David44

I assume some schools are using this for real exams. We have used it with Chromebooks for recent mock exams but our Exams office are concerned that it doesn't quite meet the requirements set out by the JCQ ICE document (https://www.jcq.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ICE_21-22_FINAL.pdf) and I tend to agree. I am looking at section 14.25 (page 30) of the linked document. I don't think ChromEx meets the following criteria. Strictly speaking, ChromEx does not meet this requirement because candidates will not be using an attached printer nor a portable storage medium. Their exam is printed by a member of staff, after the exam is over and the candidates then signs it before leaving the venue. The Chromebook and ChromEx by design will be connected to the internet. ChromEx therefore doesn't seen to comply with the strict letter of this rule. I think ChromEx certainly complies with the sprit of these rules, I think the problem is badly written rules that probably haven't been updated in years but I wonder if anyone has had anything in writing that says ChromEx is okay to use (or even the opposite, I suppose) from JCQ or any of the exam boards?

If I open RMMC and look at the Packagebuilder or SystemAdmin users, under the Rights tab, the 'Registry Policy' setting is blank. I am not sure if this has always been the case. If you use RM CC4, could you check what yours are set to? We use these two user accounts somewhat interchangeably. I want to allow these users to at least view Windows Updates when they are signed in. I would do this by changing their registry policy but as they don't belong to one, I can't do that. I am tempted just to create a new registry policy for these users but I'd like to check if they should already have a registry policy set or not.

I don't see it as a misuse and I don't see a workable way of deciding who should be allowed to request information and for what reason(s). Whose going to decide, Priti Patel?[1] It's possible that this guy working for a printer company requests the information for his own purposes and someone else spots some anomaly with the data who then reports it to the correct authorities. Without the data being freely available to anyone, that couldn't happen. Anyway, are you saying that someone working for a phone hacking newspaper[1] should have more right to that information than me, an honest tax payer? [1]Extreme examples used for the sake of argument, obviously.

How do you define someone with a commercial interest? Journalists have a commercial interest as they are paid to investigate these things. Should journalists be banned from making FOI requests? If there is a conflict of interest to uncover then someone with a commercial interest is going to be more likely to investigate than someone without. We are all concerned citizens but we all have bills to pay. If schools don't want to respond to requests like this then they should just stick details of all contracts over a certain threshold on their website and refer requesters to that page. It's public money. It's important that the public know how it is spent. At least this guy isn't keeping the information to himself.

Not sure what the rules say about posting job adverts here but if anyone fancies a change of scene or a long commute, there are opportunities in Pune (India) available. https://careers-esslimited.icims.com/jobs/1137/developer--next-gen/job

Looking at this page, Notebook Basic all sounds good until the last comparison, "A SMART watermark appears on each page when the computer is not connected to a SMART Board.". I expect that is why a lot of schools hang on to 11.4. Anyone know if 11.4 works with Windows 11?

This is not going to be possible. You can take steps to make it difficult for someone to download a video or other file but never impossible.

Was this an Excel spreadsheet that you have converted to a Google Sheet? Looking at the CELL function in issue 1, this is checking that that what it returns starts with a D which in Excel means it is a date formatted cell (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cell-function-51bd39a5-f338-4dbe-a33f-955d67c2b2cf) but 'D' is not used in Google Sheets (https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3267071). You could rewrite all the validation rules but I wonder what format you have to upload the file in? If it's CSV, maybe it's easier just to remove the validation rules and let them tell you what's wrong when you come to upload the file.

A quick question for those still using RM CC4 (we aren't the only ones are we?) If you change the version of Windows, from Pro to Education or from 1909 to 20H1 say, how long does it take RMMC to update to display the new OS version? Does it happen automatically or do you have to trigger it in some way? I have raised the following with RM. "We are doing in place upgrades from Windows 10 Pro Education to Windows 10 Education on all of our CC4 PCs. How do we get the RMMC and the RM Banner to update the name of the OS? I have tried running 'Update Inventory' on PCs from RMMC, leaving the PCs switched on for 24 hours and rebooting them a few times but the OS doesn't seem to update in RMMC. If I sign in to the PC and check the Windows 10 system app, it has updated to say Windows 10 Education. It's just the RM components that don't seem to update" and they have only come back with suggestions about rebooting the server (which we have done) and reinstalling some RM server components (which we have not done). I have a feeling they are guessing and this isn't a problem with our installation of CC4 but a problem with CC4 itself and anything they suggest will just be wasting my time. I wonder if anyone else can confirm that they see the same issue when changing OS version? Since raising the ticket, I have discovered that sending a 'Core Update' to the PC will cause RMMC to update the OS fields, whether the PC needs a Core Update or not. If this is a known issue and that is the workaround, so be it but if other schools have this working properly then at least I know it's possible and I can pursue it further. Thanks. David.

I've had a look at Google Sign Builder. Am I right in thinking that you need to be a Google Admin to use this? To get the schedule to take effect, you need to add the .json file that it generates to the kiosk app. This means that the Marketing and Social Media team can't use this without the IT Team being involved in the process? Has anyone done anything clever and got the json in there another way? GAM or directly accessing an API?

We have had staff using EduLink One for a while and are now looking in to having students and parents sign in to it too. Do you already do this? Assuming you use the manual accounts system for parents rather than create AD accounts for example, how does this work? EduLink One seems to imply that every current and future parent will need to be sent an invitation email which contains their username (which EduLink One generates) and a link to (re)set their password. Is that right? What happens if we send an invite email and the parent doesn't receive it? Can they still sign in by going to EduLink One, typing in the school code and then clicking on 'Reset Login' and entering their email address? Does the email that EduLink One sends them contain enough information for them to be able to sign in, presumably their username and a link to change their password? What about when a new student starts, can we simply send them a generic message telling them to go to www.edulinkone.com, enter the school code and click on 'Reset Login' or do we have to go through some kind of account create process before they can sign in? I.e. do parent accounts get created automatically? We've used two parent systems in recent years. Firefly where parents would simply go to the website, type their email address in, receive an email with a link that enabled them to create an account. Nice and easy, no extra work for the school. SIMS Parent which requires someone in school to find every parent on a website with incredibly poor UX and send them an invite. Bloody nightmare, loads of extra work for the school. I'm worried that EduLink One is beginning to sound closer to SIMS Parent than Firefly when it comes to the onboarding of parents.

We have enough Chromebooks with broken screens and/or keyboards that we would be better off using those for signage if possible. Chrome Sign Builder looks interesting. I knew there were third-party apps that did this sort of thing but I didn't know that Google did their own. Thanks for that. The presentation is published to the web, anyone with the URL can view it. There is something that redirects the URL when it is used as a kiosk app on the Chromebook. As I mentioned, it works when the URL is obfuscated by tinyurl.com so it's definitely publicly accessible.

Does anyone use a Chromebook to run a display screen? The type of thing you might see in reception for example. We just want to have a Google Slides presentation on a loop at this stage. We don't really want the a user signed in to the Chromebook and we don't really want to touch the Chromebook once it has been set up. I have created a Slides presentation, published it to the web and then using the URL that that generates added it as a kiosk app to a Chromebook. This has revealed two issues. 1. The URL is something like https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/jhjjghjhgj/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000. Using this URL causes the Chromebook to launch Google Slides which in turn asks the user to sign in. Once they sign in, they are not taken to the presentation anyway, they are just taken to Google Slides, it's as if they have gone to https://slides.google.com/. I assume something somewhere is hijacking the URL because it starts with docs.google.com. A work around for this issue is to create a redirect URL with tinyurl.com or similar and put that URL in as the kiosk app. As the URL no longer starts with docs.google.com, the page loads and the presentation starts. All good but I'd rather a solution that didn't rely on tinyurl.com if anyone knowns how to do this properly. 2. Using the above workaround, the presentation plays full screen* and loops but after some amount of time, the screen goes to sleep. I can not find a setting in Google Admin that stops this from happening. It's perhaps worth mentioning that despite appearances, the presentation is not actually running in full screen mode. If I access the presentations menu, I can select 'Enter full screen' and if I select this option then the presentation goes in to full screen mode (which looks identical to how it was before) and therefore the Chromebook never sleeps. For the second issue, I wonder if there is a way to make the presentation start in real full screen mode or a setting that I am missing in Google Admin Console that stops the Chromebook from sleeping.

Can I ask what you moved from and why you (your school) choose SIMS? Sorry I can't help with your question but at least my reply bumps your thread to the top. I'M HELPING!

I assume Office 2019 wasn't installed via an MSI file as they seem to be out of fashion at Microsoft in recent years so won't be affected by that part of the XML. Pretty sure our 2019 is a .exe that points via command line arguments to the XML file. Couldn't you uninstall 2019 using whatever mechanism you use for deployments?

It's telling you there is something wrong with the string $convertedcard. Check what value $convertedcard contains. I expect the problem is with this line... $convertedcard="$c1 + $c2 + $c3 + $c4"change it to $convertedcard="$c1$c2$c3$c4" as at the moment $convertedcard is going to include the plus signs and you can't convert plus signs to an int. - - - Updated - - - I love a happy ending. What was it?

That should be [color=#333333]if($user.PrimaryCardID -eq $null) {[/color][color=#333333]Write-Host "AD Attributes missing for $user.givenName) $user.surname)"[/color] as $_ (which contains basic user details from the Get-ADGroupMembers cmdlet), doesn't have a PrimaryCardID, givenName or surname properties but $user should do (I assume). EDIT: What fordea said.

So if you add $user above those four lines, does $user contain a user object or is it null? I don't know if the forum has done it or your code is really squashed together like that. $users=get-adgroupmember"IT Support"won't work. $users=get-adgroupmember "IT Support"will work but $users = Get-ADGroupMember "IT Support"looks much nicer

What line number is returning the "You cannot call a method on a null-valued expression" error and what line is that in the code you have posted?

The link doesn't seem to work, I think it's this one though... https://www.eteach.com/job/it-manager-1183916

Yes, it downloads the updates (self extracting zip files with a .exe extension) to c:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Temp so it all depends on if you allow users to run .exe files from that directory. We don't, so each time there is an update we have to unzip the contents of the update .exe(s) and copy it to c:\Program Files (x86)\4Matrix I've not heard anything about updates being installed by a service and I've actually just rebuilt a PC with 4Matrix on yesterday so have gone through the process of updating it manually this morning (as our build process installs an old version of 4Matrix).

It's a little bit bespoke to our situation but the gist of it is to run a SIMS report that shows your classes and the members (main supervisor, other supervisors and students) including the third party reporting ID for each class and the primary email address for each member. Run through the report, checking to see if each class already exists as a Google Classroom Course by seeing if you have a Google Classroom Course that has an alias of the SIMS Class ID. If not, create it, give it an alias of the Class ID from SIMS and make the main supervisor the owner (optional, you may prefer to have a dummy user own all the courses instead). Now add the members to the course by primary email address (and optionally remove anyone who is a member of the course but not a member of the class). Repeat everyday. I plan to tidy up the script one day, it's been a learning experience and it as evolved over time to become a humongous working mess of code as SLT change their minds about what they want. It wouldn't give you a head start, it would give you a head ache. If I ever refactor it in to something more friendly to look at, I may see if I can make it available somewhere.

I think you will struggle to find anyone with anything good to say about SIMS ID. Never used it for Google Classroom but I've suffered it in relation to SIMS Student and SIMS Parent. Even when it works it's so poorly designed and implemented that it will likely end up costing you more in time than paying for a better product in the first place. Another free option might be to write your own Google Classroom sync, we wrote ours in Powershell with help from PSGSuite (https://psgsuite.io/)

Yes, it doesn't work and ESS care about as much as Capita did.

The school can remove the third-party account so it can not be used to sign in to SIMS ID (which confusingly is the name of a type of account and the name of the authentication system that allows you to sign in with various types of account including a SIMS ID). They shouldn't normally need to though, they can just invite you again, which issues a new invitation code and invalidates the link between third party and SIMS ID. Capita/ESS have recently started saying this takes 24 hours/overnight though. Not sure if that is true or if they are just saying it to stop people raising calls with them when it doesn't work, which it often doesn't. Whatever you do, you will need a new code so ask the school for one, the system is so badly designed that the user can't request a new code by simply typing their email address and clicking a button themselves, they make some poor soul in the school click a button for each new invite for some reason. I don't believe the school can stop users choosing to register with SIMS ID or any of the third parties. It's why we are left in the position of offering 11 year olds the chance to link their Facebook account Looking at your screenshots, they haven't blocked SIMS ID.