David44

So, this doesn't seem as staright forward as I thought. I have added the location %LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp\tempSimsRpt\ to a GPO (Administrator Templates/Microsoft Excel 2016/Excel Options/Security/Trust Center/Trusted Locations) This is being applied, the user can see the location, properly expanded to c:\users\{username}\AppData\Local\Temp\tempSimsRpt\ReportData.xls, under 'Trusted Locations' in Trust Center in Excel, although it is greyed out. When they run a report in SIMS that outputs to Excel, they are still shown the banner at the top 'SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled'. I suppose this is true, macros have been disabled. How do I enabled Macros for only given locations or better yet, signed by trusted publishers? Is anyone able to share their GPO settings?

Users are reporting that since we upgraded to Office 2024, reports that run to Excel are blank. I sort of know why. Macros are disabled in Excel. Enabling them resolves this issue. However, I don't want to blindly enable macros for all Excel files so I wonder how other schools have this configured. It seems to be opening a file that it saves to c:\users\{username}\AppData\Local\Temp\tempSimsRpt\ReportData.xls, so do you just allow macros to run on this file?

The relevant part of the command line for us is this... /OUTPUT:"c:\automation\para.xml" I don't think the output settings in the Report Designer are relevant when the report is run by CommandReporter. Try enclosing the path in quotation marks. Try a simpler path. It looks like you are outputting to a network share, if it works with a simpler path but not to a network share, maybe some slashes need to be escaped. Failing that, mount the network share with a drive letter and try that.

I have an rm.com account and I can't access it either. "insufficient access rights"

We don't use SOLUS (Why waste time on a known buggy deployment tool that at best only deploys one application?) but we have seen an issue where SIMSApplicationSetup.exe fails to exit. We have been testing Microsoft Configuration Manager, this deploys SIMS and reports something similar to what @Sheridan is seeing, the .exe never exits. We have set the Application install to timeout after 15 minutes (the lowest possible in MCM) and after that time it reports that the install failed. When the application is deployed again, it detects that it is already installed and marks it as a successful deployment. We are actually installing the previous version rather than the Summer release at the moment but this is not a new issue...

SIMS, as we all know, is a horrible piece of software that requires odd permissions, especially when SIMSLoad.exe is updating the various components. How do you set these permissions? I'm talking about things like giving 'everyone' write access to c:\windows\sims.ini and possibly the same for the c:\program files (x86)\SIMS directory. I think there might be registry keys that the user needs to write to too. We are moving away from RM CC4. Their RM supplied SIMS packages currently set the permissions for us. I have access to the packages but the permissions are expressed in hexadecimal. I could go through them and work out what each one does and recreate it with group polices or a settings package but I'd like to avoid it if someone else has already got the answers. Are people still using SIMSPerm.bat? We want to avoid using Solus. We want users to be able to update SIMS when they open it and not have them wait for Solus to do so.

This was caused by the student (and a couple of other students since) getting a HTTP 400 error when signing in to their Google account to access Trelson Assessment. I believe the HTTP 400 error page is generated by Chrome, which is what the Trelson Assessment Chrome app runs in, albeit in Kiosk mode, and has a link to Google on it. I haven't been able to recreate this because I don't know how to purposely cause a HTTP 400 error. As of tomorrow we have moved to the PWA version of Trelson Assessment. As the error is related to signing in to Google I don't know if this will resolve it. I'd be interested to know if any other schools are seeing very occasional HTTP 400 errors when signing in to Google (for the purpose of using Trelson Assessment or otherwise).

They, Trelson and Google, have done a pretty good job of locking it down. I would have said perfect before yesterday. Certainly none of the obvious links will work, not even things like 'Privacy Policy' work which is probably not ideal but it at least closes an avenue for clicking through to other things. I suspect what happened yesterday was a unique circumstance that caused a none standard page to be displayed which had a link to Google in some way. It hasn't happened before in the years we have been using Trelson Assessment.

We have been using Trelson Assessmet for a while (since it was called ChromEx) and we have a number of Chromebooks dedicated to it. These all run Trelson Assessment as a Kiosk App (currently we use the Chrome app, we haven't moved to the new PWA yet). Today, a student reported that they could access Google and sure enough, they could. Google was open full screen, as if it was open in the Trelson Assessment app, rather than being open in the Chrome browser. I haven't spoken to the student, they were just about to take an exam and it sounds like they discovered the Chromebook like this rather than did anything to make it happen. Since the Trelson app is just a container for http://assessment.trelson.com/student I wonder if there are any scenarios in which it is possible to navigate to another page outside of their domain. I am thinking an error page with a link on it. Anyone else come across or able to recreate this?

@ITSystems_JamesE Are you doing this in conjunction with RM or are they likely to send you a cease and desist letter at some point? Do you have access to their source code for changes to RMMC etc. or are you managing to make any required changes via settings files and registry entries? What about the Smart Client for Windows 11? Is that a modified CC4 Smart Client with permission from RM or have you written your own?

Indeed. What is good for ones career progression, may not always be what is best for the school. I'd love to know MCM inside out and make a fortune somewhere else with international offices, multiple distribution points, multiple boundary groups etc. As it is, I am working for a school with one site. Having to set up and troubleshooting boundary groups is just a waste of my (and therefore the schools) time. The biggest issue for me is the fact that MCM seems unable to display any error messages. If there is an issue, you have to first work out what part of it might be wrong and then work out what log file might relate to that part and then Google a line from the log file and then find a Microsoft page telling you to check the IIS configuration. Check it for what? It's 2025, Who uses IIS? Oh yeah, Microsoft.

It would solve so many problems for us (and probably RM) if they just released a Windows 11 client pack for CC4 like that have done for every other OS update. Instead we are stuck battling with Microsoft Configuration Manager which just seems a lot more fragile and too complex for what a single school with one site requires. CC4 was far from perfect but it built PCs, installed packages and managed users which is all we need. MCM may do that too in theory but it seems like a full time job just to manage it's various issues and dependencies. CC4 hid most of the Microsoft nonsense from us and I don't think I had appreciated how bad it had become until I tried to do anything even basic like build a PC without CC4.

It's possible it would respond differently if a POST request was sent to it rather than a GET request. However, as the certificate for the site was issued on Tuesday of this week, I would guess that https://licenses.sims.co.uk/api/Entitlement/ is pointing to a server that was set up about then with a plan to have it ready by today and they missed the deadline.

Yes, download the patch from the link provided earlier in this thread (https://s3dl.ess-solus.co.uk/SIMS_Sims.net_1.24.54.1.pkg). It's a .pkg file but it's actually a zip file. Unzip it and find a single .sql file that does the same as has been posted today by other users. The difference is, when you run the patch it will probably perform a backup and kick users out of SIMS for no good reason. The annoying part of the whole thing is that no one from Parent Pay is explaining what the issue is. Is there a server that the SIMS client checks against that has an issue? Do they expect it to be resolved by next week so when the eligibility check runs in 7 days it will be fine? Did they have the same expectation last week? Is this something that has been demanded by SIMS marketing to push schools towards SIMS Next Gen and/or SIMS Connected?

Turns out I received an email 9 days ago with the subject 'Your new ServiceNow customer support portal is ready'. No mention of SIMS or Parent Pay in the subject. It tells me my username is joe.bloggs.8 (but with my real name) and to use the forgotten password link. When I do that, it says it will send an email to joe.bloggs.8@********* That isn't my email address. The domain is completely obscured so I have no idea even what domain it is going to. Even if it was ours, it certainly isn't going to reach my inbox. I assume we are all in a similar position when it comes to accessing support.

I don't think it will update beyond 126 yet as extended support only upgrades to each LTS version (long term stable). Look at this page... https://chromeos.dev/en/releases 126 is the current LTS version. When 132 becomes the LTS version, it will probably upgrade to that. That's my understanding anyway.

The issue with Slides seems to have resolved itself but we can't preview images in Google Drive now (i.e. double click on the image in drive and be told 'Couldn't preview file'). This seems to be because there is an issue getting to lh3.google.com, at least here. It doesn't seem to be our firewall though as the same issue occurs on a 3g connection. Can't see any public acknowledgement from Google yet. @paulkerton Have they updated your ticket? I'm from the same school as Chalkey above so it's still only our two schools that have reported an issue in this thread which seems odd if it's a widespread Google issue.

It seems that this error could be caused by hundreds of different things but if it helps anyone else in the future, in our case this was caused due to BITS not being installed correctly.

I have now created a Task Sequence. No idea if it's correct but it hasn't fixed the PXE issue anyway. I read on this Microsoft documentation that "When you create an OS deployment that targets only x64 BIOS computers, both the x64 boot image and x86 boot image must be available on the distribution point." Is this just an out of date document? Do you have an x86 boot image? If so, where do you obtain it from? My understanding is that the latest ADK doesn't have 32bit images any more.

Reinstalling WDS didn't resolve the issue. If I open the WDS console on the MCM server, go to servers, the MCM server and then expand 'Boot Images' there is nothing in there. On a server with working WDS there are boot images listed there. Is this normal for MCM? Is that what you see? If I can't PXE boot, the PC is not going to see the task sequence, is it?

I uninstalled and reinstalled the ADK and Windows PE add-on this morning and updated the distribution point with the boot image, ticking the 'Reload this boot image with the current Windows PE version from the Windows ADK' option. I still get the same issue. I haven't got a task sequence yet. This is a new install of MCM and I just want to boot to Windows PE at this stage. Frustratingly, something we can already easily do using WDS on another server. I think the next thing I will try is to reinstall WDS on the MCM server, again.

I have, yes. If I look in C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Windows Preinstallation Environment I can see three directories. x86, arm64 and amd64. I have no x64uefi directory here, should there be one? What do you have in C:\RemoteInstall\Boot\x64uefi?

I have been trying to set up Microsoft Configuration Manager for the past two days. I am getting stuck with PXE booting the client PCs. They do PXE boot but then report "The Windows Boot Configuration Data (BCD) file from the PXE server does not contain a valid operating system entry. Ensure that the server has boot images installed for this architecture.” It shows that it is using the file "\Tmp\x64uefi{guid}.bcd". I check on the server (which is also our one and only distribution point) and the file "C:\RemoteInstall\Tmp\x64uefi{guid}.bcd" does exist. I think the issue may be that on the server, in "C:\RemoteInstall\Boot\x64uefi" we only have one file (default.bcd). In "C:\RemoteInstall\Boot\x64" there are several files including default.bcd. Could someone with PXE booting working on MCM confirm what they have in "C:\RemoteInstall\Boot\x64uefi"? Should we have multiple files? Even better, if anyone has any idea what the issue might be. I have reinstalled WDS multiple times and I am aware of the issue where wdsmgfw.efi has to be manually copied in to "C:\RemoteInstall\Boot\x64"

Would setting DefaultSearchProviderEnabled to false do it? Lots of caveats listed though... https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#DefaultSearchProviderEnabled

To disable and suppress Try setting all of these values to zero (or false). You will probably need to set these in the Windows registry rather than rely on Google to apply them from the cloud because the user may not actually be signed in to Chrome yet when the Ad privacy screens appear. https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#PrivacySandboxPromptEnabled https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#PrivacySandboxAdMeasurementEnabled https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#PrivacySandboxAdTopicsEnabled https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#PrivacySandboxSiteEnabledAdsEnabled I am basing this on testing I did some time ago. We haven't actually implemented this here yet so I can't vouch for it other than to conform my tests were successful.