AngryTechnician

If you're on Twitter it might be worth getting in touch with @FraserSpeirs, who is a big iPad in schools advocate and has been managing them in his school for some time now.

Assuming all those folders are already redirected, simply delete the extra folders from the profile (via script or GPP). I do this at user login so they never get a chance to put anything in there, and as long as your folder redirection stays working they should never be recreated.

I love how the most recent 'news' story they use to prop up their BS is by a homeopath, and their top study in the 'scientific proof' section is by a guy who was discredited by the Bad Science blog in 2008 for, among other things, suggesting that AIDS might be caused by proximity to power cables. I think that pretty much tells you all you need to know.

Not wanting to disagree with someone agreeing with me, but it's worth mentioning that SCCM CALs are much cheaper than even $40 a pop on Schools Agreement.

Try using the Retina Scan IDENT software instead of the Smart Tracker. You'll still only get the IP address of the machine rather than the hostname, but I've found it to be more reliable in getting the username, which is what you appear to be missing from your last post. If it works, I have a .msi installer for it that you can deploy if needed.

If like me you are afraid of the command line, here's where the setting is in IIS7:

Apart form the fact that a lot of schools still insist on teaching kids cursive today... Personally I hated being forced to write in cursive at primary school, and immediately went back to print at the first opportunity. I've had the discussion about why we still teach it recently with staff at my current school. The best argument anyone could come up with is that apparently there is evidence it helps with learning spelling. A close second was 'helps with hand-eye co-ordination', but there are plenty of other things that do that job as well or better.

SNR = Signal to Noise Ratio. Normally used in electronics/communication fields to describe the amount of interference on a line. In this context, your ratio of useful posts to utter nonsense!

I'm ashamed to admit I gave up on UAG about 2 hours after installing it - just seemed far more complicated than was necessary for what I was planning to use it for. I think if I were using a greater feature set (like RemoteApp) I would have stuck with it, but I really only wanted to use web apps and the file access portal, so ended up using HomeAccess+ over a reverse proxy. As for the documentation... I find almost all Technet documentation to be impenetrable. They seem to spend pages and pages going over minute irrelevant detail and then somehow completely miss the basics that you actually need to get started with something.

I know it's not what you were getting at when you mentioned rep/post count, but it actually might be interesting to examine Rep divided by Post count, as an indication of each persons SNR...

For your size network I would recommend Essentials over Config Manager unless you really want the OS deployment extras that dshaw mentioned. I use Essentials and do my OS deployment with WDS, which works just fine for me and is included in Server 2008. I did look at SCCM but didn't really need any of the extras and so the higher cost wasn't really worth it.

Mine is a combination of SharePoint wiki for SOPs and a few Word documents printed out in a red folder with enough information to fix things if the network is so broken that the wiki is unavailable. (Wiki didn't have to be in SharePoint of course, but I was already using SharePoint for other things).

They had it last year, and they had people on the door checking if your badge (or that of a colleague you were with) said Network Manager on it! Why, you may ask? Welllllll... there was free coffee in there. I can't speak to the quality since I don't drink it myself, but it was a very handy place to sit down and have some nosh.

You can do this with a single GPO by editing the ACLs on individual bits of software inside the GPO and only allowing access to particular computer accounts/groups. That's the way we did software installation at my last school, and I did the same here until I switched to deploying through System Center. We had around 80 different MSIs in one GPO and it worked just fine for us. I subscribe to the fewer GPOs theory. I split mine up so that user and computer settings are separate, and I then have a hierarchy of settings, e.g. 1 GPO with global settings that apply to all computers, then separate ones for settings that only apply to Servers and Workstations (or particular types of workstations).

Without this update, anything you define in the 'Preferences' part of a policy (rather than 'Policies') will not apply to a Windows 2003 server. They will still apply to Vista and 7 clients, even if all your DCs are Windows 2003. There is a corresponding update for Windows XP clients, if you have any. 'Normal' Group Policy (the settings in 'Policies' in RSAT) should work just fine without this.

We have a small Canon laser that I reluctantly bought when Mrs AT was doing her masters dissertation a few years ago. All we use it for now is printing boarding passes and last-minute vouchers for Pizza Express.

Alternate port works great with that, many thanks! Given the bank holiday I should really say 'stop doing work', but that would be slightly hypocritical of me...

I tried it, but the rewriting seems to be dropping the alternate port definition off the end at some point. If I'm at the root of My Computer (https://internal.angrytech.com:8443/Extranet/MyComputerSL.aspx) and double click the N: drive, the N: drive flashes up for a second but is then redirected to https://internal.angrytech.com/Extranet/MyComputerSL.aspx#n - without the :8443 port definition. No change I'm afraid.

Nick, I've been working on implementing this in the run up to Christmas, and just wanted to pass on my comments and thanks. I'm primarily using it for file access, and you've put together an impressive product in that regard - so much so that I abandoned my foray into testing Unified Access Gateway, for which I am truly grateful. I'll almost certainly have some more comments once the staff are let loose on it, but here's some initial feedback based on my testing so far: Identity impersonation. I've seen a couple of posts in this thread by people who aren't seeing the expected behaviour with file permissions, the most recent one being just a few posts above. I saw the same thing, and realised that ASP.NET Impersonation was not enabled by default on my install (IIS 7.5). Once I turned it on manually, everything worked as expected, but this wasn't mentioned in the installation instructions. Maybe it's something specific to later version of IIS, but it may be worth mentioning in later revisions to the documentation. Alternate port for Silverlight file access. As has been previously mentioned by ASW1980, I would find it handy to be able to run the site on a non-standard port and still have the Silverlight My Computer functionality. If it's possible to make that a configurable option in later version, that would be awesome. Problems with Application Request Routing. This is a fairly obscure issue but I thought it worth mentioning. I was planning to publish HAP behind a reverse proxy using Application Request Routing for IIS. This mostly worked, but downloading files did not work correctly as the download would drop part of the file (large files would be missing a few 100kB off of the end, small files would return 0 bytes). Tracing on the IIS side showed a 503 (Bad gateway) error being returned. The best lead I could find on this is that in cases where requests are proxied, data could be dropped if the ASP code sending the data calls Response.End before calling Response.Close. A small write-up on this is here. I haven't gone digging through the source code to see if that is the case, but since you will be much more familiar with the code, I thought it worth mentioning even though it only happens over proxied connections. Security hardening. I'm a bit of a security freak, and I get very nervous publishing external websites using a highly privileged account like Network Service, and would be even more nervous of doing so on a Domain Controller - especially with the domain admin account username and password sitting in Web.config. I know RM like to ignore a lot of best practice in this area since they require running IIS on their DCs for the RMMC, but if a malicious user managed to compromise HAP while running in this configuration, you could potentially lose the entire domain. I configured HAP to run under a completely separate standard user account, with no special privileges other than begin configured as an IIS worker, and use the same account for the LDAP queries. I have encountered no problems with this configuration at all when using the My Computer functionality, though I suspect I would need to grant delegation privileges to that account in the AD for password changes if I were using that part of HAP. Are there any other access rights that HAP would need for other parts of the product, to assist others who were as nervous about using privileged accounts as I am? I hope the above doesn't seem too critical; as I've already said, I'm very impressed with Home Access Plus as a whole, and the fact that those last two things above are very specific should act as a testament to how mature the product is already. Mrs AT works for the local university, and their remote file access system is substantially inferior to yours. I hope your school appreciates how fortunate they are to have a talented coder on staff, and of the enormous benefit to the community of releasing it freely. I know plenty of schools would be very eager to cash in, especially right now, and it's a testament to you and your school's management that they haven't done so. Thanks, AT

Bit of help here, but I'm pretty sure GPO deployment is out: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/59379-deploy-microsoft-expression-studio-4-ultimate.html

We use Clarion Call. No idea how much it costs as I'm only involved in syncing the details via a push update from our MIS server. As well as the rare closure message, we use it regularly to update on match fixture changes which might require pupils to be picked up earlier than anticipated. We also use them for bulk mailing our weekly newsletter to ease load on our own mail server.

If you scan the document/import an image into OneNote it still has the OCR built in and you can then copy & paste back in to Word.

The following is an extract from an email bulletin sent by CEOP to Think U Know trainers this evening. I hope they will not object to me quoting the part pertaining to Little Gossip here:

1. CEOP is part of the Virtual Global Taskforce and as such routinely liaises and cooperates with law enforcement agencies globally, including the US. I know for a fact that LittleGossip has been on their radar for some time as it was discussed at the CEOP Ambassador training I attended in October. 2. WikiLeaks have much more technical know-how than some idiotic bullying site (and that's all this is). I don't imagine the owners of LittleGossip will be hard to track down. P.S. Blocked by RM SafetyNet.

Have to say I'm glad Google are finally stepping up their game with MSI deployment. Their near-total lack of internal use of Windows has left them ignorant of how administrators manage a Windows network for too long. An official MSI, with the welcome surprise addition of Group Policy support, means they have leapfrogged Firefox who rely on a 3rd party distribution.