synaesthesia

I would find it hard to believe that SIMS would have gained over 500 schools - we're not America. Can only assume an error in the data somewhere, either that or perhaps some schools/trusts/LAs are a glutton for punishment.

They're fairly bespoke unfortunately but it wouldn't be difficult to drill the 2 necessary boltholes in any of the off the shelf mounts you can get. We only got 2 readers and the other ipads will just be manual signin. It's quick enough to not be an issue, the readers are in the high traffic areas.

That's quite an interesting financial setup!

Yup, just works. Have a separate group for our 6th form. They have ID cards anyway, so they just tap in and tap out, either in our 6th form block or in main reception. Also options to allow them (or anyone) the ability to use a mobile app for manual or automatic signing in or out.

It's not worth it. Even the most modern Inventry kit is behind the times and may also fall foul of any requirements for TPM & suitably secure windows versions. It may have been expensive back then, but it's next to worthless now.

Same here, inventry to signinapp. Just works. Self registration of cards works well, it's priced well enough that even going all out with 2 sets of stands, readers, ipads etc from them cost us less than a year of just "renting" that horrid Inventry kit. Can add kit as and where we need without extra cost. We use paxton heavily but the integration was never a necessity.

LAN party incoming!

Yeah it's just the client software itself. OpenVPN works extremely well and also means better support cross platform.

The chains in oil are generally good. Belts however...

15m is too much for a decent HDMI connection for anything over 1080p without spending silly amounts of highly shielded cable or fiber cable. Check the settings on the hub monitor, you need to enable passthrough - it's usually called MST.

Nothing really out of the ordinary for businesses running under capital venture or similar setups and has little to no impact operationally or legally from the schools (clients') viewpoint.

Been watching Mortimer & Whitehouse Gone Fishing during my lunch break. Absolute tonic for the mind, whether you fish or not. Wonderful videography, banter between the guys, gorgeous settings. Pretty much the only televised thing I've watched of late - certainly on purpose anyway.

I agree to a point - but it literally is a 10 minute job per school, and is likely even quicker now there isn't a Biostore/Impact setup (all online via Fusion). Even back then when it was all local it wasn't that much work. And ditto for the note readers - at my last school we bought the kit to do it ourselves - £30 so we could fix 2 readers as opposed to £200 each (and no doubt they charge more for that now too)

Our trust have been working with them for that purpose and unfortunately there's little they can do It's scary really, someone needs to take them on at a legal level.

Just a heads up for people using or looking to use CRB Cunninghams. We've recently been extremely shocked to find a £1000 bill to migrate our existing system from one MIS to another. That's a ludicrous amount of money for a few minutes work. Now apply this to a whole trust and that figure hits £10,000 for an hour work at most. 1. We're in the wrong job. 2. This is blatant profiteering from public funds. Not long ago it was a still expensive £650 and they've decided for some reason to raise that. Please therefore be careful when planning MIS migrations.

So the question you were asked stands?

Do management understand what the key is/does?

Their position will not move from "They are infringing on our IP" or a variant of that. The reality is obviously different ("give me all of your money") but that doesn't sound quite as legal.

Do the old fashioned token number generators still exist? Another option.

Clarify what you mean with USB devices - are they getting confused with USB Storage? Sounds like a misunderstanding that needs clearing up, otherwise you need new management

Politics. Morally wrong doesn't mean legally wrong unfortunately, and Capita/ESS still have fingers through pies like Cassandra Nova... and possibly share the same moral values. As much as we think schools should be treated more leniently, they are not as important to the powers that be as nonsense like The Church and make believe railways.

Some of these answers feel like going back in time. Just waiting for someone to show off their FOG setup! I feel like MDT is old fashioned but it's easy, zero/lite touch and configurable... the thought of brandishing USB drives is just insane

This is my favourite bit of software this decade. Took over from Paint Shop Pro (remember that?) as the easy but powerful editor of choice and easy to slip onto a network without trying to explain to the safeguarding team why every computer has a GIMP on them.

It's as secure as the fleshy bits either end. This isn't about making it more secure, it's risk management against the meatbags doing silly things - wrong email recipients for example.

Just to clarify this a little for you - only the networking hardware has a MAC address, so in this case it would always be of the dongle as the host laptop won't have any physical MAC address other than it's wifi. In a laptop with ethernet and wifi, each would have it's own MAC address, and if you swapped the wifi card, it would get a new wifi MAC. As has been mentioned, you can get the MAC's of the dongles on any device and you'll be able to add them into MCM