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District Help Desk FAQs

How involved is the set up process?

A matter of minutes. Copy the software, register the dll (instructions are provided) and it's running. 

What are the system and hardware requirements?

You will need Microsoft Operating system Windows 98 with or Personal Web Server; NT 4.0 Option Pack 4 with IIS 4.0 or greater, and the latest version of MDAC (available at http://www.microsoft.com/data), or Windows 2000 with IIS 5.0. 

Do I need an expensive server?

No, this has run fine on desktop computers running Windows 2000 and IIS 5.0. 

Why doesn't District Help Desk have user logins and passwords like some other help desk software?

Since this runs on NT/2000 passwords are unnecessary. You can control access to the program through Windows access control lists and by restricting IP addresses to only those on your district's subnets.

Adding user logins requires teachers to have one more passwords to remember and one more user name. It also adds to the load placed on the program and your web server. District Help Desk was designed to be fast and easy enough to use without requiring any training or the added administrative cost of  supporting calls from users who want to know what their password is after they've forgotten it.

What if you do not manage your own servers and can not set up a web server?

We can set up the service for you with a domain name like www.yourschoolhelp.com.

After installing District Help Desk I get errors saying the path can't be found.

This is  most likely to occur if you have renamed or moved your default web folder. If the path to the default web folder is something other than C:\inetpub you have to change the path in Help.UDL file in the Help folder. Double click on Help.UDL, enter the correct path, test the connection.

After installing District Help Desk I get errors saying "operation must use an updateable query".

The help.mdb file must have write permissions set for the internet guest account and interactive account. Or you can set these permissions at the folder level. You can make access more restrictive if you wish but your users must have write permissions to the database file.

After installing District Help Desk on NT 4.0 I get "provider" errors.

You need the latest version of the Microsoft Data Access Components available at http://www.microsoft.com/data.

Email is not being sent.

The SMTP Service must be running on your server and configured properly to send mail. The SMTP service is available on NT Option Pack 4 or greater. It is part of Windows 2000.

Will District Help Desk run on our district's older computers?

Yes, the program has run for two years in a district with 56k lines and many 486 computers without incident.

What's cgi and why doesn't District Help Desk use it?

CGI is Computer Gateway Interface and was one of the first ways to create interactive web programs.  Microsoft's Active Server Page technology is able to provide faster page processing and place less load on a web server and your network traffic. You are welcome to compare an evaluation version of District Help Desk with a similar products using other technologies. Try bringing up a table with 300 records in it.

We anticipate many thousands of records and would like to use MS SQL server or Oracle as our backend database?

No Problem. The code  will work as is with SQL, if you need help setting up the tables we can do it . Call about a getting an Oracle version set up.

I don't like the fonts or color of the tables, can I change them?

Yes, two style sheets control all the fonts and table attributes. You can edit these directly. It does requires a minimal knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Future Releases?

Future releases will allow more user customization of data entry and reporting, better search features, and more customization of look and style.