SimonHooker

This definitely came up last year. Was very annoying as I had, the week before, ordered another 10 certificates because I was bored of buying them one by one, all 3 year certificates which have since been discontinued. If it were viable I would definitely have looked to switch over to Let's Encrypt and may yet do so. As it stands Comodo certificates will do nicely certainly JRA

I've had a lot of success making custom feeds for FullCalendar (https://fullcalendar.io/) and have also seen some nice calendars done using Calendarize it! for Wordpress ( https://calendarize.it/ ). If you are already using Wordpress, that might be a good starting point. Other than that you may need to look to Firefly. I know a lot of schools also use SOCS for their calendar as I've had to import data from there previously. I have no idea whether that is sufficient for your purposes though.

Hi John Good news, clearAfter is optional. If you just omit it then I would expect it to not clear. Alternatively if you are looking to lock it down between 0800 and 1600 you have 2 options. 1: an task that locks it down at 0800 every day, clearing after 8 hours ( clearAfter=28800 ). Alternatively, you have the default to have it locked down and then have a policy which unlocks it at 1600 for a reasonable time frame. You could go for the full 16 hours 1600-0800, however I assume it's reasonable to assume that there won't be students playing games at 1am? So maybe just have a task which executes at 1600 which unlocks for, for example, 6 hours ( giving game time up to 2200 ), so a clearAfter of 21600. That way in the morning it will be back to being disabled. Something like that anyway.

Hi John. I'm not familiar with Zuludesk specifically, but their documentation seems to have plenty of info and a sample in there already for Javascript or PHP - https://api.zuludesk.com/docs/. The JS one just requires that you have jQuery available ( Download jQuery | jQuery / https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/#jquery ). You could using that make a simple HTML page which exists solely to run Javascript in a browser. A scheduled task would then just need to load that file up in a browser or something along those lines. If the API is web-accessible you could get more fancy, i.e. have an AWS Lambda function which does basically the same thing on a schedule. I'm not sure if this is of much help to you but the docs might help you on the right way. If you have an example attempt which doesn't seem to work, feel free to post it up on here ( with any credentials removed ) and I can try to help you there

It might be that finding a system to work as you wish in this regard might be tricky. One of our schools was looking to do the same - confidential notes etc - and in the end we ended up creating a system for confidential pupil notes to accommodate that. Overall it's probably better to look outside of the MIS as it would likely be easier to lock it down independent of how the MIS operates and whoever has elevated permissions within the MIS, assuming they shouldn't necessarily have elevated access to notes.

I've also been able to import timetables from Progresso SOAP API and from iSAMS Batch API so there are some methods out there for other MIS's. The main headache I had when integrating these datasets into our product is, like most things, every MIS has structured the data slightly differently so they all take a bit of massaging to fit into the structure I would prefer.

We use AWS heavily. We've only had detectable outages during planned maintenance / update periods. No downtime in the last few years has been down to Amazon. The only time we ever really get downtime is usually down to shortcomings in how our cluster handles nodes restarting. Relating to the latest security issues, in the end this even only resulted in having to reboot a single EC2 instance and then not a vital one. As mentioned by Wave9_Lee, the key issue is that the cost can easily creep up. We benefit from the flexibility and ability to scale up more easily than if we provisioned our own hardware combined with being able to use their various products to reduce how much time we spend on looking after infrastructure. It does mean keeping an eye on the bills though and making sure we aren't just scaling up for the sake of it. Compared to something self-hosted I would say that a decent cloud hosted solution would be more reliable however if looking at something primarily aimed at internal use that does rely on having a stable internet connection of course as already mentioned. But that's 1 moving part to have to worry about instead of having to worry about that on top of the infrastructure.

Looks like good fun, up to #5 so far just doing it in the console with Javascript

I work on a similar system and we also email the amendments at this time. Like you though I have concerns over the security of this as when it gets to email you're essentially sending identifiable information over an unencrypted channel i.e. email. We're looking to change the system so that the changes are securely stored and accessed via an admin tool which can in turn export rather than transmitting anything over email. We've already done this for most other parts of the system that used to email identifiable data and haven't come up against any real opposition so I don't see why Firefly wouldn't be able to do similar. It's in the name of security after all! So in summary, I think you're right to be concerned. I'd say at least ensure it gets logged as a feature request. If it must notify, I'd say it should notify that some user(s) have requested changes but without any identifiable information, with a link to the appropriate page within Firefly where the changes can then be securely handled.

Certainly not elegant, and in Chrome seems to ignore the 0.5s between switches so it just goes straight to 10! Ultimately to achieve a countdown/up/most animation in the users browser without them refreshing the page you will have to use Javascript unless you want to do something from 10-15 years ago involving barely-supported Flash or cunningly timed animated gifs. Neither of which I would recommend even contemplating.

The short answer might simply be that fonts in emails aren't universally supported. There's more information here which doesn't relate to GPO but more to using fonts in emails : https://litmus.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-web-fonts For day to day emails I really wouldn't bother trying to change the font. Or are you talking about the font used to render in your client?

I wasn't aware of Timely, looks pretty good. We've previously made use of Calendarize it! for some of our Wordpress sites too, also provides very configurable calendar options. If you fancy trying to DIY, then so far the best JS library I've found for calendars is FullCalendar ( https://fullcalendar.io/ ) - very extendable and able to be reconfigured. I have a feeling it might also be the one that SOCS use or have used in the past.

Hi Lissydoll4, I responded to you regarding getting attendance data over on http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/186445-progresso-api-call-get-next-years-registration-group-pupils.html - to the best of my knowledge the SOAP API does allow you to get previous years data. I have to admit getting useful reports data out is probably one of the harder aspects of working with the SOAP API but I've also managed to get something working there. If you are using the SOAP API and would like to discuss it then send me a DM, and hopefully I can point you in a useful direction - trying to find exactly the right endpoints in the SOAP API is somewhat hit and miss!

Hi Lissydoll4, You can get attendance data from the SOAP API by hitting Attendance.svc GetAttendanceData. You might also need to link that together with some data from Miscellaneous.svc GetEventTypeLookup to fully determine what is going on. I have also had to make use of data from ManageAcademicYear.svc GetActiveAcadmiecYear to figure out term breaks and globally scoped absences i.e. school closures. Afraid I can't advise on the REST API, haven't got around to working on that yet.

I don't suppose any of you have made much use of the REST API yet have you? My current integration with Progresso utilises the older slower SOAP API, contemplating moving whatever I can over to the REST API so was curious to hear if anyone else had used it yet!

If it's for the photography group, reducing the file size would also reduce the quality quite significantly if they are intended to be printed again - might be better in that instance to look to options like Google Suite as already mentioned to remove space used as being a concern

A QR code is just a way of representing a string graphically. I put together some information about turning any string you want into a QR code here : http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/188682-video-played-back-printed-qr-code.html#post1619701 I would advise storing the data in a more scalable solution such as an SQL database of some sort if you are looking at storing data for an entire school on a regular basis. Additionally I'm not sure that storing more than a UUID in the QR code is advisable as otherwise you give anyone that gets that badge means to find that students ID and Name. I'm not sure if that is important but it might be. A QR code is still essentially a string stored in plain text. It is not secure at all. You may as well just have identifiable data printed right underneath it! Additionally it's easily forged should a student wish to impersonate another.

If you are looking to just generate QR codes from a string that can be easily done. I use something like that to generate MFA Authenticator strings recently, not that anyone is using it yet but hopefully soon! I did so using a NodeJS package called qrcode ( https://github.com/soldair/node-qrcode ) - this has some examples on the site. A simple node script that will return you a base64-encoded image is as follows: if ( process.argv.length < 3 ) { return; } const string_to_encode = process.argv[2]; var QRCode = require( 'qrcode' ); return new Promise( function( resolve , reject ) { QRCode.toDataURL( string_to_encode , function( err , data_url ) { resolve( data_url ); } ); } ) .then( function( data ) { console.log( data ); } ); You can then run this using the following: node ./your-script-name.js "some text goes here" And then that will give an image which youcan display pretty simply, for example ...response from node script... i.e. data:image/png;base64,somebase64encodeddatagoeshere I hope this is of help, if this sounds like it might help and you would like a hand then feel free to give me a shout and I can see what I can do about helping you getting this usable for you edit: wow this forum destroyed the code formatting! hopefully fixed!

Why do you have stylesheet.php as a php file instead of a static CSS file? I can only assume it's because individual users are intended to be able to do customisations? If that's not the case, consider just having a static .css file instead - too often I see static assets being served by PHP etc when a static text file is more efficient If you are looking for templating then have a look at LESS or SASS, as then you can use variables in the CSS file and just generate the final CSS file at the end, including minification etc. to make it faster for users to load.

Fundamentally what you are doing is pivoting, which MS SQL does support I believe - might be worth having a read if you fancy a more elegant solution https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177410(v=sql.105).aspx

I have to admit I was thinking of the older API - haven't yet had much of a chance to go through the REST API, had rather forgotten all about it! The REST one at least has the Apiary docs which makes it a lot easier to consume. Here's a relevant link courtesy of Google : http://docs.progresso.apiary.io/#reference/behaviour

The problem with making this kind of system is that the kind of permission structures involved tend to quickly go from "Just between two people" to all sorts of complications to ensure appropriate use. I've created this kind of system previously and can't honestly say I've seen much within the Progresso API to indicate that the full functionality you are looking for is there. Admittedly the Progresso API has far too many endpoints for me to know them all by heart, especially when they aren't all documented fully as far as I can tell!

Hi there, I've had a lot of .... fun implementing this functionality. The main problem that you will come across is that you have no control over how frequently or infrequently Google polls the calendar feeds. Typically it seems to poll about once every 24 hours which is far from ideal. You will struggle to get it fully-live. There are solutions out there that can help you with this but you will still find yourself up against how infrequently Google imports the data. That caveat aside, there is an undocumented method of requesting that Google add a calendar, which is that you send the user to the following URL (if you click this you will see it try to add the dummy URL as a calendar): https://calendar.google.com/calendar/render?cid=http://www.yourdomain-here.com/some/link/to/an/ics/file.ics Here's where it gets a little complicated. First up, Google does not accept a https URL there. It will successfully redirect http to https though so don't worry about that if your webserver is set up to properly redirect. Secondly, especially if you have any url parameters, make sure that your cid parameter is properly URI encoded. Finally, Google Calendar likes to just not do anything if the ical feed does not validate. Expect to spend a long time tweaking your feed to get it to validate just right for google. If you search around you can find plenty of online tools to validate your data though. I recommend using at least a couple of them, as none of them seem wholly reliable however if you can get your feed to validate in more than one you're probably on the right tracks. This method used to be documented but all aforementioned documentation seems to have disappeared from the internet a couple of years ago. There is a second way which can potentially work but relies on users clicking the right buttons in their browser. If you direct the user to webcal://www.yourdomain-here.com/some/link/to/an/ics/file.ics then, depending on their browser settings, that will get picked up by their calendar software. There's also an option for Outlooks web client but that's another story. Good luck!

Hi Davidson, Unfortunately trying to advise based on just that is not particularly possible, CSS relies a lot on context. The declaration you have there means that all iframes regardless of context will be 100% wide, 20% high, have no border, and be relatively positioned. This means that the sizing of the iframe in modern browsers is based on the parent block-level element. Additionally you do not specify which version of IE it works in - things that work in IE 8, 9 etc do not always work in IE11, Edge If you are able to provide any additional information i.e. the markup around the iframe, something that can be used to reproduce the problem then that would be best - might be worth chucking some stuff into https://jsfiddle.net/ to get an example up, or provide some screenshots to show what you are trying to achieve ( with anything sensitive suitably censored of course )

Hi there, I'd be happy to answer any questions, though would maybe need confirmation over how much I can or can't answer as mso are not sponsors on this forum. I am the the lead developer on My School Portal. In short, My School Portal exports data from MIS databases and other third parties into our own secure database which is then used to power our API and front end, adding some functionality in here and there.