. If anyone in the Birmingham area wants to come pick them up then send me a PM. You might be able to get some use out of them. Else they'll be going in the bin.

I was hoping their big education announcement the other week was going to address the lack of control for devices in a school environment. At a minimum I was hoping for the volume app purchasing scheme to come to the UK store. Was a bit of a fail announcement. New books and a weird online course thing that won't really suit most schools.

I've had a few courses with them. One where I went down to their place in Worcester and the others they came out to our facilities. Pretty good courses, but like all training it can start to feel a little slow if you already have a good knowledge of parts of the material being covered.

We've just got one of these - NoteSync in NoteCase Fun to watch all the devices power up one at a time.

hypnotic

What it's like to own an Apple product - The Oatmeal Though I will say I did treat myself to a MacBook pro just before Christmas and find it to be one of the nicest laptops I've used.

Currently looking making the move away from Zimbra to either Live or Google here too. With Google offering the mobile device management as part of their package, I may be tempted to try that one. Not heard many horror stories compared to the pains of Zimbra that have been about.

This is more of a reintroduction than an introduction. I used to post here occasionally when I worked for the LEA support team (Link2ICT), but when I left the company I was more of a lurker as my job wasn't in education any more. However, I've recently been offered the role of ICT Manager in a school in Birmingham and will be starting that in January, so I thought I'd start posting here again. It should be quite interesting being on this side of things having experienced it from the support side. And hopefully those who remember me from my Link days won't be too harsh on me.

I printed off the WAR picture and stuck it up next to the service desk area. You can tell I'm making the most of my final days

The Link2ICT setup is the same as the Serco setup, with the exception that the option to only allow connections over https is enabled and the 403.4 error message that tells you that is changed to a redirect to point to the https side of things. The certificates installed for all Birmingham schools are wildcards for *.misportal.net so you will get certificate warnings when attempting to load pages via the IP address.