psydii

We don't. They use Teams or the web to access necessary Sharepoint sites. Except for some subjects where they are always in IT Suites... in which case we have seating plans - they always use the same computer, so in "lesson one" they sync the SharePoint folder themselves. Seating plans are a universal requirement across the school, so we are taking advantage of a teacher lead management decision rather than forcing it upon staff and students.

Happens to us too. We’ve got a gpo that fixed it for a while, but the issue returned. It seems to happen after an update. We don’t have CC4. Fwiw our gpo fix was the result of a support call to Microsoft about four years ago.

2Gb database?! It think ours is more like 12Gb. Just timed it. A few seconds to the logon screen. Then between 25 and 70 seconds to the SIMS Homepage. I feel that if it was consistently 25 seconds I would not mention it. But 30/40+ is slow enough to cause me (and colleagues) frustration. We have loads of 3rd party sync running, but nothing in that regard has changed in the last few months. Perhaps a re-index might be needed, not sure when we last had one done. Various maintenance tasks are scheduled to run periodically which seem to have kept things performant up to this point. Strange thing is that once were on it runs just fine. P.

Looks like we came close today: https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/uk-news/2022/11/28/electricity-supplies-tight-as-national-grid-issues-two-separate-notices/

Hi, We're seeing SIMS taking longer and longer to get from the splash screen to the homepage. Anyone got any tips/thoughts on what might be the cause or how we might address it? Thanks P.

Wait. isn't Access Education Budgeting formerly HCSS and part of the Access Group?

Hi @Ditto, I think they are saying your tenant isn't licenced for MCAS. Which puts this outside of my experience. I'm not sure how much access to what audit data one has without it. If the event was within the 30 day limit and you have MCAS the "Activity Type:AddedToGroup" filter might return the information you are after. This page suggests the raw audit data is available https://samilamppu.com/2020/08/07/office-365-audit-events-visibility-in-cloud-app-security/ but I've never seen people talk about querying and searching it - and I spend a bit of time on infosec / SharePoint twitter so it probably falls into the realms of specialist forensics (though I could be wrong). Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

https://www.backblaze.com/business-veeam-backup.html

Somewhere in ProgramData I think.... but really what you want to know is how to have multiple windows users access the software on that machine. The solution is to use Task Scheduler to launch the server component at boot time running as a Local System. Import the configuration into that, and then it is available for all users of the computer (who must be in the local Administrators group)

If the school is happy with how things are, then you need to become happy with it too or look for another post. CC4 traces its philosophical roots back to the way Schools' IT was done in mid to late 1990's, being designed and built by the people who defined that era for IT in schools. Many schools view IT as almost a single purpose tool, and the changes that have come about through mobile and cloud computing serve no critical function to their purpose of delivering education safely to students. If you are working in a place like that but want to develop an IT career, you may need to move on pretty quickly. Build transferable skills - organization, documentation, a customer service focus and take them somewhere you can work with a less customized/restricted environment. On the other hand, they may hate their current set up and perhaps there is scope for change. You may have to navigate your boss with care in this case, from what you have said I infer that they are at peace with "how things are done", and rocking the boat is a course of action that comes with considerable risk and requires careful consideration.

We've been using OneDrive client for four years and been 'all in' with SharePoint site Document Libraries for departments since March 2020. This has never come up.

Does it need to be a full o365 group? or would a distribution list suffice?

I think andyb has the best solution for you. You could also make a spreadsheet that illustrates the problem points? image size, bit rate of wifi, wifi's inherent problem with co-channel interference, server processing time, network again, printer processing time, printer ram etc. People who play with oscilloscopes understand graphs.

I do think it is telling that we don't see that much grumbling about Arbor in these parts. They grew faster than Bromcom (across secondary schools) for the last couple of years. It seems to suggest they have a more supportable/ better supported product. That said in terms of total numbers they have fewer users, so perhaps that is the reason. With SIM's new three-year contracts, we've got one more cycle of churn to go before the market is frozen in place for a couple of years, so tracking how customer satisfaction changes in this period should be a key indicator for people looking to switch in future.

For your windows devices, Remote Help via Intune is also free for Edu customers. https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home?#/MessageCenter/:/messages/MC414475 It has the same limitations as previous non-Intune iterations except you can elevate to local Admin if the Global Admin has so deigned. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/mem/intune/remote-actions/remote-help

On the other thread it was reported making it sound like a network loop. Also if nobody knows where the other end goes, just leave it unplugged? However later on (back in this thread) other symptoms are reported, and I'd have put a small amount of money on @simpsonj having zero'd in on at least one part of the problem but as @FN-GM says, if there are two devices with the default gateway IP, then that would also explain shenanigans. That all said, I would hope that the service provider has fully resolved the issue by now. I'm sure several of us would be interested to the actual root cause.

This is a solid plan. I would caution against the idea that education IT support companies are interchangeable. They all have their preferred way of doing things, there is no standard config for Windows in a school, and usually the next team will struggle with / blame the previous supplier for things that really ought not to be a problem. This is different to say a VMWARE / CISCO / HP SAN where there are validated infrastructure designs and any appropriately trained engineer will instantly know their way around a configuration, provided the initial implementation followed the validate design. Its well worth looking at this in detail. Primaries can be fully cloud without too much of a challenge. Depending on whether they are looking at Google or Microsoft, their IWB / Classroom Screens might need a change of approach, as may printing (if they have central print accounting they will need a cloud equivalent, but they may just print direct to the devices, so again no problem?); their MIS is probably already cloud based, if not thats a project to migrate to a cloud MIS which can be quite the change; finally their wifi will need looking at, with a CC4 network its quite possible authentication is tied to their Windows Domain, this will need migrating whether to the new Windows infrastructure or to the Cloud - though cloud will have additional costs if it isn't already a cloud first system. In my (very limited) experience of Primaries, once the right configuration and software is on the right machines and there are the appropriate shared folders set up, the key support issue is not Windows Domain management, but hardware maintenance/support. The challenge being that an FTE is often too much, and a 1 or 2 day a week roaming support engineer is not enough.

Oh god this. Every time the service desk received a flood of alarms from the SAN because one of the hosts has rebooted for an update... or every year around this time when finance haul me in to say I'm 90% over budget, which in some years is a serious amount of money. I never am, we just spent 90% of the allocation in the first 6 months of the financial year because the big contracts/licenses renew in April, and we deliver the projects over the summer... and then the remote desktop takes just a little longer than normal to let me in...

You sometimes get their Bitlocker keys.

Just checking, but the DCs should be using themselves as DNS Servers and not the LA address, which should only be set in DNS Service MMC. Is this how you have it? TBH not sure why DCOM would be trying to contact a DNS server, that's the job of other parts of the stack, perhaps something in the DNS Service configuration (via the DNS MMC) is off and the domain is resolving to the LA IP?

FWIW I think we set up AAD Connect, then ran the hybrid wizard. Then did the mx record changes. Make sure you also do the whole DKIM/SPF dance too. The connectors got set up by the wizard, and only needed recreating by hand after something daft happened with AzureAD connect (because we needed cutting edge features that at the time were pre-release options)

I have been told that if you have intune you can't stop AAD Registration (as you see the option is greyed out on the panel you are looking at). You can however stop BYOD enrolment into Intune/MEM: I haven't not managed to navigate this successfully myself, and we are just extremely careful with policies, only deploying to groups that are comprised entirely of corporate owned devices.

We get that every day, caused by the pause to the dc's during snapshot for VEEAM. Also happens if a DC tries to replicate with another while the partner is rebooting. Check your event logs for the error, they should clearly be transient and at time when a DC was coming up/down or being backed-up. If the logs are full of the errors, then you have a problem that needs looking into.

Load Shedding is a term I have heard here. Also Rota disconnection (as in, there is a rota for who loses power when) seems to be the term in the official documentation: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/995049/esec-guidance.pdf A lot of schools here will have 2006-2011 era switches. While post-capacitor plague, electrical kit from this era was more prone to solder fatigue failure. Fatigue being caused by thermal changes (as might be seen when powering down for a few minutes), and corrosion (as might be seen if a device is on the shelf for a while). Solder quality improved as time went on so newer kit is less prone to these failures.

We put 16Gb into ours from day one and people love them.