Distributing DfE Laptops

[OllieC]

Hi everyone,

 

Sorry if I'm asking the obvious but I'm feeling absolutely overwhelmed at the moment, the new email noise is bringing me out in a cold sweat, so just need to mull over what others are having success with.

 

We've got a stack of DfE laptops - they're not DfE managed unfortunately, when it came to ordering, I could either go for those naff geobooks or the semi-decent HP ones unmanaged, so went unmanaged.

 

I *could* just build them, have them on force tunnelled VPN and have done with it, but I don't like the idea of the strain that will put on the VPN/connection as well as giving these laptops unnecessary access in to school systems when all they need is a web filter.

 

Thinking I'll just do a quick win 10 image with office/teams installed and a .\localuser account like the DfE setup. My issue comes in with management and filtering...

 

We're RM customers with hosted safetynet, I'm waiting for my account manager at RM to get back to me with regards to cloud filtering - is there any suggested way of doing this if they can't do it? E.g. a local filter that can be installed or a recommended route for cloud filtering that isn't going to cost an entire budget.

 

Management... I can just set windows update settings and leave it at that, BUT I've read that SCCM now includes InTune for devices that are SCCM managed - how on earth does one go about using this? I can find no route in to being able to take advantage of this.

 

Any input is greatly appreciated before I find a hole to jump in to.

 

[MatthewL]

I personally would have them all domain joined, login as themselves, can access resources as if they were in school. You have control over them and you know filtering works.

 

If your concerned about traffic on the VPN look at split tunnel and the way you filter but for me connected and VPN one way or another all the way.

[OllieC]

Thinking life would be easier if we just lock down off domain - nothing to expire, nothing to go wrong (e.g. change password but device tunnel not connecting leading to issues logging on etc etc).... Not sure how to effectively achieve filtering with split tunnelling either as split tunnelling only sends traffic for that network over the VPN, requests outside of the network, e.g. internet wouldn't go through the VPN tunnel.

 

I'm looking at Netsupport DNA (already users in school) remote gateway and potentially the parental filters built in to W10. Think I've found a way to get InTune rocking as well.... things always seem a bit clearer when you're not receiving an endless stream of password reset requests!

[southhamster]

We've been looking at this.

If you are a Google edu school adding filestream gives you some control in the admin panel RG lock or wipe.

I don't know if it's any good but Senso web filtering looks fairly cheap.

Still waiting for when can order our Chromebooks!