KK20

I would still backup if you dont know what you are doing. Who knows what cron jobs run maintenance for the moodle database. It all might be fine but if something else is linked and thus updated/removed from other tables then good luck with that. that being said, you'll have backups from your normal backup schedule so they will be good to go if things go wrong.

Does IE10 still adhere to the same registry locations? If you need a proxy address then you could always edit: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings ProxyServer ProxyOverride "" ProxyEnable 1 If you want to enable "automatic" for your WPAD or whatever then take a look at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Connections\DefaultConnectionSettings its a binary value and 1000 should be enough to get you "enabled". HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\AutoConfigURL will get you your PAC address if you want to use that. Those should work for you as a registry preference (assuming IE10 hasnt changed locations of course). Incidentally, printer scripts worked for us in XP with GPP being flaky. W7 the opposite, the scripts are flaky (there should be NO reason why!) and GPP work nicely. I do what any insane admin would do in a mixed XP and W7 environment- BOTH! so what if it adds another 2 seconds....

local policies most certainly DO apply. In fact they apply first. Then site/domain/OU in that order hence (as above) a "non configured" domain policy will indeed use the local settings. Be careful if you "lock out" local admin functions because if that PC cannot connect to the network/DC then that PC is effectively hosed (unless you can swap the local profile via linux boot CD....)

backup the database and try! A lot of the bits-and-bobs I tried when developing our moodle site was trial and error. Forums are hit and miss and due to 1.9 being rather aged now you might struggle. Upgrading should fix your problem too: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-30643

I had thought of pfsense or even a clearos installation (was thinking pound or just squid3 with dansguardian either bolted on or under a dual squid option). Unfortunately time is against me so for this one i'm going for an off-the-shelf option.

In the end ive decided sonicwall for the firewall but keep my existing dansguardian filter. I'll decomission the TMG server and setup an MS VPN server on the network to handle VPN from clients.

working fine for me.

scenario for you: If you have an intranet that you happily use then you decided to open it up so you can access the system externally (from home for instance). If you have a https: page for logon then a "self certified" certificate will flag up big warnings to the PCs at home (since they arent on your domain so they dont understand that your server is "trusted"). A purchased SSL certificate will prevent this. Of course you can tell your teachers to ignore this warning - however this is a *bad* thing to get the teachers into the habit of doing...

Our portal is lacking at the moment. I am half way through pushing an automatic sanitised intranet derived dataset directly to moodle. Parents will need to use their child logons unfortunately as I don't want to go creating extra accounts for parents. Since the project is already planned, designed and being implemented/tested it wont be scrapped and moved to an MIS. That being said, even if I did use a similar approach to iSAMS portal, it means I need to scrap the reports etc which simply wont happen. After the iSAMS demo I was reasonably impressed but even the mighty iSAMS has some issues in our eyes (migration is the major hurdle with iSAMS - i.e. we need to do it ourselves effectively. A quoted 10 week migration is (quite frankly) not acceptable. Even crappy E1 managed it in 3 days apparently. Doublefirst quoted 5 although that included a couple of days onsite so effectively 3+2.

Has anyone used a netgear prosecure? In my hunt for a new firewall a friend who is a sysadmin of a business uses these. They dont filter the internet so cannot comment. I was wondering if the filtering was up to anything, having a look at the specs it does seem to offer page inspection rules and security policies based on A.D. SSO. At first glance it looks very similar to Fortigate in terms of options. Are they rebadged fortigates? Any takers so far? Prices on a UTM-50 look good (too good TBH).

outside of bonding the only other I can think of is a wireless option if one exists near you.

We only use LRs; I have found unifis can be picky about mounting. Horizontal mounting is best but in our rooms some ceiling are simply not accessible so we have needed to mount vertically (the floor below ends up serving rooms above rather than the rooms they are mounted in in some cases!). The LRs are better at serving in this instance (more a geography of our site than a general rule though). we bought ours from http://www.wifigear.co.uk/ as I found them substantially cheaper than the rest.

Moodle needs support. You need someone who is either programming oriented or technically minded. It also needs to be planned. We use moodle for our preparatory, middle and senior school although it has been a hard slog to get it where is is today. The "enrol onto course" hierarchy is not intuitive. Page editing is clunky compared to the likes of frog or firefly. Although it is free it needs more "upkeep" and setting up than paid solutions. Calendar sync with exchange is pretty much dead in the water (iCAL as an intermediatory isnt really a solution). IIS webdav native support doesnt work either so no mapping of school shared drives if you are an MS only house. But it has no initial purchase cost so once it is up and running (assuming your technician time is "spare") then it has set you back £0. It can also be customised quite well. It can be used effectively though, you just need to think the hierarchy of moodle through. Plus the reasoning and expectations of what you want your VLE to do: simply content management or full blow "can learn from home" system.

Just to clear a few things up just so you have an idea of why I have discounted so many other MIS. I didnt want to go into so much detail initially but it seems people are getting the wrong idea on why my options look polarised, im not just saying "no" because Im not interested in certain MIS - I simply believe they wont be suitable. I wasnt clear in my original brief, we have no intention of moving our core existing working intranet functions into another MIS - that is academic reporting, SEN, pastoral tracking (These three facilities are highly customised to our reporting system and to how our teachers "work"). Our change of MIS is stimulated mainly due to the unreliability of E1 (being outside our control "in the cloud" and the lack of our ability to drag information from it. Since then I narrowed the search down to the ones I was asking peoples opinions on - engage, isams and schoolbase as I believed these were either modular or cheap enough for the core functions with the option of getting the data we require simply. In order to answer questions as to "why": I do currently script reports in order to grab certain information from E1 (only certain bits can be pulled directly via PI, for instance exam data and timetable cannot be pulled effectively via PI). This has led to a number of issues; how often do you poll for changes? Does someone need to do it manually? Does the system have a timeout? Do you need to create an automated browser service to "click" events for you? Our .NET service that operates our E1 import facility is cumbersome, it entails taking data from a report, saving it to a directory, the service examines the file, imports to our SQL database. If E1 change anything in the layouts of reporting then the intermediate layer needs to be changed (this has happened -albeit once- in the past when papertypes were changed - layouts altered which mean the exported file changed subtly). Scheduled reports are only as good as the time they are run. Multiple changes during the day especially around options times etc. Direct SQL access (or any kind of database access such as the time we had a read only DSN to the OMNIS database of Phoenix Gold) simply means a join therefore live data. I'm no stranger to schema mapping, it took me 2 weeks to map out phoenix gold (all the bits we needed at least I dont pretend to have mapped it all!) - to anyone else who looked at gold then OMNIS.FPUPILS alone was an exercise in why that database was designed by muppets! Our moodle also uses SETS to automatically enrol pupils into pages and also create "groups" within moodle so that assignments can be matched to sets. This makes sure the markbooks use "moodle groups" that match "SET groups" from the MIS. We have an exam seating planner that works and does everything we need (tables, outside candidates, room overspill, spare machines for scribes and word processors, invgilators checklist, time table for extra time - moves to extremeties of room etc). We have a parents evening scheduler that does everything we need (clashes, siblings, lates, "go home at", "only arrive at" times) . All these systems require data. Ideally an SQL join would sort this out. In a secondary sense I could script reports and import to our SQL database just as I have with E1. Given a choice I would not do this, hence my requirement for database access on demand. I have given one example previously as to why (I estimate) Aspen solution wouldnt suit our academic report. In our academic reports a form tutor report entry looks different to a subject report entry. The house master also has a different layout. EYFS, preparatory and lower school also have different looking reports. Each report is tailored to show (and pre format) required information. I imagine your EYFS and ours are identical as they are statutory fields and radio buttons. Our preparatory give different options for different subjects some have effort target and attainment some do not. Some have information automatically copied in. One example, if a person has an identified SEN weakness in english then this data is added automatically to the report and a flag is set next to the person with JUST the english requirements - not the WHOLE specific learning difficulties (although the whole is viewable by clicking should a teach wish to). This cuts down on clutter enormously. Attendance is calculated and colour coded, we dont use raw numbers. Effort ranking is colour coded depending on previous reports averages in the particular "group" (i.e. prep, lower, middle, 6th etc). Lower school reports do included exam results but only as a comment. Middle (GCSE) and 6th give results and colour coded differences between predicted (from our MIDYIS or ALICE data) as a trend etc. I could go on but dont feel I need to to be honest - i havent scratched the surface on our learning support referral system or pastoral system. Suffice to say I have yet to find an MIS that will do all of the above in a simple manner - im sure they could do most but not all. Our parents are used to getting a page of A4 on each subject with general class comment, data on progress and individual comment based on the data (even the peripatetic reports are fleshed out!). From a teachers point of view all the data is displayed on the report page without the need move elsewhere and really only involves them putting a class comment and a single comment (the rest will be inserted automatically - although it CAN be manually editted if required for exceptions) - plus they are only shown what they need to (although this can be overridden if they want more data, say if they are a house master wanting an overall feel. (excel sheets are also generated automatically for the above and sent to head of departments with more number crunching value added information etc). I am guessing (as is the case of all MIS ive seen so far) that I will be able to get the look and feel of our report and easy tailored data entry but the automated text insertion from specific parts will not work (i.e. english SEN only for english subjects, mathematics for mathematics etc). Im guessing the automatic insertion of trends and formulae will not work along with the colour coded boxes for attendance, effort etc. I also know the SMT will shriek if I say a "portion" of the MIS is hosted in the cloud.

Without going into too much detail we have an inhouse .net developer who has built up our intranet for bits not normally found in an MIS - it isnt intended as a replacement as it only fills in bespoke requirements rather than an entire systems (it wont create census reports, registration, timetable, exams entry from secure results etc etc). For instance, our pupil report does the following: Staff opens intranet which is SSO inside our perimeter. Opens the relevent report which changes depending on the time of year (sometimes a comment, sometimes simply grades, sometimes it is based on exam results). The exam results are automatically filled in at the appropriate times, other times we have effort target attainment with a trend displayed from previous reports and/or exams (colour coded for a weighting scale i.e. if a person has consistently underachieved). Automatic "clubs" reports are generated depending on what clubs have been attended vs signed up for. Attendance is calculated and appears next to the comment for the teacher to write about (attendance isnt shown as a figure on the report). Form tutors are emailed when all year reports are in and emailed at deadlines as to outstanding reports. Printouts are created as necessary with different layouts depending on the time of year and type of report (simply press print to preview after selecting the range). SMS is sent to parents automatically depending on the time of year, preference and exam results criteria. That is just the pupil reports. We have pupil pastoral tracking that generates house colours, headmasters awards, music awards and automatically emails the correct people (autoprint was disabled as the paperbin using the card was used for something else, printing is done manually by clicking the link in the office email), clubs registration (outside of normal registration as clubs are not compulsory) which generates billing reports and emails to the correct admin staff, learning support referral system again emailing the correct LS staff based on the referral, specific learning difficulty generation linked to individual education plans and specific learning plan, EYFS tracking plus many many little foibles that certain teachers ask for (automatic excel spreadsheet generation for departmental reports), exam seating planner with archive (allows split rooms, external candidates not resident to the school) parents evening scheduler that allows single slots for siblings as appropriate. Having access to the database simply makes this work. We have managed to make it work from the closed system that is E1 although chunks of data couldnt be grabbed effectively - timetable and exam results are particularly tricky but doable in a manual fashion (luckily these are predictable changes so I can run a manual update at these times!). Oddly enough I only extracted certain data as when we moved to E1 from phoenix we were promised all sorts of things with respect to extracting data via their PI sync tool (which turned out to be bunk), I then took to grabbing and replicating as much as I could in case of a connection failure. Good job I did.... coincidentally, the doctors information is used when creating trip forms on our intranet. You choose a set of recipients (or a preset list for the common trips taken such as sports fixtures), add the information about a trip and two sets of forms are generated, one to send to pupils regarding the trip with all the generic detail and one for the teacher to keep as a trip portfolio containing relevent medical information, contact details and special needs. So for an MIS (for us) a modular system is good as we wont need to pay for bits never used (which is why schoolbase attracted me). Database access is good as we can use the database for our own "read only" needs. If aspen can be hosted locally how is it you cannot get at the database data? Is it a bespoke database? encrypted with an private key? Is it the web files are hosted locally (say on our existing IIS system) but the core database is hosted externally? Does your SQL allow an "sp_addlinkedserver" approach thus I could link my own server in some way - I havent thought this through yet with regards to security and permissions assuming it is an IIS based system etc etc. Obviously the SQL link approach would need to be able to be scheduled as I dont like the idea of logging on to an MIS to run an update again.

We simply have a large intranet that needs access to the timetable data, set data, examinations, pupil roll, pupil telephone numbers, doctors addresses etc. Currently I need to run scripts and programs to grab all this information from E1 and place it into an SQL database for our intranet to use. It would be much friendlier for our Intranet to simply access the required information from the MIS database directly. In our experience cloud is bad for critical components. E1 was down pretty much all of yesterday for example, no cover could be scheduled, no exam information could be checked, registers couldnt be entered etc. If it wasnt for my intranet copying chunks of pupil information we wouldnt have had pupil contact numbers for emergencies. None of my core systems (intranet, email, moodle) have ever been down (short of a reboot at lunch time for planned reasons!).

Dont forget that you might need to tweak the bindings on your intranet web server to accept the new A record header. It depends how your server is set up (ours is strict bindings, no wildcards). If your proposed A record is different from your existing domain then you can also set up a new forward lookup. We have an "school.sch.uk.local" internal domain but we also have an external "school.sch.uk" and "schoolalternative.net". I have added the schoolalternative.net as new forward lookup zone to forward requests as appropriate (with the bindings in IIS).

oops OWA is forms based on TMG atm. can smoothwall pass the forms based auth back to exchange and let exchange reject as appropriate? I'll need to look at the security implications of that first (hence the reason you normally let TMG be a firewall and do the AUTH). That being said, it is no different from letting IIS auth my webdav etc. Tom, ive posted in teh smoothwall direct support with a few more smoothwall questions. In reality I will probably email smoothwall directly after monday (ICT practical iGCSEs on monday so i'm on call for those in case of issues....) Chazzy, thats the point. I cannot GET a TMG licence any longer, you cant buy one since they have EOLd with no replacement (unlike when they EOLd ISA you could "downgrade" a TMG licence)

and I now see forefront CALS removed from EES. Great. so begins my migration from MS then.

Licence renewal time comes around and I submit my usual request (no change to hardware, software or FTE staff so an easy one) only to find out no licensing for TMG any more as it is EOL. uh oh. So with a couple of months to go I am not quite in full panic mode yet. Anyone ideas on alternatives? I use TMG for VPN, multiple website publishing (OWA, outlook anywhere, intranet, moodle) spread over 2 ips in reverse proxy. Internally it load balances 2 ISPs on an active failover (with a static route on TMG sending SMTP over the "backup" ISP line permanently). Quite a few rules for letting a guest VLAN use internet and route certain web servers (we dont have an L3 router). Are there any alternatives that will leverage the above with (presumably) AD integration? Will MS UAG cover my existing TMG usage (since it installs TMG I believe). Will UAG cost me an arm and a leg? Ta

well I can see there is a rep from aspen but I don't want an online hosted database; I want full access to it so that wouldn't feature in my search. The only reason im looking at iSAMS and doublefirst offerings were previous admins (from independents - we meet up occasionally and compare/grumble etc) using both. We aren't going to need all modules so I gather both are fairly configurable rather than "one size fits all". whilst im looking at getting demos I wondered if anyone else had any dealings - nothing sinister.

have I missed something?

iSams are coming in for a demo. Then it will be down to the bursar/head releasing the funds....

After being burnt with E1 and their "cloud based" solution I would be extremely sceptical of another externally hosted solution. They claim to allow exporting of data through their report builder however they forgot to say that you can only export certain bit. Need the timetable? tough. Exam results based on something useful such as form/yeargroup (i.e. anything other than a single specified person per request?) no. Not saying it isn't possible but printing an internal report to a text based printer (as they wont allow saving off reports to csv for some of their inbuilt reports....) then parsing it is not my idea of robust or simple (but better than nothing). Running an SQL query and getting a record set is a much better solution (no E1's PI does not expose all the data either, you can PAY for a single query to be added to your PI repository that lives inside report builder anyway for £200 a pop and you can imagine my response to that).

Thats the thing, I can find very little information or people who are using it. When we have doublefirst in for a demo it looked quite good and based on the "demo data" it did everything we asked of it (and it is hosted on my existing SQL database server so no problems in getting data out). I have out found the name of one local(ish) school that uses engage so im going to try and book a visit to have a chat with them and see how they get along with it.