synaesthesia

I suspect that might be tactical - let's face it, an average secondary blindly running SDS will hit 700-900 teams and the reality is only 2/3 of those will be needed. Could therefore be resource-saving measures?

What was the attack vector? In these circumstances, frankly I think it's a no-brainer to allow access across the board and relax those restrictions. Beef up security otherwise - better password policies, account lockout etc. Otherwise maybe get them to install VPN software to remote into school beforehand using whatever VPN capability your ISP/router provides. There's only so much you can do.

Blimey, sorry guys been madness over here! If you set up for just a security group ("HAT-HAP" has a nice ring to it!) then that'll probably take the pain out of it. We don't get a massive amount of concurrent users although our single RDP also hosting HAP is struggling a little, so will be clustering it next week but I think the best plan would be to use network access policy on the server to limit bandwidth so it's not all munched. As of 9:35 this morning we're only consuming 9.5MBps of bandwidth as a whole - 7 users on RDP (either full desktop or remoteapp SIMS) - and now as I type this out I realise I don't know how to check the amount of connections to IIS?

I';d hazard a guess at the version of .net - ours is running 2016 but I recall having to make sure to download the older version of .net framework 4.5 rather than what's supplied with the OS and then making sure to change the application thingy in IIS to suit

Teamviewer across the board for us - we don't have staff laptops and have had to rush to prepare a load of domain only student laptops for around 30 staff. Installed teamviewer on all of them on personal/non commercial license and thankfully yesterday Teamviewer announced they would be turning a blind eye to any possible licence infringements Plus there's Teams sharing if need be.

We've been asked to have one of us on site at all times, so we've set up a rota between ourselves basically meaning we'll be in 1 or 2 days a week. We have children in from keyworkers/vulnerable etc so there needs to be someone available ideally and at the same time they're basically in one area so we have the run of the rest of the building to isolate/work in with minimal, in fact probably less risk than being at home

If you get stuck download the free app from salamander, it fills all those fields out for you ready to upload.

We use our local supplier for these, AMC in Kettering, Northants. Always been very good for pricing and have always been able to beat the "big boys" by more than a substantial margin to the point where the big boys accused them of punting grey goods. Still, if that's the older version of that switch then your best bet might actually be Ebay.

Yeah fs.com have been great for us, never had a dud and far better than forking out £howmuchyoumustbejoking for a branded one.

Would suggest the salamander one - the Capita one comes with SIMS Teacher App, and I don't think anyone sensible uses that any more Salamander SDS just creates the CSV files for you that Office 365 needs to import into Teams (something we'd be able to do easily if any of the fields made sense for us mortals!) and it's free. They do have a paid version which is proper live syncing etc

Frankly if it helps, and someone wants a monitor to use with a laptop, a desktop to borrow, a keyboard/mouse or whatever, we'll do it. It'll be a whole lot easier if we had staff laptops at all, but we're coping. Allowing visualisers to go home too to help lessons be a little more interactive and allow for recorded lessons (we're not allowing live video under any circumstance if it's showing a face)

The government have specifically said they do have that power, but to use it would be disproportionate and that we're sensible enough anyway. Yes, I chuckled at that last bit too.

SIMS for us runs "reasonably" - where reasonable is like a dog. As soon as someone fires off a large report though, said dog becomes entirely lame. ESXi VM, 64GB RAM dedicated with full use of 4 Xeon e5630, RAID1 enterprise SSDs and full SQL with a 10gbit connection to the network.

500,000 kids and 1,695 peed off teachers?

Hah, yup no doubt We're enabled now, but at least the demand for Teams/Hangouts etc is an intelligent one borne of forward planning and contingency rather than blind panic

Dammit, we had this exact same thing earlier and I didn't even see this thread - worked this out on our own after seeing several sites refer to a part of the admin center that's no longer there (no surprise, MS change 365 so bloody often it's infuriating). I was adamant I had disabled it for students yet couldn't find anywhere to suggest this was even possible! Turned it on about 2pm today, still waiting for something to happen

https://www.ers-online.co.uk/o20552/50013-001-103-crossmatch-uareu-4500-single-finger-fingerprint-reader-optical?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_Pa08aCQ6AIV2pTVCh2hyAGZEAYYASABEgL0dvD_BwE £63. Inside is identical. Standard USB so I'd be surprised if any other model doesn't work.

Cunninghams are ridiculous. Haven't heard about a charge for the note yet, but today they've just told us it'll cost £300 to replace a fingerprint reader on a reval unit - £100 for the hardware and £200 labour! It's barely 10 minutes work and the reader will be 20 quid! Going to do it ourselves, they should be bloody ashamed of themselves.

As has been said, you can't forget, lose or easily damage a fingerprint - it's a matter of convenience over anything else. For a typical UK school the basis of asking for fingerprint for cashless catering as an example is convenience and cost. With less cards to replace in the case of RFID, it costs less financially and in time reprogramming. In the case of PIN codes, it costs less in time for resetting/reminding. Time and money are both valuable in schools now more than ever with less staff to run all of this, whether that's IT/reception staff resetting or handing out these details or canteen staff having to put several hundred children through a system in half an hour. We make it clear we prefer the use of fingerprints for this reason - sometimes some people's fingers don't register so we express a preference to try their thumb instead, but there is the option for a PIN if all else fails, or they don't have permission or have other reasons against doing so. We won't discriminate against it's use, and wouldn't dream of telling those with pins to the back of the queue - that's just immoral. Facial recognition though - yes realistically it's little more invasive than fingerprint but does seem particularly over the top! TLDR: We generally have a good basis for processing biometric data in this fashion, and would be a large, countrywide upheaval if someone says OI! SCHOOLS! NOOOOO! . Simply, don't take the mick

Yeah, looking at the same - we have 3 (one for each of our sites although on one network and one for general app shares). With 10gb uplinks and SSD storage it seems a little wasteful so will be dropping the 3rd.

Groan. Glad I handed them my notice a couple of weeks ago. Will miss the decent internet speeds but I couldn't put up with the crap any more. Pulling teeth would be paradise compared to speaking to their support to find out why stuff isn't working yet again, or why my bill has gone up £10 a month yet half the channels we watch have disappeared.

Considering it - ideally I want another OnePlus device but they seem to hold their value even better than Crapple phones so even decent refurbs are a little out of reach. (my OP3 is struggling a little now mostly due to crap replacement screen). I've been looking at the Mi 9 but voices in my head keep saying NOOOOOO.

Just the on screen message for urgent bits, and even then we don't use it for anything much than "Oi, do your registers, it's your job you pleb" or "Something's gone wrong, sorry!"

All I can bring to this conversation is this.

These sort of policies can be questionable and often get overturned when they realise what they're missing out on. "Oh, but we used to manage without tannoys and mobiles..." - and yes, we also didn't have to worry about lockdown drills etc. Forgot to say - we use Impero to push messages out to whoever needs them and also have Netsupport Notify for lockdown type scenarios.