MarcLister

We have a shared calendar for our school of all the upcoming events. Each Friday one of my colleagues will send out a link to the next week's calendar entry for staff to see what events are happening the following week. The link is sent to the whole staff group which is [email protected]. One of my colleagues can't access the shared calendar despite me sending her the link that adds the calendar to her Google Calendar twice. No-one else has had the same problem. My colleague is a member of the staff group. Any ideas what is wrong and how to fix the issue?

We have Inventry but also Net2 running here. Sometimes I re-use a card and so have to remove it from the Inventry system register for one user so I can register it against a new user. I just open Notepad and press the card to the reader. I then get a few characters of text which is that card's ID number.

I agree. It's something I don't think I can do. However as a special needs school disciplining students won't necessarily work. Our DSL doesn't want to prevent students from emailing staff and would prefer that we tell our students to email him (on a specially created email address not his own work address) out of hours as he has responsibility 24/7. Thanks. Just what I need! If staff open up a computer or laptop at home out of hours and pick up a work email then that's their own issue. If they get emails coming through to their phones, how do they know it's a work email or a private email? This might just save me a lot of work. As said above, with special needs students, we wouldn't want to discipline students. We'd rather educate them to email a particular email address out of hours so that our DSL can sort issues out and involve other members of SLT if appropriate. Exactly. I was thinking that as students know how the staff email addresses are formulated, sectioning students off into another domain wouldn't work as the students could still email staff. I would be very reluctant to block ALL student emails from a new domain to our staff domain as, as has been said, it would be a 24/7 block and I don't want that.

The issue is the content of the emails. Staff are getting emails from students with distressing content. Most staff have Gmail on their phones and so get emails at all times. It is a member of SLT who has asked me to look into the out-of-hours issue but I don't think I can do that hence my suggestion to my colleague in SLT that we might have to separate students into another domain.

We have a Google Apps domain for our school. All our students and staff have an email address on the domain but are in separate organisational units. We are having problems with students emailing staff out of hours and staff, rightly so, want their own time to be free from interruption by student emails. Is it possible to prevent students, or users in one OU, from emailing staff/users in another OU? The requirement has been given to me to make this out of hours, i.e. between 3pm and 8.30am weekdays and then from 2.30pm on Fridays until 8.30am on Monday. However scheduling in half-terms and holidays etc makes me think that it would be easier, if it is at all possible in the first place, to just prevent students from being able to email staff at all, at any time. So, can this be done? If not, I'm considering setting up another Google Apps domain and splitting the students and staff up so that we can then prevent staff from getting emails from the 'external' student domain by blacklisting it. That might be a severe option though.

Hi Norphy. Thanks, I shall look into that.

Does anyone know of any free duplicate file checkers that can scan network drives? I have a few network drives where I think we probably have duplicate files, mainly photos and videos, that staff have made copies off. I'd like to re-arrange these files to have them centrally stored, where only I can access them, and save the network space. I've used Duplicate File Searcher but it is quite slow and hasn't been updated in 5 years. https://sourceforge.net/projects/dfr/

Good call on allen keys. I'll have a look on Monday and see if we've anything that fits. I went on Ebay earlier. However everything seems to come from the US and the cost of delivery is more than twice the cost of the product itself.

As well as my ICT duties I'm also the Premises Manager at my school. We have several doors with push bars on that can be locked in to allow the doors to be opened from the outside during the day. To lock the push bars we use dogging keys. Unfortunately ours are starting to get worn out and become more circular rather than hexagonal. This means that it is getting harder to lock the push bars open. Does anyone know of any reputable and fairly priced UK companies/websites where I could purchase a set of keys for me and my colleagues and some spares?

I tried the Windows key + P to swap between computer only, duplicate, extend and projector only options. We selected duplicate and nothing happened. We plugged the HDMI lead in, took it out and re-plugged it in and the Windows Display wouldn't detect a second display.

The adapters are powered at both ends by mains. If it's a MacBook Thunderbolt/HDMI issue why does it also affect Windows laptops?

Nope. One is easy to get to, the other we need a big ladder for. Yep to Windows laptop. We tried a Windows laptop and the PC never registered the projector. We also have a Saturday school who hire our hall on, erm, a Saturday morning. They've tried with a MacBook and a Windows laptop and the projector doesn't register with their devices either. I will see if I can borrow another colleague's MBP and see if that works. It is the same spec as my 2012 one. I have also just bought a second hand Lenovo laptop so when I get that I can use that for another test. The projector is several metres up in the air on the hall wall above the stage. My thinking was I need to try and plug directly into that and bypass the HDMI-Ethernet extender but there are logistical challenges in doing this, namely getting a ladder tall enough and getting someone to support the ladder for me. This is the model, or a very similar model, to our one. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extender-Repeater-Function-Ethernet-Satellite-60M-RX-TX/dp/B00YC3BWL2/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1525951049&sr=8-3&keywords=hdmi+ethernet+extender&dpID=5148vRFXYZL&preST=_SY300_QL70_&dpSrc=srch

Hi Joanne, The HDMI-Ethernet box was put in because HDMI wouldn't have lasted the distance whereas Ethernet does.

We have a Casio XJ-UT310WN-UJ projector in the hall. I connect a 2012 MBP to the projector by way of a Thunderbolt-HDMI cable which plugs into an HDMI-Ethernet device because of the distance involved. The signal is then carried to the projector by Ethernet cable that then converts back to HDMI into the projector. We've noticed that if my boss connects his 2017 MBP to the projector by using a USB-C adapter and an HDMI lead to the same HDMI-Ethernet device the MBP never detects the projector so we can't output from the newer MBP to the projector. Last week we had an issue where a PowerPoint wasn't showing the images on my MBP so the teacher went and got his Windows laptop which has an HDMI socket. We plugged the laptop in using an HDMI lead and the laptop never connected to the projector. Does anyone have any ideas what is going on so that only my 2012 MBP with Thunderbolt-HDMI works but 2017 MBP with USB-C adapter to HDMI or Windows laptop with HDMI don't?

Nice one. Will research that one.