 MakeAlias Case StudyWellington Girls College
Background
Wellington Girls College (WGC) needed to be able to give faculty control over their resources and the deployment of them on to the student desktops. Items such as Conferences, Folders and Calendars all needed to be supported.
The built in FirstClass feature “Give Alias” would have been ideal. Unfortunately, this feature is only available to Administrators and sub-administrators, but the admin did not want to give sub-admin privileges to the faculty.
The Solution
Using batch admin, a personal “locker” conference was created in a folder structure on the admin desktop. Each faculty members personal conference was then aliased to the owners desktop.
The batch admin script set the unlisted attribute for each conference so that they didn’t appear in the directory. A conference was used because at the desktop level faculty don’t have sufficient permissions to drag items into a folder.
The MakeAlias RAD application was aliased on to the desktop of all faculty. By default, MakeAlias lets the user see every item on the Admin desktop. These items can either be selected to give to other users, or selected to open up and navigate down to lower level items.
Giving faculty access to all items on the admin desktop was not an option. So, the SetPath attribute was used so that when a faculty member started MakeAlias, the top level they could navigate to was their own personal locker. This not only protects the admin desktop, but also gives each faculty member their own private storage area that no one else can access. The sample scripts used to set up this environment show how to create a secure, personalised environment for each user.
When faculty create or find something they would like to be able to give to selected students, they simply alias it to their desktop and then drag it into the alias of their locker file on their desktop. The item is then available to be selected from within MakeAlias.
The horizontal and vertical position of the object can also be copied. This allows the faculty to layout their lockers so that the objects map to the standard desktop layout. When an object is selected for copying to a user, its’ position information can also (optionally) be copied. Additionally, the objects’ default icon can be changed, and the newly created object protected once placed on the users desktop.
As a bonus, the MakeAlias application also allows staff to alias documents and messages – something that even the FirstClass “Give Alias” feature doesn’t support.
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