I don’t particularly want to implement personal sites at this stage as it’s not what we are trying to achieve with our intranet. Also, the scalability of SPS seems fairly irrelevant – our single-server Sharepoint on SQL Server install should be plenty beefy for the foreseeable future. It looks like Class Server can be installed into WSS, so that shouldn’t be an issue either.

From the information I’ve trawled through on Microsoft’s site and elsewhere, it seems that the extra features in SPS boil down to:

• Audiences – targeting items of content on a page at specific groups of people. This could mean that a particular news item is only visible to staff, with pupils seeing the same page minus that item.
• Personalisation – letting users tweak/turn off some web parts on some pages (for themselves only). We would probably have to disable that feature to remove an avenue for confusion.
• Areas (topics) – this is very poorly described in the Microsoft material (Damnit Microsoft, use some screenshots!). From what I can gather it allows you to have a hierarchy of WSS “site collections“, which appear to be hierarchies of sites anyway. Perhaps they are saying that subsites within a site collection have no navigation system and “Areas” fill that need. If that is the case, it’s a pretty poor omission from WSS.

  I shall quote a chunk from the Microsoft Web-based Training (which I can’t link to because of their wacky site design).
  
  
  

  In SharePoint Portal Server, areas serve two purposes. First, they provide a navigational structure or map of the portal site and related content. Second, they provide a centralized structure for information browsing. Areas direct readers to the information they seek through an organized hierarchy of topics.

  Within each area you can create site collections; essentially a collection of Web sites in Windows SharePoint Services. A site collection has the same owner and shares administrative settings. Each site collection has a top-level Web site. This top-level Web site can have multiple subsites, and each subsite can have multiple subsites, down as many levels as your users need. Since sites are nested in a hierarchy within the site collection, it can be challenging to manage them all.

  This hierarchy allows your users to have a main working site for the entire team, plus individual working sites or shared sites for side projects. Top-level Web sites and subsites allow different levels of control over the features and settings for sites.
  

  
  

• Improved search – search through file shares, external websites and numerous other things that can already be searched more effectively by other means. I don’t see much mileage in that one. I suspect it might overcome the problem that searches in WSS are only local to the Sharepoint site that you are searching in (i.e. they don’t search subsites), but that isn’t stated explicitly.
• Scalability

I feel that there is a great deal of the confusion between what features are available on WSS and what is SPS-only. This is made worse by Microsoft themselves using the term “Sharepoint portal” when they are seemingly talking about WSS sites. The Class Server FAQ illustrates my point. Possibly their own staff can’t quite discern the difference either.

BEWARE!

The import procedure that Microsoft suggests Class Server administrators use is, well, rubbish.. behold:

!UpdateCls
PrimaryKey	ID	Title
ID	[C:History 6]	History 6
.Teachers
Teacher
AllisonBrown

(header rows emboldened)

That mess would have to be created in Excel, saved to a “Microsoft Excel XML Spreadsheet Format” and then imported via the CSProvision tool on the Class Server to add AllisonBrown as Teacher of History 6. Those 6 rows of spreadsheet generate precisely 1 row in the database (!) which looks like:

ClassID	TeacherID
597	412

(those are the primary key values from the Classes and Persons tables)

If you want to add another teacher to another class, it’ll take you yet another 6 rows and because Microsoft made the syntax multi-line, you’ll have to use a whacking great macro if you plan to generate the data automatically. Lame? Lame! Faced with the proposition of adding teachers to well over 900 classes, Microsoft’s recommended method went hurtling binward.

Instead I decided to pull the classIDs and teacherIDs out of SQL Server then create a lookup table in Excel. That let me generate a ClassID – TeacherID mapping from my SIMS.net CSV file, resulting in 2 long columns of numbers. Import that into the SQL Server “MapTeachersToClasses” table manually and Bob’s your uncle! Job done easily in a couple of hours.

The only challenge remaining now is to get the pupils and their pupil-class mappings into CS4. That should be relatively straightforward – it’s only hampered by the lack of a direct link between SIMS.net and Active Directory. For that trick I shall be using the UPN from SIMS.net and creating the mother of all lookup tables with every child in school listed by username, Active Directory SID and SIMS.net UPN. Ungh!

To be continued…

That is all. 

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)