home working

[LeMarchand]

Lenovo desktops all in one

 

Dave normally has some good deals on HP AIOs...

[chaplic]

Surprised no-one has suggested windows virtual desktop. Just setup a site-to-site VPN between your premises and azure if you need to access on premise servers. Means you can scale up or down as required.

[Ditto]

Surprised no-one has suggested windows virtual desktop. Just setup a site-to-site VPN between your premises and azure if you need to access on premise servers. Means you can scale up or down as required.

It's a good point. I have a thread asking about 4G for home workers with weak internet access. I have said VDI should be considered. Do you know what level of internet speed would be sufficient for VDI - I'm assuming it's minimal.

[chaplic]

It's a good point. I have a thread asking about 4G for home workers with weak internet access. I have said VDI should be considered. Do you know what level of internet speed would be sufficient for VDI - I'm assuming it's minimal.

 

When I've setup VDI for offshore access (so high latency too), I've specified each concurrent user has 400-800kbps -so well within the capabilities all but the poorest broadband . If you want to do voice and video then you are looking at least 2Mbps upwards

 

 

Id be a little reticent to have mobile broadband as the preferred strategic solution as I find it less reliable and predictable than traditional connectivity, and it's more telling on VDI when you want a constant stream of data, compared to outlook/ onedrive and similar where you dont need a constant predictable stream of data.

[dhicks]

Id be a little reticent to have mobile broadband as the preferred strategic solution as I find it less reliable and predictable than traditional connectivity, and it's more telling on VDI when you want a constant stream of data, compared to outlook/ onedrive and similar where you dont need a constant predictable stream of data.

 

I've not had a problem from home on a 4G (now upgraded to 5G) connection - over lockdown there's been two of us connected to different remote desktop systems via RDP and web-based (both AccessNow and Gucamole), quite often all three at once plus a couple of Meet / Zoom connections.

 

Windows Virtual Desktop: is it still priced per user? I had a look a little while back and it looked as though it was going to turn out a bit expensive at around £25 per month per user.

[xicor]

the reason for not allowing them to login to O365 on personal devices is because my staff keep downloading confidential files for students on their personal computers via O365, as a school we have a duty to safeguard this information and having a copy of a students dob or health reports etc on a personal unmanaged computer is just unacceptable

 

Hang on, you can't allow them to sign in to Office 365 from home? Seems a strange restriction these days when you can have MFA, and use that with Remote Desktop Services and Azure App Proxy to provide the remote connection you need.

 

Setting up a VPN on personal equipment could be a minefield when it comes to support.

 

RDP RemoteApp with MFA via Azure would be the more secure option for ease of Management and security, otherwise if you could provide them with school equipment then AoVPN would be better

[LeMarchand]

Pretty sure you can block downloads from O365 (but wouldn't swear to it!).

[chaplic]

You can (for outlook and sharepoint stored content) enforce a webview only and no download, requires conditional access and a bit of fiddling. Not flawless and someone sufficiently motivated will find a way to exfiltrate data is so desired, but should keep people 'honest'.

[dhicks]

Windows Virtual Desktop

 

Ah - is this now (or shortly, start of August) "Windows 365"? This maybe needs a thread to itself.

[chaplic]

Ah - is this now (or shortly, start of August) "Windows 365"? This maybe needs a thread to itself.

 

No, Windows/ Azure Virtual Desktop is more customisable and really designed to be in an IT ecosystem. Perhaps like hotmail to Office365 exchange. That said, I can see Windows365 being valuable to edu because most of the reasons for WVD wont ring true. Affordability may be the challenge!

[JohnJackson]

Interested to know if this is the remote access solution or the remote management as will get this looked into.

[xicor]

Hi All, just a quick update on this, in the end we sadly had to settle with getting laptops..... much to my dislike :/

[ssouth]

We use RDS with 2FA

 

I'd like to enable 2FA for our RDS setup, but no idea how to do this.

[JohnJackson]

Please can you email [email protected] and we will help you out on this one. This kind of expert advice is going to be part of a new service we're bringing to schools called "concierge". More to come ...

[Oaktech]

I'd like to enable 2FA for our RDS setup, but no idea how to do this.

 

Not easilly...

 

Couple of options: put the RDP in azure, use Azure MFA server on premises, there's also a stack of 3rd party options: DUO, UserLOCK to name but 2.

[xicor]

Please can you email [email protected] and we will help you out on this one. This kind of expert advice is going to be part of a new service we're bringing to schools called "concierge". More to come ...

Hi John, we're still waiting on an update from LGFL regarding the firewall access issues. any update on that ?