Richard Willis

I’ve just completed a Salamander Active Directory installation. The school wanted quite a few different types of groups, some of which are very interesting.

Firstly some standard ones:

• All Students
• All Staff
• Students by Year
• Tutor groups (including the teacher)
• Classes

Fairly standard stuff here, however all the groups were complicated by the fact that the school, and hence AD, was split into two, the sixth form and the rest of the school. So the structure was duplicated and groups went in different places depending on whether they were sixth form or not.

Now onto the more interesting groups:

Year x Tutors – All staff who take a registration group in year x.

Under 15 Students and Over 15 Students – The school has a content based media server and they wanted to target some of their content based on age.

An email group for each pupil containing all teachers who teach that pupil – That’s a lot of groups, but staff were beginning to get annoyed with bulk emails with subject "FAO teachers of x". It will be interesting to see how this one plays out, whether it has real value or whether it just clutters up the address lists.

I was pleased with how Salamander Active Directory could handle all of these just with configuration changes. I didn’t need to make any changes to the core engine, it just handled it beautifully.

We currently in the process of collating together all of the slide decks, and have almost got all of them in now. Here is a list of all the ones published so far. I will update this list as the last ones come in.

Steve Beswick – Keynote Speech

Building the Learning Gateway track

Steve Smith – Best Practices for Configuring your SharePoint Environment

Unified Communication for the Learning Gateway – Nathan Winters

Site Structure and Templates – Andrew Woodward

Branding Your Portal – Penny Coventry

Other Components you can use – Dave Coleman

User Adoption track

SharePoint Governance for Education – Alex Pearce

Driving User Adoption and Parental Engagement – Mike Herrity

The use of SLK as an E-Learning tool – Richard Willis

BECTA Data Security Guidelines – Ray Fleming

My Sites – How to use or not – Richard Willis

Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions at the conference, and for putting up with my technical difficulties.

My first session was The Use of SLK as an E-Learning tool. I has a few technical difficulties with this one as the display size changed after I plugged into the projector, so had to skip the demos.

My second session was My Sites – How to use or not. This one was inspired by the talk given by Mark Eichenberger at the SharePoint Best Practices conference in April.

Alex and I would like to say thanks to everyone involved in the first Learning Gateway Conference, whether you were a speaker, attendee or helper. You all helped to make it a great day.

Extra special thanks to the speakers, without whom the day wouldn’t have been as good as it was.

We hope that you all enjoyed it and took some great information and tips away with you.

It’s now been a few days since the event and I’m catching up on the day job’s work! The effort required is beginning to fade, so were already starting to think about planning another one!