Richie1972

Thankfully my predecessor got rid of citrix. We're now pretty much running all P4 Celerons 2.66 or better and a few P3 733MHz base units knocking around. Just had a set of new servers installed too. Yes, the kids are still nuts - some should make a nice career move to prison, whilst rest are practising saying "Do you want fries with that?"

If you have 3Com switches in your network then download Network Supervisor from their site - gives all sorts of info - ip address, which ports are connected to switches, pcs, etc. Also shows loading and config problems - as well as nice labelled connection diagrams

I'm just having a version of each eg 7,8,9,10,11 and if any software causes a problem (not found one yet) then I'll try and edit the MSI

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but MS are PERMANENTLY making the visual express range (VB,C, etc) free I'm using Visual Studio Express and Visual Basic Express and find them to be excellent pieces of software

I've successfully pushed out Activstudio 1 and 2, PX3 and resources for all three via GPO. You need to edit the MSI - in the property section add ISSETUPDRIVEN and assign it a value of 1. As we have a site licence, we then push out the licence files to the pcs in the startup script, so I don't have to go to each machine to register it.

You can use an MSI editing program (Orca from MS is free) and change the product code, then you can install every version of ISScript on your pc - push it out through GPO, so that you don't have to push it out again with other apps

We've blocked bebo, meebo and so many others. We're running Websense, so using reporting tools in conjunction with AB Tutor control to identify websites to be aded - got a nice big list so far

We're currently using McAfee antivirus and it is crap (not using it through choice - it's paid for by LEA). We also have McAfee Antivirus Enterprise 8, which we briefly used on our servers - until it completely screwed up. We are temporarily using McAfe antivirus on servers until I can persuade the man who signs the cheques to buy the vastly superior Symantec Corporate for the servers. Due to the price of Symantec Corp I reckon we'll have to suffer with McAfee on the workstations though

GPO+scripting+RIS+IT staff who know what they are doing > ranger, RM CC, etc I'd say by a long way. A mahority of Ranger and CC are just prety frontends for stuff Win 2003 server can already do. I prefer to have control than leave it in the hands of expensive extra software. However, ranger, cc, etc do have their places in primary schools where there might not be someone technically minded

We were getting that problem with student accounts until we changed over to mandatory profiles - so all students get the same profile that has already been configured - the office 2003 install has also been transformed and there are adm templates in active directory. Staff still get the prompt first time they log in, but as they have roaming profiles they don't get it again, which is fine by me

I've just started designing my own web based system to handle helpdesk, resource requests, asset management, basic user tracking, user desktop and even deploying apps in conjunction with our RIS 2003 roll outs. It's still far from finished, but I'm tweaking and adding to it constantly - just added shutdown and wake on lan options, so seeing how that goes.