David44

I did get this working in the end. The line that worked for us was... ClassWiz Emulator Subscription for fx-570EX_991EX Ver.2.01_b.exe /l0 /s /v"/qn ISX_EID=XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX LOCALE=0" which if it isn't the same as dmason2 posted, is certainly based on it, so thanks for that. Just as importantly, if not more so, to uninstall silently... ClassWiz Emulator Subscription for fx-570EX_991EX Ver.2.01_b.exe /x /s /v"/qr" Anyway, that's not why I'm calling. It now seems that we need to install the networked version as we have more users than we have standalone licenses for. We don't want to put this on a server running important software nor do we want to spin up a server just for this so my idea was to put the server component on the Maths Office PC which is likely to be switched on whenever anyone wants to use the emulator in a classroom. So, my questions are... Has anyone done exactly this? Put the server component on to a Windows 10 PC? Does it work? Secondly, does the server component run as a service or does someone need to be signed in to the PC and have the server component running interactively for the licensing to work? Thanks. David.

Hi, We have a number of standalone laptops that we plan to use for exams. These laptops will just have ExamWritePad installed as well as all the junk a standard install of Windows Education comes with. I'd like to lock this down so that students can only get in to ExamWritePad. Probably not in a 'kiosk' mode so they literally can only get in to ExamWritePad, it will be helpful if they can see Explorer to check that their work has been saved but not be able to see/browse the c: drive for example. These laptops will not connect to the network so we can't use AD and Group Policy. The laptops will be built from an image (and rebuilt after every exam). We had a similar set up a few years ago with Windows 7, which was locked down using GPEdit. It worked quite well but it was a lot of work to set up and it locked down the administrator user too (although the administrator account had access to gpedit of course so could lift restrictions temporarily, still annoying though). Is there a better way to lock down local accounts?

I'm not sure you can blame the users for the mess that ESS have created. People aren't used to using an invite system and it doesn't make sense for a system that they all have to use anyway. It's not clear why ESS insist on using it. Normally you can see the logic in their decisions, in as much as you can see how it benefits ESS, even if it makes things worse for users but I don't see how using an invite system benefits anyone in this case. Not the users who need to wait for the invite, not the school who have to send each one manually, not ESS when the system doesn't work properly and schools need to raise tickets. It's hardly surprising that users just go to Options Online and try to use it. This is how decent, properly thought out websites work. Onboarding is a solved problem when it comes to online systems, you go to a website at a time that is convenient to you, enter your email address and click on the link to sign in and/or create an account. Another option would be to simply sign in with an existing account (Google, Microsoft etc). This is a workflow that people are familiar with. If ESS have a good reason to change this tried and tested process then they need to explain it to users. If users are seeing 'a blank screen with just the purple bar across the top', that is not the sign of a well designed and thought out system. It is not possible to write simple instructions for users either. When they click on the link in the 'invitation' they are often taken to a screen asking them for a username and password (it's the SIMS ID user and password it's asking for, students aren't going to have SIMS ID accounts). Any instructions have to therefore start with, "Ignore this and scroll down to the button hidden at the bottom of the page and click that instead". Again, this is not the sign of a well designed or simple system although I can see this benefits ESS as it tricks students in to needlessly signing up for a SIMS ID account. A decent system would allow the school to give students a link, they click the link and following the onscreen instructions (NOT a separate document that they won't read) are able to sign in and use the system without having to be given separate instructions. Thank you for confirming that it works in an even less intuitive way without SIMS Student. Currently in our case, when they click on accept invitation and select the third party to sign in with (Google in our case) they are taken to SIMS Student which has a link to SIMS Options. It sounds like you are saying that if we don't use SIMS Student, when they go through the registration process they are left at a dead end 'Invitation accepted' screen and aren't told what to do next (they actually need to go to a completely different URL, so hardly guessable). It really is a horrible system, so stressful for the students.

Hi, We currently use SIMS Student and Options Online. At the moment, students are sent an invitation from by us using admin.sims.co.uk, they go through the registration process which then takes them to SIMS Student. Within SIMS Student they see a link to Options Online. We are looking in to dropping SIMS Student but keeping Options Online. What is the workflow for students in that scenario? They receive an invitation, they go through the registration process and are then taken to...? The obvious answer would be to Options Online but I have a nasty suspicion that they would still be taken to SIMS Student and told that 'Your school doesn't subscribe to this service' or something similar. Can anyone at a school who uses Options Online but not SIMS Student confirm either way? Thanks David.

The window opens, then closes and then nothing else happens. The window displays literally what I showed in the screenshot, a logo. We are attempting to use the standalone version at the moment and those are the license key(s) we have. I didn't want to resort to using the MSI as it's not officially supported and according to their FAQs, doesn't exist. Although I haven't had a reply to the support ticket I raised earlier yet so I don't know how much support is worth. I found I could obtain the MSI by running the .exe and then looking in %tmp% while it was running but that /a flag is useful to know too. When I raised the support call, I was asked to upload the licsense.ini file from C:\Program Files (x86)\CASIO\ClassWiz Emulator Subscription\fx-570EX_991EX Emulator. I don't have such a file. I tried to create a blank file with that name to see if that would resolve the issue but it did not. Is anyone able to show me their license.ini file or at least the structure of it. I assume it's in plain text and I also assume it's created when the program is licensed, so I may be able to create it manually if I knew what it was meant to look like. Thanks.

Thanks for that. I am currently just at the stage of running the command manually to check it installs silently and activates. I haven't made any kind of package for it yet. I tried your command line on a fresh PC and I get the same issue, it appears to install correctly but when launching the app, it just displays that odd window from my first post for a second or two before closing. I'm starting to think this isn't an install issue but something else, not sure what yet though. I might contact Casio and see if they offer any kind of support for it. One of those annoying things that should take 15 minutes tops but ends up taking a day or more.

Our Maths department has asked for this to be installed. https://education.casio.co.uk/download-emulator-cw Is anyone already using it? The instructions seem rather confused about version numbers and command line arguments. I have downloaded 'ClassWiz Emulator Subscription for fx-570EX_991EX Ver.2.01_b.exe' which says it is version 2.01.0020. The instructions mention a procedure for version 2.01.2000.000 or higher and separate instructions for version 2.01.0000 or lower. As this was downloaded yesterday, I am assuming it is the latest version, so I am going with the version 2.01.2000.000 or higher instructions but these seem wrong anyway. The instructions for a silent install say to install it with installer.exe ISX_EID=XXX-XXX-XXX LOCALE=1033 This doesn't work, it is not silent (why would it be, there is nothing in the command line to suggest it would be) and complains of an invalid EID. I have managed to get it to seemingly install silently with this line... installer.exe /S /V/qr /VISX_EID=XXX-XXX-XXX /VLOCALE=1033 but when opening it, an odd screen appears... it contacts https://casio.prod.sentinelcloud.com/ems/loginByEID.xml (I can see this on the firewall, doesn't appear to be blocked) and then closes. It's worth mentioning that the trial version does work when installed manually but once the software is installed using the command line above, even uninstalling it and installing it manually causes the software to behave in the same way, i.e. open a window with a logo I don't recognise and then close. So, is anyone using this? How do you install it? Did you encounter the above issues?

Seems to be two different issues as this thread is now a few days old. We are experiencing the Senso issue (as we use Senso) but that only started happening today. Me and my colleague normally get email alerts from Senso about issues. Neither of us got an email about this issue and have therefore wasted a good part of the morning trying to diagnose this. We removed the Senso extension from a couple of test users and the problem was immediately resolved. It was only then that we checked http://service.senso.cloud/and found out that they knew about the issue from at least 10am (senso.cloud | Service Status) . Did anyone else not get an alert from them this morning?

So, what happens if you enter =(E1/D1)*100 in cell F2?

Just checked, the CC4 package we created uses a .exe file (GoogleDriveFSSetup.exe, but it's an old package from before the rebrand so your .exe might be different) with --silent as the only command line argument. It's probably time we had another look at it and install a newer version by default. It does upgrade automatically which was the cause of another issue, when it upgraded it used to make a new folder so you'd have it installed in c:\program files\google\1.0 or something similar and then the new version would installed in c:\program files\2.0 and so the CC4 shortcuts wouldn't work. Someone on here wrote a Powershell script, Google Filestream Launcher that worked around that issue but I have a feeling that may not be needed any more.

Does the user signing to CommandReporter have the permission to see the missing fields in SIMS?

Aren't YouTube Shorts the same as normal videos with a different URL? This is a short... This is the same video... If you take the video ID of a blocked video and construct a short URL, are you saying that it is no longer blocked?

Are the students being redirected to https://www.sims-student.co.uk/ (which you don't use?) after signing in, if so, what if they manually go to https://www.sims-options.co.uk/ after signing in? If you go to https://admin.sims.co.uk/#/options/permissions do the students have a tick in the students box? If not, tick each student individually because ESS think that's acceptable.

We don't use SIMS Teacher app but I do subscribe to the service status page on the ESS website and there was an alert earlier for this issue. See here... https://customer.support-ess.com/csm?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0037319

I don't remember. I expect we already allowed E,F,G as it was possible before the days of Google Drive that some users may have connected USB sticks, digital cameras and/or memory card readers so they would have used these early drive letters for those.

No, but it's not that difficult to sign in. We have Google Drive Desktop open when they sign in. If they are already signed in to Google, this just mounts the G: drive silently in the background. If they are not signed in to Google, they get a prompt to sign in to Google, which they can do in the browser so if they are already signed in in the browser it's just a matter of selecting the correct Google account, no typing involved and then the G: drive gets mounted.

We use RM CC4 and Google Drive File Stream (now called Google Drive Desktop). We just created our own package for it, it's just an MSI IIRC. We also don't use RM Unify which I believe is the online platform you refer to.

Can I ask how you got your CC4 machines running 1909? Did you rebuild them or upgrade existing 1809 PCs to 1909 via Windows Update? We are trying to get our machines on to 1909 via Windows Update and although the Windows 1909 update is installed, the PCs are not restarting to complete the process even when they are on 24/7 with no one signed in. Signing in to the PC, going to Windows Update and clicking 'Restart now' works but isn't practical with ~250 PCs.

Odd that this is coming up now. We first had reports of this (or something very similar) six months ago. A user was pasting a URL to a Google Doc in to a Word (2019) document, when they clicked the link in the Word document they were taken to this page https://support.google.com/drive/answer/6283888. Is that the page that everyone else is seeing now? Interestingly, if you use tinyURL or something similar and paste that URL in to the Word document, it works, the link goes to Tiny URL which then redirects to the Google Doc's URL and it opens. I just checked and we still have this issue but since only one user reported it, we haven't been actively looking in to it. My guess is that when the user clicks on the link in the Word document, Word fetches the URL. Since Word isn't a supported browser, the link redirects to the one telling the user to update their browser.

We have been seeing something similar when we have links to a Google Doc within a Word Document.

One of our mock exams coincided with a Google authentication outage so candidates couldn't even sign in to ChromEx to start the exam. Google outages are very rare so I think we were just unlucky but it is another thing that can go wrong and that you might need a plan for. If half the schools in the country were using ChromEx and there is a technical issue, the exam boards/JCQ would release a statement telling schools how they are going to handle it and you will probably be okay. If you are one of a handful of schools using it, you are going to be very much on your own. I expect a lot of schools used to do what we did, use old staff laptops for exams but if the school has gone 100% Chromebook then than is not an option and the laptops being used for exams are getting older and less reliable each year.

We have had an issue with Chrome Notifications for some time. It seems we can either allow notifications from all sites or deny notifications from all sites whereas what we want to be able to do is allow users to decide for themselves, i.e. a site will have to ask permission which the user can allow or deny before it is able to show notifications. I have raised this with RM but I don't seem to be getting anywhere. Do you have RM CC4? Do Chrome notifications work for you? This is a good site to test with... https://www.bennish.net/web-notifications.html This is what I have said to RM All websites can currently display notifications in Google Chrome by default. Users should be prompted to allow or deny notifications from each site but this is not happening. Checking the settings for each site, Notifications are set to 'Allow' and this can not be changed (see images below). The global Chrome setting says "Sites can ask to send notifications" but this is not happening (see image below). The Google Chrome policy for this usertype in RMMC seems to be set correctly (see image below) and is not contradicted by global registry settings in RMMC (see images below). We want all sites (apart from a handful) to ask the user before being allowed to display notifications. See images below for how this works on a standalone/non-CC4 PC. As you can see from the screenshots, the user is not signed in to Chrome so these settings are being enforced by AD/Group Policy/CC4. rather than Google. For reference, the issue is the same if users do sign in to Chrome.

The problem with ChromEx is that it doesn't quite comply with the letter of the JCQ's Instructions for Conducting Exams (https://www.jcq.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ICE_21-22_FINAL.pdf) so you need a brave Exam Officer or member of SLT to say, we are doing it this way anyway. It could be argued that... rules out Chromebooks completely if you comply with the literal meaning of the rule. is another one. Few schools are going to have CBs connected to printers or have the means to save a document to a portable storage medium. It would be so much easier if JCQ rewrote the rules to be less PC specific. The above rules could be replaced with "Students should not have access to any resources not made available as part of the exam" and "The exam script must be printed at the end of the exam and signed by the student" instead of all the nonsense about intranets and portable storage medium. It's not 1999 any more!

Same question, a year later. If it's not possible to make it an attached document suitable for SIMS Parent/SIMS Student, does anyone know if it's possible to send out the Exams Statement of Entry to each student via InTouch?

If you go to https://admin.sims.co.uk/ Options> Permissions, do the students who should be signing in have a tick in the student column? Good luck if they don't, you need to tick each one individually.