Class Server 4 and the Temple of Doom
Written on October 18, 2005 – 6:14 pm | by Sahmeepee
What can I say about Class Server? It is possibly the least well supported Microsoft product I’ve ever come across. Not only do Microsoft put zero effort into the Class Server site, but the community support for it is almost non-existant. Try to find a screen shot of Class Server 4 on the web. I suspect the best you will find is this Class Server Presentation. Hopefully you have a powerpoint viewer of some sort installed. And speak Russian.
Until recently, the official Microsoft “community” for Class Server was an MSN group with restricted access. My application for membership was turned down with no reason given. Way to go. After a certain amount of haranguing, Microsoft have now set up a public newsgroup (google’s version here) for community support, but there isn’t a great deal of activity even now and many questions don’t get any response at all. The majority of the support documents are still hosted on classserver.msn.com (why?) and some are a bit, uhm, version 3: Class Server Troubleshooting Guide as linked to by the current Microsoft Support site.
In version 4, Microsoft have turned Class Server into an addon for Sharepoint (available via “web parts”). I’ll have to get them working together nicely before I can decide if I like that, but at the moment I feel it’ll be an improvement. Unfortunately, it won’t save you any time during the “provisioning”(enrolment) process, because Class Server will still need to know which pupils are in which classes. This is no mean feat when you have to drag your data from the clutches of SIMS.net (UK education peeps: shudder now). Rumours that Harrison Ford will be searching for the fabled SIMS.net database documentation in the fourth Indiana Jones movie are apparently unfounded. The provisioning process is now performed with the commandline “CSProvision” tool after studying the 30-page provisioning guide. Fun. I don’t mean to sound like too much of a crybaby, but I suspect that a more readable layout is possible.
The data munging battle continues regardless, with the following aims:
- kids, staff and their respective classes entered in a reasonable time (next year: before term begins)
- enrolment data entered in a repeatable (i.e. well-documented) way
- enrolment data entered with minimal manual manipulation
- class names entered in a way that is useful to staff and pupils (i.e. they can recognise their own classes)
- a working method for rolling the pupils over into their next year without losing their assignments etc. (it’s not much use creating a portfolio of work during year 10, then archiving it at the start of year 11)
- a simple way to archive/delete data from year 11/13 pupils at the end of the school year (this one seems fairly easy)
3 Responses to “Class Server 4 and the Temple of Doom”
Now you know why Moodle is around move over tot hat much better… :)
Over Sims.net documentation I once heard that masons held copy in there library…
Russ
I want to export all of the timetables for every student in Sims.Net into a separate database so that I can pool that with our print audit databse records and bill departments for all of the printing which takes place in their lessons. Does ANYONE have any idea where the timetable information is stored in the SIMS database???
When I exported the data from SIMS.net I built a report (Reports > Design) and chose .csv (or excel) as the output format. You can do your analysis in a spreadsheet from there or else import it into a database. One of my reports was a table with several rows per pupil, one for each class they attend. I’m sure you could do a similar one for each period when a class is taught and then tie them together (*lots* of rows!)
If you’re trying to get the data out of the SQL Server database directly, I’d advise against it because of the way Capita have designed it. (The only meaningful access to the data is via the Views and they are all locked.)
Kudos if you manage to get your scheme working by the way.