psydii

May I ask for what mix of devices you have, and your overall volumes?

We found lockdown did for them. They could survive a summer break without use, but that first lockdown, followed by the summer holidays was just too long and the heads got blocked. Six years of reliable service up to that point. I'm also looking for alternatives, and keep ending up back at managed print as now actually being the only way to provide print services economically.. previously it was always a close run thing... and with pagewides nothing could compete if you didn't need toner based prints. We also have an interesting challenge replacing some HP CP5525's ( 'Enterprise' A3 Colour). I would love to find an equivalent device... but nobody seems to be able to offer anything. The CP5225 is hot garbage - it doesn't have its own drivers and performance through Papercut and from MacOS is awful. The CP5525 on the other hand got driver updates two years ago despite being long discontinued.

This way is cheaper and easier. We're not building a platform for the future, its a refresh of current capabilities as we wind down over the next 3-10 years. Could you expand on Dell providing a better product and service?

Because we still have on prem critical stuff, that isn't going cloudward anytime soon. We are all in on 365, but with a significant legacy that takes large capital projects to change. Also moving from SIMS takes the will of SLT to change, however some strategic decisions have been taken assuming SIMS is the MIS, and I'm not about to wreck a DH's project (that is part of the SIP) by pushing for (and winning) an MIS change, that can wait a few (3) years - so in the meanwhile we need the infrastructure to run it.

So I am looking at new servers and a SAN. It seems that the basic chassis is a rebadged Seagate (formerly DotHill) no matter what vendor is making the sale. (PowerVault ME5 / HPE MSA 2060) So (other than the bottom line and the confidence I have in the 3rd party engineer team to build and configure it), the only variable is really Dell vs HPE support. With our previous HPe kit I have been able to extend 24/7 warranty/support for at least four years after the initial 3 year term, their support has been excellent. But with Dell I haven't had any experience for nearly 20 years, but back when I used it was also excellent. Help me out! What should I be looking for/questions should I be asking these days?

Yup, but pretty much every other system we use that needs to know about students also pulls through Wonde. We also used them rather than edenred, but they were processing all that data already. They only service I have actually directly contracted with them for is the MIS 'backup'/disaster recovery option.

Except in the email we received yesterday they've dropped the Basic/Premium branding, and worded things so to a naïve person reading it might believe we'll lose access to services we have come to rely upon if we don't pay. To be fair, it actually does read like they will cut of the GDPR compliance part of the service, which I do rely upon but has always felt part of their core offer.

TBF We took them up on the Data Recovery piece. Having another method for getting the data when everything else has gone sideways seemed like a win-win.

They seem to have changed their marketing, previously trying to upsell from Basic (free to the school) to Premium (not free at all)... We've just got an email from them stating that "your free period for Wonde is coming to an end, and an annual invoice of £360+VAT for your Data Management licence will be issued..." Unless I missed something, we never signed up for a free period of anything... Wonde is a service 3rd Parties use and pay for as part of their service to us..... Has the (unwritten?) contract in this sector whereby the third parties pay for the data transfer and compliance service seems to been broken? Is Wonde running at a loss? Have we built a complex interconnected web of systems on top of something ephemeral as cloud?

So it's 2023, anyone done this recently? Because it is 2023, 90% of activities would be just fine with no layer 2 or 3 connectivity to the main building, however we need certain elements to be fully integrated with our existing infrastructure, including some legacy tech that expects to be on the same layer 2 network. We also have some potential workflows that would benefit from 10G back to the servers. Anyone got any advice? Who did you go to to solve it? How much did it cost? How was the funding secured?

I kind of like the way they it encourages them to engage with us via the UX, otherwise they don't try anything new because they can't be bothered to engage with the process, or they just upload the student details to whatever site takes their fancy - because how would we (IT / DPO) ever know? Yeah Yeah GDPR etc. Sometimes you need the technological carrot and stick to support best practice, and this seems to work pretty well. Still not sure what flow people are following to trigger specifically the above though - it was initially configured because the HoD followed process with us to make it work.

JAMF (IpsumLorem...here are more works than strictly necessary because the spam filters require them)

Still getting them. Reviewing the latest batch, it seems to be Trimble (SketchUP). Not sure why though, since we've got the SketchUP app itself authorized and that seems to work well. The URL / API that needs to be authorized is worryingly non-specific... it looks a lot like authorizing it would authorise all apps running through the Amazon Cognito service. I lack the time to dive into how Cognito works. So it remains unauthorised.

Another way, more work, but would make finance/auditors happier is to actually eyeball every computer and check them off against accounts in AD. If you can't physically find the computer, its account gets disabled.

Aww shucks. Are you saying this is a long solved problem in this space?

Been pondering this, and I've had a revolutionary idea, has anyone thought of separating the user data, application configuration and operating system onto their own disks? This way you might be able to swap out the OS or even the application hosting independently of user data. It could be a game changer. I should probably patent the idea.

Inventry have tried my patience too. Not sure what’s happened but they’ve really dropped the ball. To the extent when it next comes to renew I am going to go to the hassle of re-tendering for a new system rather than putting up with their shoddy support any further.

Officially: buy E3 for all staff. In practice, a Microsoft Licensing partner will probably find you a solution, and its up to you if you take it.

A trick we used pretty early on (thanks to an Azure AD P1 I think) was to require MFA for accounts logins that have a risk level of "medium" or above, for users who aren't MFA enabled this just blocks the logon.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-entra-azure-ad-blog/raising-the-baseline-security-for-all-organizations-in-the-world/ba-p/3299048

Sorry, wasn't my intent.

Astute of you. However, some of these people got their addresses when they started with the 3rd party before they TUPEd to us. Some never worked for us starting with the third party and leaving before we brought the service back in house. We have in the past had our facilities hire people with school email addresses since they worked very closely with our internal teams on resource availability and booking, so the whole system was school branded. In later contracts they were less integrated and operated under their own branding.

You can just ask salamander to do this for you. The use case you describe, however, seems a little odd. I am not sure what the limit on Class Teams is when it comes to memberships/assignment use, but last time I checked our year groups were too big.

Its not uncommon. People who work with NHS / Hospitals / Microsoft often have email addresses owned by these organizations, even though they might actually work for consultancies / universities / 3rd party companies contracted to provide specific services. Here our Head of Catering has a school address despite being employed by our 3rd party provider. The same has been variously true for Facilities, HR, IT, the cleaners over the years. Why? Often for the duration of the engagement the leadership want them to appear as part of the school to internal and/or external stakeholders. Also sometime they may be processing/handling sensitive information, and by requiring all communication to occour on school controlled platforms, it is easier to provide the necessary protections as part of the standard IT offer.

Minimum requirements to getting and email account: Signed Contract, Signed AUP, DBS, Completed mandatory training (Safeguarding, Data Protection, H+S). We can and do secure with MFA.