Windows RT in a school environment

[Brendan_WadeIT]

I'm already well aware of the pros and cons to having the Microsoft Surface in a school environment.

 

However, I am looking for some information from others that are in the same boat!

 

- How do you initially set up the devices? Manually, or with Windows InTune?

- How do you deal with Microsoft accounts, or do you just have local accounts?

- How do you deal with purchasing apps?

- How do you keep them maintained?

 

If anyone could possibly shed any light on the subject, I'd be eternally grateful many thanks in advance!

[Tall_Paul]

We have literally just started using them.

 

All I've done so far is set up six manually with a local admin account, and local user account. The kids logon with the user account, then connect to our wireless network using their AD credentials.

 

It's just a trial so far so we haven't looked at purchasing apps, etc. I have noticed quite a few of the apps don't like being sat behind a proxy though.

[Brendan_WadeIT]

Thanks for you input! I was thinking of the same kind of idea.

 

Do you use RADIUS on your wireless I presume to authenticate credentials on the wireless? And what advantage does this have over simply having the surface connected to the wireless permanently - is there a script you can run? Not too familiar with the whole setup you're using.

 

In all schools we service we're recommending the school sets up transparent proxy through the SWGfL - this makes setting the surface's up so much easier since it seems to use two sets of proxy (in LAN settings in Internet Options, and one for the metro apps - can't remember where the settings are).

 

The main issue we're have at the moment is the kids all have their own username to log onto class computers - but obviously this gets a bit messy when setting up single sign-on with Windows RT. As well as the whole app purchasing...

 

Such a shame they can't just join the domain...!

[Tall_Paul]

Yes, we do use RADIUS and it works very well indeed. Students have to authenticate when connecting to the network, and authenticate when opening IE and that's it (making sure they don't select remember my password).

 

A reboot at the end and the Surface wipes all settings and logs back in as 'User'.

 

As I said, early days, but working well so far.

[Brendan_WadeIT]

Many thanks for that! So what advantages is there using RADIUS in a Surface environment, over just joining the whole device to the network and be done with it? Is there a script of some kind to decide what that user sees (drive maps etc.)? Forgive my ignorance - RADIUS is not something I've really gone into much detail with in the past (not needed it)! Ta!

[Tall_Paul]

We only use Radius for authentication so when a student connects to our WLAN their internet connection has the correct level of filtering applied to it.

 

Re mapping drives, it's not something I've tried but given you can't join an RT device to an AD domain (AFAIK) I'm not sure how you'd get around doing that without using something like HAP or WebDav.