Anyone else Azure wary?

[_techie_]

Hi.

 

My network manager came into the office this afternoon, to deliver some good news that we will be getting some funds for replacment PC's for teacing staff.

We had recently looked at Chromebooks for staff to use, along with our Citrix system to access SIMS.Net and files whilst we transition to a cloud ready future, but a recent trial didn't work out quite as planned, and we now need time to move away from SIMS.Net to another MIS.

With this in mind, we initially went down the route of doing a direct replacement of existing kit. We currently run Chromebooks for students across the site (we are a Google Classroom school you see).

 

Driving home, I was thinking that signifiicant savings could be made on replacement kit, by just going down the Azure managed device route for Staff and reducing the endpoint count down. I recently did a trial of this myself using a Windows 10 Azure managed device setup using autopilot, but the experience left a little to be desired, as well as significant delay between the device checking in with Azure... I also didn't really get round to use Sharepoint, or OneDrive as I was the only one using it. I also experienced quite a few bitlocker startup issues, which caused some grief...

 

We currently run fixed desktop PC's on an on-premise domain, but this does increase the PC count and thus cost as well, however we do have good reliability. We also need to provide some breathing room for the next 3-5 years whilst we undertake some other projects, like moving Staff mailboxes to Exchange Online, putting in some new servers and replace SIMS.Net (some big ones here!).

 

We are also only running O365 A1 for faculty, which means staff don't actually have full Office M365 that can be installed on your their individual PC's so some additional costs there to do this.

I'm also not a massive fan of OneDrive having experienced significant issues with file length path issues having assisted some friends in the past with this.

 

Has anyone transitioned from the more old-fashioned Windows network, to a new cloud ready MS future for Staff using Azure/Endpoint Manager?

What benefits did you experience and what drawbacks/issues did you have to overcome.

 

Thanks

_techie_

[Ditto]

Moving from SIMS to a modern cloud based MIS is perhaps a project that should be run standalone. Based on other Edugeeker's that have made this move, I suspect it'll bring you most reward for the effort. The main MIS suppliers seem to have strong and well tested approaches to migrating, so is potentially achievable within a year. Once that step is taken, I would expect your ambitions to move to a cloud ready future will be a bit simpler.

 

I'm sure others will bring further insight to this thread shortly, but you might want to read through a blog about a serverless school, starting with https://blog.theserverlessschool.net/p/about.html

[supportman]

Replacing the MIS with a modern cloud one really isnt a big deal, it took us about 3 months of talking about it then 2 weeks of actually migrating. Went very smoothly in the end.

 

I would advise starting there before adding other cloud services as its the core of the school.

[ZFarnworth_geek]

Would you go hosted sims? If you’ve got chromebooks and just have staff login to sims ID on chrome and then download the rdp file as long as you have got the rdp app installed, that should be about it.

 

That’s what I’d do but every school is different.

[Theblacksheep]

Would you go hosted sims? If you’ve got chromebooks and just have staff login to sims ID on chrome and then download the rdp file as long as you have got the rdp app installed, that should be about it.

 

That’s what I’d do but every school is different.

 

I'd bin SIMS as early as possible and go to a cloud-based MIS.

[Primus]

SIMS is awful, time to bite the bullet.

[supportman]

Would you go hosted sims? If you’ve got chromebooks and just have staff login to sims ID on chrome and then download the rdp file as long as you have got the rdp app installed, that should be about it.

 

That’s what I’d do but every school is different.

 

Absolutely not!

 

Sims has been left to rot the last 5 years. So outdated compared to other products.

 

As an example we are on Bromcom now and teachers just use the modern apple or android app in most cases to do day to day stuff, and the web interface for more involved things like reports. It works on literally any device.

[Michael]

I'd say it depends what Azure's being used for. Bromcom for example is hosted in Azure, but Azure joined devices and local domain devices, it isn't quite like for like.

[TechMonkey]

Hi.

Driving home, I was thinking that signifiicant savings could be made on replacement kit, by just going down the Azure managed device route for Staff and reducing the endpoint count down.

 

I think you need to quantify this. I'm not sure how Azure will help make significant savings or reduce the endpoint count? Moving device management to Azure may lead to less on site servers needed (no SCCM/MDT needed) and moving to OneDrive and SharePoint will remove file servers, but currently I don't see a complete serverless model for schools unless you are extremely cutting edge or revolutionary. Also how do you see it cutting endpoints? Same number of staff, same number of desks.

 

As others have said, there are easier and more rewarding changes that can be made but it will affect infrastructure more than the end user. Also it will often shift the cost, not always save it.

[Norphy]

For the average business and for 1:1 deployments, I could see how Intune and Autopilot can help reduce costs, or at least support costs, as you'd be able to drop ship a computer to a customer without having to touch it. The user would log in with their Office 365 credential and the computer would join itself to AAD, or it would hybrid join and get all of its software from the internets without IT touching it. There's a lot of setting up to do with it but there's massive potential and with current Microsoft licensing plans, you'd only pay for what you need rather than overprovisioning something like SCCM to be able to expand future use.

 

For the more "traditional" school setup, with many users to one computer, Intune is just another management platform with no real clear advantages over any other platform, apart from possibly cost of internal infrastructure.

 

One way or the other, it's not going to reduce endpoint hardware costs, as @TechMonkey says