TaylorIT

Hi all, Would you mind if I ask, what is everyone doing with the monitoring and filtering of foreign languages? Some products seem better than others for foreign language monitoring. The one we use only seems to monitor English and maybe one or two other languages. Obviously with the number of EAL pupils in schools, I am just concerned that we are not meeting our KCSIE/DfE safeguarding requirements by just monitoring in English. The problem is, there are sooo many different languages! It seems that NetSupport and Smoothwall are focusing more on including foreign language libraries than some of their competitors, if I understand correctly. On a different subject, has anyone come across a monitoring solution that alerts us if it goes wrong on a client? I was thinking a bit like Sophos Antivirus when an alert is sent to the management console if it cannot protect a device. My fear is that we install our monitoring software on a pupil laptop, we test it, it works fine, we send it home and it stops monitoring a few hours later, even though it still looks like it is working fine on the management console. Yes, we have seen this happen! If the software was able to self-verify it is working correctly and send an alert back to us if something goes wrong, we can inform the parents. You can imagine the scenario, little John Smith has been searching adult websites on a school device and is now traumatised, the monitoring client stopped working a month ago but the IT Team had no way of knowing! School is still at fault as we should have been regularly testing the monitoring client is working by a keyword test on each client (even though in reality this would be impractical on hundreds of devices, some used off site, managed by a tiny IT team). Even if we checked each device, one at a time each week, and something happened, they would say we need to check them more frequently! Thank you Rich

Hi all, I have spent a while today trying to fix various errors with the Office Deployment Tool to just simply install Office 2019 Pro Plus. Oh I wish Microsoft would have just put an .iso download on their VLSC! I just thought I’d post this solution in case it helps someone. My master image had Office 2010 on it, so I uninstalled this prior to attempting to install Office Pro Plus 2019 x64. It also had a temporary install of Office 2019 I had on it to test it, this was also fully uninstalled prior to installing this volume licence edition. As soon as I ran the tool I got the 0-2034 error message. A quick Google and various forums suggested proxy/internet/Antivirus/Firewall issues as well as old versions of office which may be clashing. I checked the internet and it was fine, I even tethered my mobile so I could try a different internet connection and it still didn’t work. I used the Microsoft Support Assistant tool as recommended to remove all traces of historic versions of Office. Still no luck! Then I came across the Techsoup article which runs the tool in two parts, one to download Office and the other to install using command prompt. After a few goes I managed to get Office 2019 Pro Plus x64 to download using their XML template for this product and my custom volume licence MAK key. It took a while and I didn’t think it was working at first. It wouldn’t download on one machine so I tried another and it worked, eventually. https://www.techsoup.org/support/articles-and-how-tos/how-to-download-and-install-microsoft-office-2019-products-requested-from-techsoup Unfortunately the second part, the installation wouldn’t work. Again error messages moaning about internet issues, which was a bit odd as the installer files had downloaded during the first stage. In the end I managed to get it to install by removing the SourcePath from the XML file. So the SourcePath worked fine during the download stage but not for the install stage (setup /configure configuration.xml). I’m not sure if Microsoft have changed something in the Office deployment Tool but I couldn’t get it to install without removing this path. Hopefully this may help someone save a few hours of troubleshooting as I know this Techsoup article is popular on the Microsoft Forums. Thank you. Rich