psydii

Write a spec, put it in a spreadsheet give each item a weighting (how important it is), score the offers against the spec. multiply the scores against the weighting. total it up. award to the highest score. (test the spreadsheet extensively before committing to using the weightings - its very easy to build something that scores the worst offer highest because of some untested interaction in the spreadsheet). I've fended off a few grumpy unsuccessful vendors with this approach, and always ended up with the best solution delivered. I've also (for larger projects) paid consultants for a day or two's work, to review the initial spec, ad-hoc advice and then 1 page report sense checking the final scoring/decision ahead of final approval by governors.

The two wireless networks I've looked after that have absolutely rocked are Aruba (twice) and Extreme (at the time based on Chantry) Aruba are still basically who they were, and Extreme moved away from Chantry until they got the engineers and IP via the acquisition of Enterasys (which bought out HiPath from Siiemens, who in turn had bought Chantry). They then bough Aerohive who had the people who wrote the spec and the cloud management piece. I've never heard a bad word spoken about their wifi (other that the warranty isn;t as good as th *old* Procurve/Aruba warranty). Which is to say I remain convinced it still pays to buy best-in-class Wifi and not tie it to the switches or firewall.

Ironically (becuase no one uses it so no one noticed) it wasn't loading for me early this morning. Fine* now though.

"Why, many years later, there is still Old and New UI is madness." It's been 16 years and bits of Windows NT/95 UI still pop up in Windows 11. Similar on MacOS. Linux command line tools etc have undergone a bit of a revolution too, and yet ifconfig and crontab persist. "Jack of all trades master of none" because the first part is what the market demands. I think Arbor are just better at managing customer expectations (and tend to sell more to customers whose expectations are easier to manage). "You need a PhD to create a report." Kinda true for any database really. School data isn't super simple. You either are happy to get what you are given, or you need to roll up your sleaves and get into the weeds. It's been years since I used bromcom, but a lot of what was done in rather limited reports in the platform then, does appear to just be part of the UI experience in alternatives. So what I am saying is it sucks that you need to write complex reports when a good ui should expose the data you need to analyse quite simply in the app itself, but eventually all MIS's throw up their hands and say git gud*. I'm not going to comment on workflow, performance, support and feature development. My own experience was so long ago it isn't relevant, but the frustrations do sound hauntingly familiar. *fwiw I never did (get good).

If it's still based off the Meru stuff, that platform had gone in a unique direction for the first 15 years of wifi (up to the point of acquisition), so pivoting to the more usual multi-channel architecture their software stack was starting from a disadvantage at the point of acquisition. Unless of course they still persist with SCA, in which case, I'm sure they've sorted out the problems by now otherwise no one would recommend it.

This gives me hope that keyboard repair/replacement might not need applecare+ MacBook Neo Exploded View and Orderable Parts - Apple Support

So.. £39 for display or external enclosure damage repair. very reasonable assuming that also covers the keyboard. **But** your need AppleCare+ to get that pricing which adds £124 to the price, so actually £623.00 for students. ..and assuming institutional pricing is going to be just that, but less VAT, gives a unit cost £519, and a repair cost of less than many other tier 1 OEMs.

Push? Don't know. But a USB3 thumb drive install of base windows 11 is pretty quick, and Windows Configuration designer lets you make a few basic tweaks so you can jump (more or less) straight into the autopilot workflow. I think you only need the USB in the machine until the copying files phase is complete (or the OOBE experience has started if using a WCD profile). We just have a bunch of them. It's quite a lot quicker than using SCCM PXE to pull the OS over the LAN. (It makes me sad though, I've been doing network installs since '95, and remember when unattend.txt was new.)

Here LM of IT has always been the DSL (who is also sometimes Head of HR when it's not a DH or the HT). We treat it (keyword/behaviour/communication compliance/web filter log alerts) like the helpdesk, except we get to delegate actions to SLT/DSL. DSL reviews everything at the end of the day, but we handle the minute to minute admin, and sometimes initial investigation. Staff are not monitored for keywords but they are for communication compliance. The whole thing is overseen by HR and DSL at all times and our pragmatism about alerts is guided by the SLT member(s) with responsibility. Between this and Data Protection, IT is basically compliance these days.

The silver lining is that they're all that's keeping MIS's from costing £100+ per pupil per year. To be honest, what is expected of an MIS might actually cost ten times even that outside of the primary/secondary market. At some point the wheel are going to come off, either from customers fleeing, or divestment and we'll all realise the they were the good guys all along. That said, I got crucified when our on prem sims behaved this badly, and I had about as much control over how it was used and what was querying it as they do. But they ought to be able to rate limit by customer / 3rd party in order to protect the overall service. Ooh I've got an idea: as an option, to ensure immunity to the issues caused by others, they should offer "sovereign-cloud" or "on premesis" version ? 🙃

This is all my opinion: Its a choice, though perhaps one that most Bromcom customers aren't actually bought into. I am predicting that when the founder of Bromcom passes (or he finally divests), a private equity firm will swoop in, restructure the finances (as per Arbor and SIMS), and within 12-18 months all MIS providers will have tripled their prices. Bromcom is the only thing keeping the prices down. Occasionally unreliable performance vs £150K per annum. Lets see where we are in another decade.

Parent Pay have their own MIS they want you to buy. 😆

..it could be just that. A 3rd party (or parties) made changes that increased the load, and that was enough to push it over the edge. It may be that that previous guardrails protecting against that had never been tested, or simply that limits were not enforced and had never been an issue previously. I'm pretty sure those of us who've nursed SIMS along for years have experienced the occasional performance hit relating to one integration or another. As for the scaling of resources. Bromcom is a business that operates in cash, with no debt. This is a philosophical/existential position for them, and throwing money at the problem is the route to debt. Arbor and SIMS are debt laden financial vehicles who happen to generate income from annual leasing of access to an MIS product to an almost captive audience. They are less afraid of spending now and worrying about it later. By which I mean, there is a risk that (in my opinion) their reliability and performance comes at the cost of monstrous price hikes in the future.

That sort of thing is usually handled by Cabinet Office with suppliers directly. Which might explain the lead time - some of the vendors might have said "it will take time to build a portfolio that meets those requirements at the price point you expect". Anybody remember the 5 year Apple Care SKU? That only existed because without it (for while) Apple would have been locked out of the school's market by similar policy/requirements.

We always have three or four suppliers providing quotes. (unless we'd done a big RFQ/Tender with a long purchase window). In terms of really knowing the product mix, being able to give the best pricing and right-sizing the kit/warranty while guaranteeing non "grey-market" kit we've had good results from Probrand, XMA and Bechtle. But sometimes it really it really is how well the sales person is trained. We had a recent incident where three suppliers quoted £120+ on a 3 year warranty, but one of them had it down at about £30, while prices on the kit were pretty comparable. I queried it and the response was roughly "yeah, the others will have quoted the warranty for that generic-class-of-laptop from that manufacturer. However that model is edu specific, and there is a edu specific SKU for the manufacturer warranties on those machines, though the £120 warranty is still valid, so we could sell you that if you really wanted." Warranty though is one of those things that is almost never needed. If you buy "enterprise" kit, its battle tested (or will be) and software / firmware updates are issued for 5-7yrs. The only things that need fixing are things that get broken, and warranty doesn't cover that. At £30 I'll take a warranty. At £120 the Finance Director and I sit down and look at repairs vs warranty sped/ vs age of kit over the last three years and then (usually) proceed without.

The thing is *we* need to consider these things, because we need to know how far we can push them. M1 8Gb machines are doing just fine here for music and media tech. We need to consider whether these Neos might actually be viable to replace aging intel imacs, or even 8 year old Ryzen 7's stuck on Windows 10. Nobody here can tell the difference between the performance of a new laptop and one (of the same "class") that's 6 years old - because the SoC's and periphery components long ago reached a point where they're "good enough". The A18Pro isn't a six year old chip. It's last years flagship iPhone SoC.

Those terrible Atom's of yore were a long time ago. They started getting quite good when they were re-implemented around skylake about a decade ago. However, around the same time Apple's ARM implementation in phones was starting to beat intels mid-tier i5's in some benchmarks! The A18 isn't going to be the problem for anyone considering the Neo. Disk and RAM could be, and for those considering a fleet of them - they keyboard replacement story is going to be make-or-break.

The neo's only need 20W, and laptop trolleys have built-in usb chargers these days, so shipping power adapters with the laptops is just an unnecessary cost. Now I have heard it reported that the neo's dont' support fast charging, which might be a problem. I believe that our Lenovo 100w's do, and so a 20minute top-up on for a set we forgot to charge last night gets us through 'til at least lunchtime. Without fast charging we'd be in a hole. But perhaps the neo sips the battery sufficiently judiciously that it wont be a problem either.

In fact if it wasn't for the requirements for flexibility to make the timetable resolvable, I'd be fine moving half our IT Suites to N100-class CPUs. In fact, by proxy, we have with the 3 "virtual suites" delivered through post-covid laptop trolleys (yeah the 2000s called and want their IT Strategy back). But as it stands (for us) Photoshop and Premier need to run well in all our suites and half our laptop trolleys. Which is why I will be watching these MB neos with interest.

Yeah the 100w series (apart from one duff model) are absolute troopers. As are/were the Acer B311 series. As long as they had good eMMC and a cpu four (real) cores they are fine for web based tasks or single application word *or* excel etc. Still going strong six years later.

Given that a 4 core Intel N100 (basically 4 efficiency cores from the 12th gen i5, which themselves are kinda a pared-down, die-shrunk skywell from 2015 with modern io and decoders) is "good enough" when paired with a reasonable ssd and 8Gb ram... a laptop based around an A17Pro with 8Gb ram is going to be just fine. It'll be interesting to see how these things compare in real-world office/business/teachery type tasks compared to say an Intel Core 5 120U based device, and whether the difference is noticeable. Or even how they do in Photoshop for gcse/alevel workloads... (the N100's don't, but the 120Us absolutely knock it out of the park)

On prem AD or Entra/Google Auth?

How is the "shared-user" experience on wireless macs with sso for google / one drive these days?

It really is possible to do this well. But they wont. And when Apple started to explore on device privacy-focused legal compliance tools there was a backlash against them. The device knows who you are. You should be able to take your passport/drivers licence, scan it, and have the device verify against a governmental database, receive a token that it then counter signs, then use some "hash" of that token going forward. The hash used rotates so it can't be used to track you. (moot somewhat when the ISP knows your device hardware address and IP, and the websites are tracking your cookies and access patterns so have pretty good digital fingerprints already), but a token effort* so the device manufactures can say they are protecting your privacy. Good? No. But certainly better than sending it all off to Palantir. *pun intended.

Or perhaps they will be required by default to block until you sign in with proof you are over 18. All the pieces to get this to work are almost in place. Windows, Mac, iOS and Android have the tools to secure identity tokens, and down at that level they know who unlocked the device, so are in a position to inject the user's identity into network-level traffic for the network operator to make filtering decisions against. But that wont be enough. It's only a matter of time before that MiTM trick we've been doing for years in schools will be required of all ISPs and device manufacturers.