The Server Room

Google Calendar

I’ve been playing with the new Google Calendar (calendar.google.com) for the last few days and it’s rather swish. A couple of niggles make it seem slightly beta, but my overall feeling is that could be useful for all sorts of situations.

Within secondary education I can’t see that people would want to use it internally if they already have in-house shared calendaring (from Outlook etc). For external use it would be nice to publish a calendar with the dates of term and significant events such as school trips, shows and even exams so that parents can subscribe and stay
informed. Primaries may want to use it for their internal calendaring needs if they aren’t provided with a (suitable) solution by their LEA.

Nice features:

• Selective sharing with other Google Calendar users - Add people you know (based on their email address) to view/change/manage individual calendars or just see your free/busy status. If they don’t have a Calendar account, it offers to send an invite. I found it a tad unnerving that I could add a gmail address and it would happily give me the user’s real name even before they’d accepted.
• Search public calendars - Search within the text of calendars published on Google, the Apple calendar site (ical.mac.com) and elsewhere on the web. You can also make your calendars public and searchable. There had to be a search element somewhere, right?
• Quick add - Click the quick add link and type “Boozing on Friday” and it’ll stick an event in your default calendar next Friday. Even smarter though, I tested it with “Boozing on Friday at noon” and it scheduled an event from midday to 1pm. Even more than that, “Boozing on Friday at noon at the Kings Arms” will put in an item as before, but also fill in the location field AND link to a maps.google.com map of places called “The Kings Arms” near me. Stunning.

Things needing polish:

• SMS Notifications - US Only?! Come on Google, you have sms.google.co.uk and that works fine. When this comes for us Brits it’ll be pretty handy (not sure if it’ll cost anything though)
• Printable Calendars - The print-friendly function is a nice feature, but it sometimes produces really badly formatted calendars, particularly in “month view”, because the number of weeks being printed out isn’t a constant.
• Event Reminder Buttons - There are detailed instructions on producing reminder buttons for your website/blog, but they require manual assembly of a nasty URL string. Surely it would take a Google employee about 20 minutes to make a form that generates the HTML snippet. The form could handle validation/escaping for disallowed characters as well, which Google currently provide a (not so) handy lookup table for. Fixed! Thanks Google!
• Importing Calendars - Calendars can be imported in ical/vcal format from Outlook or iCal which is a nice feature. It seems that Google are explicitly allowing only those two programs at the moment. I tried importing a calendar file from Mozilla Sunbird and it failed first time:
  Failed to import events:
Failed to upload ical/csv file

  When I changed the code for the software that generated it from:-//Mozilla.org/NONSGML Mozilla Calendar V1.0//EN

  to-//Apple Computer\, Inc//iCal 2.0//EN 

  it worked flawlessly. Result!

My wishlist:

• User Groups - I’d like to be able to give access to view a calendar to a predefined list of people rather than adding each one individually to each calendar. Google does speed the process up a touch by remembering addresses you’ve used before and prompting as-you-type.
• Quickly Select Weeks - In the mini calendar that lets you jump to a date, you can quickly pick a month view (click “April 2006″) or a day view (click “14″), but they haven’t provided a way to get to the week view. In another calendar app (possibly Outlook Web Access, I forget) this can be done by clicking slightly to the left of that week’s row. OK, so maybe this was too obvious! You can click and drag a range of dates in the mini-calendar to display that range in the main view. The range can be 1-7 days or multiples of 7 days - awesome work Google!

Tips:

• Default Calendar - If you need to enter a lot of information into a particular calendar quickly, click the down-arrow next to it and choose “Display only this Calendar”. Any new items you create will be added to that calendar unless you select a different one.
• Quickly creating events - As well as the “Quick add” features above, you can drag an area in the main calendar view to create an event to fill the time slot. That feature alone takes all the donkey work out of manually entering the durations of meetings etc.
• Better locations - This is more of a Google Maps tip, but if you put your locations in with the format:
  postcode (Name of Venue) e.g. SW1A 0AA (Houses of Parliament)
  the Google Maps link will accurately point to your location rather than guessing and it’ll have the text in brackets as the title of its marker.
• Learn from others - Check out what other people are doing with Google Calendar on Flickr.

Posted in Websites | Comments Off

Sharepoint Portal Services vs. Windows Sharepoint Services

I’d be interested to know about how secondary schools use Sharepoint for their intranets. We are currently licensed for SPS, but I’m finding it hard to see compelling reasons for using it over plain WSS in a secondary school environment.

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.

Posted in Class Server, Sharepoint, Software, Technical | 7 Comments »

Interactive Whiteboards

Here’s an interesting article about interactive whiteboards in the Grauniad that nearly passed me by. I definitely agree that there’s an element of buzzwordiness/hype about the whole approach to IWBs by the British Government. As is always the case, however, there is definite educational benefit in there once the technology is sufficiently well-understood by the teacher. Which is why it’s so much more helpful to train all staff on IWB use and have five boards than to train five staff members and have an IWB in every room.

As I’ve read in a few places around the web, it’s important to get to grips with which sorts of activites work well on an IWB and focus on those. The not-at-all-advertised Teacher Resource Exchange allows you to search for interactive whiteboard resources, but unfortunately it seems that a lot of the uploaders tag their resources as useful for IWBs when clearly they aren’t. I’m not sure how long that site will be available, as it’s part of the Virtual Teacher Centre (in turn part of the NGfL), which is due to close on 19 December 2005. As BECTA are involved, I’m not anticipating good things.

On a related note, there’s a new Australian Blog about the use of IWB’s in education: ActivBoarding. They’re using six (I think?) Promethean ActivBoards with ActivStudio. It looks like a good place to watch for a fresh perspective (most of the stuff I’ve seen is very UK-oriented) and interesting resources. It’s a shame there’s not an open/common format between the whiteboard programs (particularly between Smart, ActivStudio1 and Activstudio2) as being able to share flipcharts etc seems to be one of the key benefits of the IWB experience. We’re firmly in the Promethean camp at school, so I’ll be passing these links on to those that can’t when I return to work on Monday.

Still not sated?: There are more resources for Promethean ActivStudio users in the Promethean resource directory and at the Lighthouse for Education.

[via IWB-EFL, Teaching Generation Z]

Posted in Government/politics, Hardware, Interactive Whiteboards, Websites | 3 Comments »

Class Server 4 - The saga continues

Today saw a smidgen more progress with our Class Server 4 installation. I managed to get all the classes into the database and all the teacher-class relationships too, as well as entering a few straggler teachers that didn’t have accounts on the network (until today that is). Not perfect, but healthy progress.

BEWARE!

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

(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:

(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…

Posted in Class Server, SIMS.net, Software, Technical, VLEs | 2 Comments »

Sharepoint vs. Fileservers

A few quick notes comparing Sharepoint to a plain ol’ fileserver when used as the main storage location for shared (non-personal) files in school:

This post is subject to change as ideas pop into my bonce (or other people suggest them).

Posted in Sharepoint, Software, Technical | Comments Off

Searching ‘05-style

In school it seems that kids nearly always go to google to search for anything. The majority of teachers I’ve come across see no problem in that - it’s what they do when researching. Increasingly, web-savvy people are turning away from the one-stop-shop approach to searching in favour of more customisable search methods like Rollyo (via mikeoliver.org). Rollyo is going the right way in that it lets you decide which sites you trust on particular topics, but it doesn’t address the problem of certain sites being poorly indexed by generalised search engines (Rollyo is powered by yahoo! search).

Image search is one example of a problem area. Google images is pretty good, but it’s far from flawless:

• As people have pointed out their results tend to be badly out of date, leading to dozens of dead links. I first noticed this when knocking together a web app to return google image results in date order (using the EXIF info in the thumbnail) - the most recent results were over 6 months old! I had been told that this was because spammers were cunningly using google to host images for their spam emails by letting google index them then linking to the preview thumbnails. Grr. (That explanation hasn’t been verified btw)
• Many sites don’t want their images to be indexed by google. Perhaps they have their own, better way of indexing the images. Sometimes the image site is owned by the competition. Either way, the results from some important sites don’t show up.
• You don’t know the copyright/licensing status of images unless you trawl through each of your results manually, one-by-one looking for the relevant information.

In this case, pupils and teachers would be far better served by casting their net wider than the reflex google image search. Having a good jumping off point in each area is important - in this case Wikipedia has an awesome page of Public Domain image resources. Mentioned on that page is flickr. Despite being bought by yahoo! recently, it’s still difficult to find fault with the site. Tucked away on flickr is a really useful page which lets you search for images with specific Creative Commons licenses. Although people often ignore the copyright on images when putting together intranets etc. it’s good to know that it’s easy to do it the right way.

A similar method can be applied in other areas - you wouldn’t google for the precise wording of a debate in Parliament, you’d use the Hansard search page. The same applies for many specialist subjects (medicine, technology etc.), or does it?

Posted in Websites | Comments Off

Class Server gotcha #1

Just a quick gotacha to be aware of: when installing Class Server 3 or 4 into Sharepoint, you’ll need your Sharepoint to be installed into the web root “http://server/” rather than at “http://server/sharepoint/” or similar.

That is all. 

Posted in Class Server, Sharepoint, Software, Technical, Troubleshooting, VLEs | Comments Off

Class Server 4 and the Temple of Doom

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)

Posted in Class Server, Sharepoint, Software, VLEs | 3 Comments »

Network diagrams

Today I made a start on a diagram of the school network, with the intention of including all switches, routers, servers and “network appliances” (CCTV servers, NAS boxes). It’s surprising what you find out when you examine things in detail! It’s definitely been a worthwhile exercise already.

Previously I had made diagrams with 3com network supervisor (free version, closed source), but it doesn’t really give you any control other than rearranging the items it’s detected on your network. On the plus side it has autodiscovery and nifty features like documenting which server/PC/printer is connected to which physical port on a (3com) switch. Very nifty, but not flexible enough.

The software I’ve been using this time around is Network Notepad (free, closed source, win9x - XP). Although some aspects of the interface are a little clunky, it does everything I need it to and more. Bear in mind that it is a drawing and documenting tool - it doesn’t have the autodiscovery features available in expensive commercial products. You can enter the IP addresses for NICs in manually though, so it will produce fairly meaningful documentation if you put the time in.

Make sure you download and install the additional object libraries to supplement the basic ones that come with the installer. Unfortunately there aren’t any 48 port switch objects at the moment. If someone points me in the direction of a free tool for making wmf files, I’ll tackle that myself.

Posted in Software, Technical | 2 Comments »

A Brief Introduction

About me:

I’m a network manager in a state secondary school in the UK. My crew of two make up the rest of the school’s ICT Support team, looking after 600+ devices and 2000 bodies. I’ve had some experience of managing Linux servers in my distant past and Mac OSX clients more recently, but my current environment is all Microsofty (not always by choice).

I’m interested in free, libre software and the benefits it can bring to schools (and taxpayers). Many of the free applications we use are in the excellent Edugeek Essential Software List so take a look there if you’re interested. I’m also interested in extending pupils’ access to learning outside of lesson time and ideally outside of the school gates. Another area in need of some R&D is giving staff more self-service access to IT: a knowledge base they want to use, a place they can share useful information with colleagues and pupils, a useful set of starting points in each subject area and (ungh) the skills and confidence to attempt new things with IT.

I’m in danger of not sticking to the title, so that’s all!

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »