Hwb Welsh Gov

[swiftysw1]

Hi my Fellow Welsh schools.

 

Most schools are part of the Hwb (Welsh Government); which is basically managed at LEA level.

 

My question is related to the Schools DC's.. Who are these setup by?

 

I have read these are done by the LA? (JUST THE DC's ONLY) and not any member servers?

 

Thanks

[3s-gtech]

Can you give more context on your question? Do you mean our DCs in each school? Or somehow related to Hwb itself, which is all M365 based (into other services)?

[PotNoodleTech]

Frankly it depends on each school.

 

You say most schools are part of HWB - every single school in Wales has access to HWB but that doesn't mean they use it on a daily basis - 50% of schools I know use their own Google/Office365 as it's MUCH more flexible and reactive to teaching and learning needs whereas HWB is extremely locked down, inflexible and very difficult to make any changes to.

 

Most schools are likely to be using the LA active directory so will be using LA DCs and possibly LEA member servers too.

 

Some like mine set up our own servers but are still joined to the LA active directory etc.

 

A handful are totally separate and use separate companies for support (for example RM).

[mikes]

We are in the VOG and run our DC's ourselves, our switches, wifi and broadband are controlled by our LEA so our school is on a giant network with our LEA (all firewalled and sectioned off) but we control our own DNS, DHCP and DC's. Basically anything server side is our problem (apart from SIMS which the LEA supports) and anything networking is done by our LEA.

We have access to HWB but we only really use it for the licensing it gives us e.g. for Minecraft and Adobe Creative Cloud.

 

One thing that makes me nervous about using Hwb is that it seems the students show up similar to staff e.g. currently our system, a student would be 22SmithM and a staff member would be M Smith, meaning it is hard to send to the wrong e-mail. But on Hwb it seems a student and staff member would both show up as SmithM2343 and SmithM2112 for example? Our staff would constantly be sending confidential mail to students if this was the case if we moved to Hwb.

[PotNoodleTech]

We are in the VOG and run our DC's ourselves, our switches, wifi and broadband are controlled by our LEA so our school is on a giant network with our LEA (all firewalled and sectioned off) but we control our own DNS, DHCP and DC's. Basically anything server side is our problem (apart from SIMS which the LEA supports) and anything networking is done by our LEA.

We have access to HWB but we only really use it for the licensing it gives us e.g. for Minecraft and Adobe Creative Cloud.

 

One thing that makes me nervous about using Hwb is that it seems the students show up similar to staff e.g. currently our system, a student would be 22SmithM and a staff member would be M Smith, meaning it is hard to send to the wrong e-mail. But on Hwb it seems a student and staff member would both show up as SmithM2343 and SmithM2112 for example? Our staff would constantly be sending confidential mail to students if this was the case if we moved to Hwb.

 

Pretty much identical to us.

 

The other big negatives to HWB is the inability to manage your own schools data - not just for the daily stuff like renaming/creating OUs but the serious stuff such as data retention investigations and compliance etc.