supportman

Lets hope its not just a rebranding... Still no reporting improvements after the lady came on here 5 years ago to promise it. I've still got the uservoice conversations saved somewhere as well as email communication with lots of suggestions. We were looking at other solutions as well, as the current reporting system has been not fit for purpose for anyone who lacks a degree in Linux and DNS. Cloud filtering looks good, but they really need to look at their pricing model and product development road-map. I think the cost has almost tripled over the last 10 years and I don't remember a single new feature that has made my life easier when someone asks me to lookup a students history on the internet. I see they still don't offer an SSD option for the larger appliances 7 years after I emailed them about it either. Just poor development progression from a product that started off so brightly and does a great job at its most basic level for filtering. Hopefully this is a fresh start.

Interesting, I kind of assumed that teachers only used it for registers and not all that other stuff and it was just habit. I've rolled it out to a few staff and they haven't launched Sims since but it was only a very small set of users I must admit. My idea was to totally remove Sims from teacher laptops and desktops and just use this app but maybe I was a little premature with this idea.

This is the biggest reason for us testing this software. Out of interest why do you think using the full fat Sims client is a better solution that on a web page or smart phone? I would have thought personally it would be much easier for a teacher to take the register on their phone or laptop using the web version than launch full sims. Maybe i'm missing something...

Its absolutely true though... we were testing the full education version and installed the (I think) 1809 update and it broke all the start menus for some reason. That's why we changed to LTSC fully. Its much quicker to boot, has no upgrade issues, you don't need to run silly powershell scripts to remove the bloat and it "just works".

Who would want to run 'modern' apps though? They are just a relic from the Windows 8 days when Microsoft thought ARM and touchscreens were the way forwards. Microsoft is clearly moving back towards .net and merging that with the modern SDKs from a development point of view so I doubt it will be an issue in the future. Just look at the mess Microsoft got in with the modern skype app to see the issues, you still cant even minimise to tray!

I don't think it takes much training to use sharepoint and onedrive, even our most technophobic teachers can work that one out as its just a web page or mapped drive.

Any ideas on how to set the Maximum memory limit for SQL server? Our server needs to be rebooted after a few months when it uses up all the memory so it would be good to prevent this. EDIT: Google to the rescue! https://support.laserfiche.com/kb/1011758/setting-a-maximum-memory-limit-for-a-sql-server-instance

Right click on the Sims database in SQLserver manager >> reports >> standard reports >> user statistics. That should show you which user is taking up all the CPU time. Very useful report! Also you can check live with Activity monitor. Just load up SQLserver manager, right click on the root of the SQL server in the tree >> Activity monitor We actully found a lot of the CPU time was being used up by Solus_deployment_server Database for some reason.

Defender here as well, there is no need for 3rd party Anti virus products these days.

Sounds like a great, modern plan. Keep us updated how it goes as this is surely the future.

Maybe a hint on the delays of Sims 8 and whats going on at Capita from their recent stockmarket update: SOURCE: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/14/capita/ So basically they have outsourced their software development to India to save costs. And maybe that's why we haven't seen any move to Software as a Service in the last 5 years? I don't know many Indian agile software companies so hardly surprising.

So will this work just by using Azure AD Connect to do SSO with your local Active Directory?

How does everyone host websites for students as part of their studies? Are people running their own servers or using external hosting accounts?

LTSC here, "it just works" Its faster to logon and has no bloat.

You can also do it with Sims to be fair, its clunky but it can record "medical notes" which can be accidents.

https://www.medicaltracker.co.uk/ is quite good, although they are not very reponsive to feature requests. They have been promising medicine auditing us for 6 months with no progress. The rest of the system is pretty good though and has replaced and manually reporting of accidents.

Well yep that's progress for you I'll admit to really enjoying not having to worry about local servers so much these days and happy to pay for that privilege. Saying that, Microsoft have hugely increased their local server pricing in recent years. I don't think its any more expensive to "go cloud" it these modern times.

Teams 'for education', yep! Its brilliant as a homework tracker. Works best when you combine it with SDS so you have all your class lists as groups from Sims. https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/create-an-assignment-in-microsoft-teams-23c128d0-ec34-4691-9511-661fba8599be Or a nice video here:

Wow! I went to a Microsoft event years ago and they were talking about ditching group policy and moving to windows intune, sounds like they have finally started to make that happen. Its a sensible move, I really like where Microsoft are going these days. Great company finally getting its act together.

We publish reports using TASC insight parent portal currently.

Very interesting, we've been moving further and further away from internal servers to the point where my server rack is looking rather empty! Feels great but the Onsite Domain Controllers, MIS and web filtering are all areas I would love to move offsite. Shame I don't have a primary school to test out on How do you find Windows Intune? Has it evolved much since the early days? I would of though chromebooks were also an option.

The docs seem to indicate you need the latest verison of office 365 installed. Use the latest versions of Office 365 clients: To get a silent sign-on experience with Office 365 clients (Outlook, Word, Excel, and others), your users need to use versions 16.0.8730.xxxx or above.

It was too expensive years ago let alone today We chose Microsoft Teams for education and its brilliant. I have no idea why people continue to pay for VLE's when such a good free product exists from both Microsoft and Google.

I still don't think I have seen a good implementation of OneDrive yet for students. I'd love to see someone who has done it successfully. It still seems silly running a huge internal file server when we get some much free storage online with each Office 365 account. But mapping folders has never been reliable for us, even with 3rd party products.

Do you know if these will work with larger 10tb disks? Also do they have rails to mount them in a rack?