psydii

They can do many amazing things better than AI, but I've never seen one quite that good.

I've seen "Options" work well. It's from the same team that brought us the inspirationally named (and highly regarded) "Timetabler" TimeTabler | School Timetabling Software | Our Products Caveat: it was a long long time ago, from the earliest days of the Bromcom MIS.

26H2 adds Windows settings backup and restore. Not a replacement for roaming profiles of yore, but potentially handy when swapping out a user's device in a 1:1 environment. We try to mimic 1:1 by enforcing seating plans in IT Suites (well the class teachers do it as per T+L and behaviour management policies). This ensures any device a student is likely to use, should be ready for them next time they use it. Now I wonder how hot desking vs 1:1 and settings backup interact when the user might be on their 1:1 device then a shared device etc. Windows settings backup becoming a new resilience baseline - Windows IT Pro Blog

Copilot itself is covered by the same contracts as 365. So doesn’t strictly need one if you’ve got your 365 paperwork up to date. You should however add it to your AI register, and mention it alongside 365 in your RoPA. But if you light up any of the integrations that alter that, such as Anthropic models, you might need to more formally consider whether an additional DPIA is needed based on the specific terms of those additional integrations. in Microsoft-land if you have to click through a licence agreement to enable it, then you need to do at least a light-pass on a DPIA and add it to your RoPA and stat sharing registers.

Those Grandstream handsets look a lot like rebadged chinese oem built on top of the alibaba cloud. If the rebadger has done the job properly, you are not supposed to be able to realise, but sometimes there's a config mistake and the phone registers with a chinese server on boot. We've got ours (not grandstream, but clearly the same manufacturer) locked down with geo-based firewall rules. We used to have cisco handsets which lasted 10+ years. These ones look and feel like longevity might be a concern, but they've actually been *more* reliable than the cisco's in their first few years. (compared to the ciscos in their first few years). For us, support comes from the UK based VOIP provider that sold them to us, and it hasn't been a problem. However I think the way the contract works, they will all get swapped out at the five year mark - which potentially speaks to the longevity (or lack there of) of the device/support. Beyond that, I couldn't say.

If only there was a B2B web api they could use instead of an exe first compiled in 2002. Oh. Wait. There is. ParentPay should be eating their own dog food. Or just use WONDE like everybody else. Frankly it’s embarrassing.

The way I have solved this in the past is via the cashless catering vendor. (They are one of the smaller outfits.) Their system prints the cards/tokens and integrate with Paxton so they already have a commercial licence (for your site). And because cashless catering, and basic provisioning/deprovisioning is a solved problem, you can sometimes persuade the cashless catering developer to put in some bespoke automations for you. The method of persuasion varies depending on how much you've spent with them recently. One year something was quoted at £6000 (which we did seriously consider, but declined) and then a few years later (and to be fair after they had done some similar dev work for someone else), it was thrown in "for free" if we bought those three tills we were planning to this month rather than next.... (done this twice with two different vendors solving similar but different problems)

Autopilot is apparently having a bad day too. https://x.com/nilsvanwoensel/status/2105264065643729252

Microsoft tells nonprofits their deleted M365 data isn't coming back So the non-profits did not move to a supported plan, so the tenants were hard deleted. Utlimately not unreasonable, except..... ...there's supposed to be a window where the tenant is recoverable, but it seems Microsoft's processes are such that that is more of a "good intention" than actual operating practice. I hope this is followed up with a significant strong statement about the steps they are putting in place to prevent hard deletion of backups before the recovery window expires. I mean you can backup SharePoint document libraries pretty easily, and even your inbox... but if you've enitrely lost Intune and Entra? This is a significant breach of trust.

Microsoft have done a really surprisingly good job of bring this particular feature to 365. It's far from a perfect implementation, but it is now very easy to loose track of where a file really is.

Wasn't that specific course, but it cost us nothing that wasn't already spent. Because its a faff to get set up and no one else had put themselves forward, the full allocation was just sitting there. You do have to align things with the actual job you are doing/being trained to do, and there is real work required of your manager to support you as part of the apprenticeship programme.

special schools - just match against phase/governance. Independent schools - chains use MAT, otherwise LA/Stand Alone. 16-19 is secondary for the purpose of this fantastically well designed sector survey. Not-England - We're all familiar with understanding that 11-18 is "K12" when it comes to licences. Just match as close as you can. Maybe put clarification in the comments. Mostly primary/vs secondary dominated trusts. Yeah, very subjective sorry. You know in your gut which phase the MAT leadership put the greatest weight upon. Choose that one. On Gemini solving admins problems - I think equally true of copilot - I get the feeling everything here is quieter than it was.... ...but I first had this thought about bias vs decline in Google Workspace usage before ChatGPT breached the public awareness. But yes, it occurred to me (or might even have been suggest to here previously) that Google Admins need to ask fewer questions because things just work better. (counterpoint - things work just fine over in 365 - there are just a good deal more gui-exposed settings that can be twiddled... but this survey wont expose that, just whether there is a bias between the number of schools being managed, and Primary vs Secondary when it comes to platforms in use by edugeek members.

That your employer has conditioned you to think training is "time off" speaks volumes.

It maybe a clickbait title, but, are we? Over the last few years, I have noticed* fewer google/workspace related threads or mentions, and many more threads or comments like "we're moving from Workspace to 365". Is it that Google schools are happy, content, and silent; or is it that actually Google is losing ground? Or perhaps is it that large Google-first MATs aren't well represented here? *of course I could be wrong.

Copilot, no. People have a library of prompts they develop and copy/paste as needed. It's just about 'good enough' that I don't have a revolt on my hands. People deeper into AI use have got the full 365 Copilot licence and that does offer this functionality. From what I understand Gemini on an education Workspace account does offer this functionality. Side note: I suspect that Notebooks functionality might be coming to k12 tenants without the full 365 CoPilot licence - I've seen the feature light up (and then go dark again) for several people. The notebook functionality is game changing, and if Gemini continues to offer it in the free tier for edu Workspace accounts, I can't see how Microsoft can continue to gate it behind the monthly 365 Copilot add on. Where as I can see them being forced to drop their edu AI support tools inside Teams Classroom etc since they are competing against little startups - and crushing them attracts unwanted attention from regulators.

Might exampad+ be a good fit? ExamPad+ | Exam Word Processor for Schools paging @liamrobinson

Never done it, but when I was paying attention to this sort of thing, Sharegate was the tool to use. I'd have though, as ever, it depends. Particularly on whether any of the schools have got "business processes" enabled by 365 that depend on more than just files and email. Just of the top of my head, things that might trip up the unwarey: Custom mail flows, rules etc Forms PowerAutomations CoPilot Sensitivity Labels Data loss policies Communication compliance policies ediscovery case history licencing automation/edge cases Users that ought to be shared mailboxes Teams that ought to be shared mailboxes. Distribution lists secondary email addresses on users, distribution lists, groups, teams etc. (where do the important emails to things like safeguarding/dsl, data protection, security, noc, hostmaster, the primary apple DEP account, and other 3rd party admin tools really go? See also things like admin and finance (though those are obvious ones that nobody's going to forget about). Teams that represent operational groups within the school that the MAT might not be aware of. Teams Policies Teams Telephoney settings, etc. Unusual permissions at the top of Sharepoint collections. Unusual permission deep inside SharePoint collections. legacy email address policies customised quarantine arrangements for certain mailboxes. local knowledge in how to deal with various alerts containing sensitive information in quarantine, communication compliance etc etc) Entra Enterprise Apps (and all the DPIAs you're going to have to do to bring over anything you don't have already set up) 3rd part integrations - everything that pulls from Entra, and how that is configured. Conditional Access policies Custom Indicators in Defender. Edge policies Defender policies InTune (settings, remediation scripts, include/exclude rules etc etc) Intune Autopilot (groups/tags) Personal devices in Intune. Any Integration of 3d party MDMs. Any integration with 3rd part identity providers or plugins (e.g. for Apple Devices) I've probably missed a few.

Not heard anything about that, but there was some chatter about Entra being busted which was buried in the 1000’s of the other CVE’s over the summer. Was otherwise distracted, so absent msm tech sites picking up the story, I assumed (head in the sand) it was a nothing-burger. An awful lot of ms infra software got vulnerabilities exposed recently.

966 patches in the September update, so I wouldn't rule it out. Are you sure though that it wasn't doing that from the start during the summer?

That sounds like some UAC interaction (or similar) flashing up the "desktop" (in the Win32/NT Object sense) of another user/account session. If its an older version of the Adobe CC suite that isn't auto updating, it seem like it might be that CC is now tripping over changes made in the UAC flow (or similar) in a recent Windows Updates? Might even be a new bug in the latest version given how many patches have gone into the last two patch Tuesday releases...

Shared Device Licensing overview | Enterprise Looks like this is expected behaviour? [not the freezing bit!]

Officially we're all in on "teachmate". All staff have Copilot Chat (or is it "Copilot 365 Free tier" they keep changing its name) 10 staff have M365 Copilot 365 Premium (including me - which is why i can't just glance at the correct name for "Chat" in the corner of my screen). Most of the staff who are paying attention are begging for Claude. Which we could (technically) give them it via their M365 Copilot Premium licence, if not for unanswered GDPR querries. Its sitting with our DPO at the moment, and has been a good long while. That said, in casual conversation with people familiar with the overall strategy, I'm told a lot of people are happy enough with copilot chat, they've figured out their prompts and it does what they need. It has come a long way in the last two years, and seems to offer GPT 5 (5.5?) even for those on the basic Chat licence. Its getting stuff tuned and baked into some of the edu specfific tools. But even so the Notebook feature of the Premium version seems like a game changer.. perhaps. Certainly Google appears to offer that for free to edu customers. Nobody is asking for the OpenAI products because (for us) they are available in Copilot. Those that want to do more are asking for Claude. We have some people using Claude and MIstral and githib copilot with very clear guard rails that they must not include any PII. I do have to say that having a coding ai working on scripts has got somethings done 10x faster than without, and claude has helped people streamline and automate processes both on the technical side and on the business case side. Copilot is doing a lot of triage assistance across middle leadership. From a T+L perspective there is some below the radar use in Teams classrooms, but officially we're all in on "teachmate". Just to be clear, I am not "voting" for Microsoft / Anthropic instead at least one "other" is a vote for the combination of TeachMate/CoPilot Chat + a smattering of M365 CoPliot Premium, with the understanding that GPT is part of the CoPilot offer. I should point out that we have M365 A5, and strong a history RBAC built from group membership which supported us further secure things with Sensitivity labels and DLP policies. RBAC dates back to the dawn of our AD, and the labels and DLP since about 2018 (with a review to the more modern implementation a few years ago).

Delete when the retention policy says the files can be deleted?

recycled some dfe laptops and dedicated them for the purpose. wifi is switched off, acounts wiped by exams team after scripts handed in via usb/printing. Devices are maintained with a monthly reconnect over a weekend, and again over the holidays.

but why though?