synaesthesia

It's clearly lightyears ahead of SIMS. I'm on the fence personally on Bromcom vs Arbor - the latter had it's share of performance issues now and then but nothing I can remember over a couple of minutes of "ooh, this is going slow". And a bit like some other service providers, it's not a good look when a quick search on this and other forums is full of "Is XYZ down?" "More problems with XYZ" etc, whether it's MIS, broadband, safeguarding reporting systems, filtering systems - all rather important to the safe running of educational establishments!

I can certainly sympathise, but there are certain systems in a school which need to remain as accessible as possible. MIS and safeguarding systems being the highest priority, and even now with so many eggs in one, fragile basket we're losing access to contact information, communications to parents, attendance, medical information and more besides. If they are unable to have workable failovers, load balancing, route differencing that works then it's clear priorities need shifting. I seriously believe that a local cache should be implemented, it isn't that difficult of a task with minimal additional outlay or resource. 5 minutes here and there is one thing, but to have chunks of the day offline or near-unworkable is unacceptable for such a system.

And the service status page still has the audacity to read "all systems operational"

I've always been fairly anti-cloud, this certainly doesn't do much to put that to rest I think for certain mission critical systems a local cache wouldn't go amiss. (I can hear the anti-server brigade screaming at that idea!)

I wonder how carefully calculated the SLA's are to avoid having to actually cough up responsibility for these failures... and if the SLA's should be tightened around key parts of the school year.

Yup, as per other thread: https://status.bromcomcloud.com/

to make it easier to host the Access database it seems to run on?

Heh, that's about typical, cheers I'll add that to the list of features alongside "runs dog slow on more than capable hardware that was fine on 10"

Hi all, rather a random question this morning! Just noticed by chance thanks to a glance on Impero that most of the times on the Windows 11 lock screens are incorrect. Not timezone/DST incorrect, but just outright wrong. Simple NTP fix one would think - but logging in shows the correct time, even odder still clicking through to the login screen and letting it time back out to the screen with the time on, it's then correct. Is this a bug, some random delay or something I need to be investigating further?

Christ on a bike! https://www.ultima-security.com/shop/p/universal-tablet-stand Think I'll stick to the bouncepads where student facing and Amazon El-Cheapo when not

I love that film!

Joy Sorry, didn't get a chance to give it a go yet, but that's not a good sign. Thankfully installing directly via the task sequence is working for us, seems odd that it's necessary though!

Ooh I'll give that a go at some point soon @timbo343 cheers Will report back.

Sort of surprised to see people still customising the start menus - is there really that much still locally installed that requires this?

Ooooh nail on the head, cheers!

Bit of a niche one, Our 6th form make good use of the Advanced Search feature in Google on their chromebooks, however searching for "Advanced Search" brings up an immediate Smoothwall Cloud block, picking up on a result from x.com It's fine if they browse manually to it, but that's a bit of a pain - can anyone else replicate such a block as a student searching for "advanced search" ? Yeah X is one of the first hits but certainly shouldn't necessitate a block surely?

Once he'd hit the dizzying heights of Postal, that was it for him

Don't bother sysprepping - just MDT install from the ISO image and stop the task sequence before it gets to the setup part That'll leave you nicely at the OOBE for Autopilot.

"but how else am I going to play the end of summer term films like "shrek.2.1080p.webrip.fairlight.turkish.subtitles.avi" ?

I am of course talking about non-chinesium grade stuff, as opposed to oxygen free, pure copper, gold plated, made in an airtight factory by artisans aged 94 years old

Because that costs money and time, sometimes you need something that just works near immediately. And looking at the size of that cable, it's likely an existing microphone/XLR audio cable. Sometimes things need to be "Just Made", and what might be convenient for us as laymen might not be right for certain situations; whilst a microphone will run over an Amazon Basics cable containing less copper than a rural police station, it won't be good at it. Higher end audio often needs higher end cabling, and I'd rather that "bodge" than a random chinese grade thing which is only one step up from telling the person to shout louder instead of using a mic.

Will certainly be giving that a good read later; am I right in thinking it might help clarify the position of schools regarding what safeguarding data is eligible for inclusion? I can't remember the name they gave it (something like official authorities), but with some queries about what bits from MyConcern/CPOMS can be included it may help clarify.

But you can't tell that without seeing inside or checking with a meter Could very well be stereo.

Likely just stereo RCA? See the short pigtail done quite often in DIY setups

Hit a bit of a blank with this, it seems to be heavily linked to the BDD process running it. The user running it, filtering levels etc don't have any effect (I checked filtering, HTTPS inspection etc as running without the silent flags & checking the google folder in programfiles86 showed it was stalling at the "updates" stage). Instead I've just taken it out the application installer and just installed it as a command line in the task sequence which just works