icttech1981

Brilliant, thanks. Some bed time reading for me over the next few weeks

I'm currently setting up FOG Project and seeing how that performs. It's not too taxing to setup a VM running the FOG Server and pulling an image from a W11 machine is currently in progress. I'll report back on how this works out. It's open source too so the only cost is your time. https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject

Hi, We currently use Office 2016 here which is installed on all staff devices (Approximately 60) and all pupil laptops (100). Due to security patches and support ending in October 2025 we are currently in the process of signing up for M365 Pro Plus using an OVS agreement. Can anyone offer any advice on how best to deploy this to devices via group policy? Can an XML file be used to automatically sign in a user when they open office apps on their device? Any guidance would be much appreciated.

I work in an inner city primary school, we are in the top 3 deprived areas of the UK. Over the past few years we've found that the majority of children coming into KS1 haven't even seen a laptop, never mind used one. As you can imagine expecting them to logon using their actual name is pretty much a non starter. We still use a generic logon for year 1 but have terms dedicated to digital literacy, using keyboards (They all have capital letters which is another hurdle, most don't recognise anything other than lowercase letters) and spending time on learning games like tux type. When they move to year 2 we implement actual named logons. While this would be frowned upon I think you have to take each school in isolation and decide what works for them. If the children are at a level where logging in using their name causes more problems than it solves then why push it? For me, doing that causes more harm than good and will make the experience of using a laptop frustrating for a child and long term affect their ability to use one well.

An update on this, we finally found the issue! When opening Word and connected to a different network other than school, I noticed that at the bottom of the Word intro box it sometimes showed the text 'searching for printer' (Not always though!). I set the default printer to something other than the copiers we use in school and Word began behaving again! It seems when connected to a network away from school it spends a while looking for the copiers in school to help setup print settings / page layouts etc. It's take a while to get to the bottom of this but its another fix added to my OneNote catalogue. It must be WIndows 11 related though as I tried to replicate the issues on a W10 machine and all worked fine, even with the default printer been set to the copiers we have in school.

That sounds promising, can you remember where the autorecover records are stored and how you fixed the issue?

2016 is the newest version we have. We understand that it's EOL soon but our funding is been massively reduced over the next few years so we're hoping to avoid extra expense. Completely get that no new security patches will be released but by moving to W11 our machines OS is at least fully patched and secure. We do get the free version of Word through our A1 licence...we may have to look into using one drive instead of offline files if we can't work out a fix for this problem. The most annoying aspect of it is that it's only Word that's causing issues. All the other Office programs work great!

Thanks for the quick reply. I changed the default save location to H:\ (That's the letter we use for users home drives) and that made no difference. I also checked the templates and these are all in the appdata on the C drive, they aren't looking for any network path. We don't have a VPN to connect to school offsite either

Currently working our way through upgrading all our machines to Windows 11. We started 6 months ago as we have almost 150 machines onsite............nice of Microsoft to now decide to offer another year of Windows 10 updates for free just weeks before the initial cut off point 😬 One strange issue has come to light though which we are struggling to get to the bottom of. We use offline files and have done for years with no problems. When teachers work in school on our domain we have no issues with Office 2016. The same applies when the laptops are used away from school and not connected to any WIFI network. However, once you take a laptop home and connect it to any network with an internet connection Microsoft Word hangs really badly, usually it opens the first file fine but any extras you ask it to open it takes an age to do (Anything up to 3 minutes) or it crashes and closes. Powerpoint and PDF's (Many of which are substantially larger than the Word files) all open fine and very quickly. The machine that first had the issue is a good spec too, a Dell Latitude with a 500GB SSD, i7 and 16GB RAM. We have tried all manner of fixes such as: Disabling all add-ons Running Word as administrator Opening word files from USB drives Opening word files from the C drive Trying multiple versions of (old!) Office Working through event viewer to find any issues that may be obvious Running Wireshark and working our way through the logs Re-installing Windows 11 None of the above worked. We have a few machines still on Windows 10 so we tested this on a separate WIFI network away from school, Word functions fine and the files open as you would expect! Any help is much appreciated.

One thing we do here is assign a laptop number to each child in a class. Each week they get the same number, this helps massively with logon times as the profile is already on the machine. We have SSD machines and from pressing the power on button to getting logged in is always under 1 minute. Obviously there may be times when a machine is not available so a child has to use a different laptop but this rarely causes a big issue.

Another vote for SnipeIT here. Opensource and not hugely difficult to setup if your comfortable with sorting out a linux VM. For free it really is superb, comes with all the functionality you could ever want (Asset pictures, check in / out to locations or members of staff, maintenance records for each piece of kit etc.)

Another vote for Veeam here. As someone has said, free for up to 10VM's. One way round this if you have more is install it onto 2 different servers to double up. I know that means more backup storage drives and making sure everyone knows whats backed up and how/where but it's a good workaround for me.

If she is using it to do some SENDCO work make sure bitlocker is setup and you save the key. Covers you for any potential GDPR breaches then should the laptop be lost/stolen as everything is encrypted.

One of the main distribution boards is in our server/comms room so access is needed. I agree with what most are saying, you have to allow facilities access to the room.

Pudding