psydii

Is it possible those files are owned by someone else, and they shared with the "no downloading" option selected? Either set up like this: Block downloads for view-only files in SharePoint and OneDrive - Microsoft Support, or maybe this: How to use the SharePoint Block Download Policy.

Our service desk client actually tracks this for us. I occasionally think Config Manager ought to be able to do this too. A quick check in CoPilot, and it agrees, but I don't have time to check whether it was hallucinating. Here is the prompt I used: "We have IT Suites of computers, each suit is in its own collection. Different sets of users log on and off each hour (lesson period). However not every suite is used every lesson period. We need to report on IT Suite utilisation. How can configuration manager be used to create a report that tracks usage of computers in a collection."

EDIT NKD got there first. You can set an alert to appear if any recipients are external or students, and use DLP to block or warn based on classifiers (which these days it appears you can train up on, say, example reports from sims and the contents of the SEN teams folders). We don't block, we warn. The Data Protection Officer gets a note about it and checks with people periodically. The occasional visit by the DPO keeps people on their toes, and improves their practice - it turns out, beside actual breaches, the amount of data flowing out of the org via email might be more than strictly necessary.

I wonder if this is related?

Is this archival footage for school history/marketing purposes? Then a dedicated SharePoint site(s). I think there is a 1TB limit on a site, so you might need to split them up. For student coursework already in progress, similar, but moving forward, class teams / (student work document library) is where new material should go. You will need to watch out for permissions with things like a legacy media share. Better to really limit access until you've had a chance to get your head round it. ( I *really* knew what I was doing and still managed to goof this for a couple of migrated folders!)

Might be worth raising it via Microsoft Edu support https://aka.ms/EduSupport

Do you really mean Seamless Single Sign On? With modern implementations of Windows, iOS, MacOs, Android with a "current" version of Entra Sync and Entra Connect, Seamless Single Sign on is not required and generally should be disabled. Why you should disable Seamless SSO in Microsoft Entra Connect

They had a chance to make people like the Copilot brand, but instead they messed up the Office suite and 365 user landing page (portal.office.com), and every thing is worse. My favourite bit is that on 8Gb machines, if you have a copilot window open (either in a browser, or thanks to its integration in Teams and the 365 App) after a day or two of just being open, they seem to bring the machine to its knees.

Hmm. I would loop in your account manager into the conversation, keep positive and usually they can dig up someone who can help, even if it is to gently say your SLT "fix your data" (not that we've had that recently, but a few years ago a huge number of "sims problems" were actually GIGO problems.) I assume the sims support person who hangs about these parts might also be able to help you move this along.

Summer 2026 census routine is in NG only. So unless you are committed to being off SIMS before then, you will need to sync to NextGen.

Whether triple screens work is very chipset/driver dependant. They were what I had been given a budget to deliver, but we found out pretty quickly during early evaluations of hardware that there were too many variables to make that a safe investment. We were also burned as an early adopter of USB-C docks, but we've not had systemic issues with post-2021 USB C devices. Here is some good info about the state of USB C in 2025: How Long Can a USB-C Cable Be? What is USB-C Power Delivery? What is USB4? USB-C Cables and USB-C Adapters from Cable Matters And to wander off into the weeds away from problems unique to USB-C for a moment.... USB Type-C Notifications in Windows 11: OEM Configuration & Testing Guide (With references to bad ACPI driver implementations from vendors) .... (How bad ACPI implementations can impact your experience: Deep DiveGitHub - Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive: A deep dive into the ACPI.sys DPC latency problems on Asus ROG laptops)

You may only need that, but if either end point supports higher, you may encounter issues with cabling that isn't in spec for the highest standard the end points support. Amazon Basics used to do a 10m that worked well *for us* in cases where nothing short of a Bluestream would. I can say that with certainty because we ran out, and they stopped selling them, and the *only* thing that worked were the copper 10m bluestreams. However it seems Bluestream also stopped selling 10m copper too, so we (along with everyone here who needs it to work now and into the future with higher capability devices) moved to Active Optical Cables. [EDIT BECUASE I DIDN'T READ IT PROPERLY - The new one from Amazon is a AOC, not copper] If that new Amazon one is as good as the old one (it looks completely different), then it will be great. But it is different, so I can't endorse it, but I will say that it's worth a shot. Looking at the business ends, i wouldn't be surprised if it uses some active amplifaction/signalling to work - in which case, if it doesn't have a usb option for it to get its power, you may find inconsistent performance between devices / firmware / drivers. [Our AOC ones all draw power from a USB port on the board. So this probably needs to as well.] Finally, I would be sceptical of any brand that sells 15m 4K/60+ copper HDMI as this at the ragged edge of plausibility and vendors that trade on the reliability of their cabling do not sell such products.

hmdi to projector/screen. Break out from there to amp/powered speakers if necessary. Set the amp reasonably, lock it (and the audio cable runs/ports) away so the teacher/students can't fiddle and use the computer to control volume. Better though to have good speakers in the board so you don't need any external devices or additional cables.

If you didn't find that pricey enough, Blustream 48Gbps AOC 8K HDMI Cable 10m (HDMI48G-10) (Black) (1) | 8K Active HDMI Cable | Richer Sounds . If you ask a Bluestream distributor for a potential supplier you might be able to get a price closer to the off-brand offer from Adept networks. We found Bluestream cables game changing.

If you still have an on-prem Exchange server use ECP to make the contacts. Using ADUC to make a contact produces something that looks superficially correct but does not work. I've not tried the PowerShell equivalent, which claims to work for EOL too. New-MailContact (ExchangePowerShell) | Microsoft Learn

Attendance write back is *fraught* with problems. Unless you (the architect of the system) tightly control how the humans behave on a day to day basis, marks you don't want to be will get overwritten. Every few years the org I work for has to re-learn this lesson the hard way. You can get it to work just fine when everybody involved understands how it must be done and why they must not deviate from that practice. But eventually someone new starts who, even though trained up, does not really understand why, and then a manager changes and the new manager is disinterested in understanding "why not" and then things break and "everything is terrible and doesn't work and computers are unreliable" This is platform agnostic.

End points will try to negotiate for the fastest/highest bandwidth they can both support. If the cable can go higher than the endpoints and is in good condition, at no point does signal degradation become a factor and the negotiation is very quick. If your cables are only rated for 1080/60 and either or both end points want something faster, they try - it takes a moment for the devices to decide to fall back to a lower bandwidth resolution/standard and try again. Rinse and repeat until the manage to get a stable setting. However (from experience) If the screen says I'm 4k60hz and the laptops also says it is, and the cable is *almost* good enough, they don't ever fall back to something that works and you get a black or flashing screen. On the precise mechanism for the negotiation I am not clear, but from experience if the cable outclasses the end points capabilities, you get an almost instantaneous connection/display.

Hardware is weird. Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers, follow-up - The Old New Thing I heard they actually removed some of the safety code referenced in the article recently, and looking around the web it seems that reported audio problems/quirks in Windows 11 jumped about the same time. Maybe they also cut out some legacy code that was responsible for mitigating electrical interference between network traffic and audio hardware. that said I can't seem to find any references to the removal of the code Raymond is talking about, and whether it does line up with the uptick in Windows 11 audio problems might just be me retro-fitting what I can see to make a good story. What if you built it with Windows 10 and the drivers you had installed last year? If no crackle, try an in place update to windows 11 without doing any HP recomended driver updates and test again. Maybe also try with an older Windows 11 release, or the latest drivers from Windows Update (rather than those from an HP driver pack or auto-update system). Another thing you might try is an alternative patch lead - maybe a brand new high quality CAT6A and route it slightly differently. However, I suspect the correct solution is to move away from file shares and use OneDrive/SharePoint instead.

VGA cabling wasn’t trying to transmit 20-40GB/s. We have, I think, just crossed over the could/should level of video fidelity expectations. We’ll see similar issues in a few years as 2.5gb/s+ switches and built-in Ethernet ports take hold and suddenly all those cat 5e and slightly-out-of-spec 100m cat6 runs start to suffer the same issues we see with HDMI. Yesterday I replace a rogue cat 5 patch lead on a slightly over-long cat6 run solving random 200ms ping times when there was lots of network traffic on the segment. Cable and pc had been fine when they were in a different office last week… and that was on a 1g switch/pc.

Yup. Anything other/additional to than the cable supplied with the screen and you are at the mercy of the gods. Fibre, though a bush plate, to the device is the most reliable.

Assuming they have an alternative device from where they can perform admin functions, you could try creating a secondary non-admin account for each SLT to use with their iPad.

As with anything that is tangentially related to I C or T, we tend to be the backstop/continuity provider if things have gone wrong. We hold copies of the keys to the accounts, and have our own documentation of processes for how to actually post or update pages. I've been asked to make two posts in the last year vs the many dozen that the comms officer has. When they were off for a long period a few years ago, we did a lot more of the posting, but big changes to content were put on hold. The bulk of their work though is internal facing and more akin to the technical/design work that used to sit in a traditional media services / reprographic team (from way back in the day). None of that comes anywhere near us.

Oh. Now there is another thing in my "...when you have more time" pile.

I was looking at configuring a new Microsoft 365 Apps deployment in InTune the other day and the only options for English were "none" (install as per OS) and Engligh (US). This seems like it might be a problem. But then again deploying the US/Int version of Windows brings its own problems with timezeone defaults sticking... so maybe its a "you should have installed localised version of Windows" problem. I parked it as a "look at it again when you have more time" job since the current deployment method (SCCM) of an ancient build is still working fine.

“It just worked but nobody knew how”