drkmccy

Don't think Apple is targeting Chromebooks? This is squarely aimed at the budget Windows laptop sector. From an average consumer POV, why would I buy a cheap plastic laptop now? Specifically Edu, every popular app is available for MacOS: M365 apps, ActivInspire, SMART, etc. There's obviously the group of users who will never buy anything Apple and the ones who cant use anything that isn't Windows -and those 2 groups overlap quite a bit, including a large percentage of network managers. But looking at it pragmatically and if there isn't any Windows only software needed: A £450 laptop that will last twice as long as same priced Windows PC, is more secure and can be easily deployed and managed. That's worth looking at. I would consider it for teachers and 121 student laptops. As for specs. MacOS is very efficient in resource management. The 8GB of RAM is not gonna feel sluggish like it would on a Windows PC. It will perform closer to a lightweight Linux distro.

Hmm, I am specifying in the mst to install the English UK handwriting pack. That could be it. Thanks.

Yeah I tried that, however it still didn't launch. Might be because that dll already exists in your devices? I noticed when Notebook is opened for the first time as admin, that dll and a few others get created. Maybe try and see if your Applocker rules work on a freshly built device? I did see other SMART folders as well as LaunchNotebook inside Temp, so I allowed the whole folder and it finally launched. This is not great as anything could be in there but at least it's working for now. I'll have to tighten it slowly by adding the other folders.

Hi @Squelch Would you care to share the particular filepath rule you used? I've tried allowing everything in that folder and it still doesn't launch

I block Zoom from installing and force users to join on the web by using this: Xoom Redirector (google.com)

I still can't find the right answer to this. Newer versions need an account I get that but some only work when plugged into a smart board, some add a watermark and apparently version 20 or 21 made some changes that were then reverted in 22? And I also hear the latest v23 is prone to crashing. So.... What is the sweet spot version to deploy? Would be good to know if there is a best version when using Smart boards and best version when not using Smart boards. Also, does the age or model of Smart board matter? TIA

A bit of a weird one. I built a thin image on a virtual machine and deployed my apps through the task sequence. I syspreped and captured the fat image. Now, when I image a device with it, brightness controls are there but as soon as the proper graphics drivers install, the brightness adjustment disappears! At first I thought it was just a certain model of Lenovo laptop with AMD graphics but then the site got some Acers with Intel graphics and it's doing the same thing. If I uninstall the drivers and go back to the basic Microsoft display adapter the brightness adjustment comes back. Puzzled by this because if I just image the machine with a usb drive containing the same ISO used in MDT, the issue is not there. It seems to be the MDT image.... So weird.

I've been spending the last year migrating sites to the cloud so I thought I had installed my last server back in 2019 but we recently gained a couple of primary schools that have 10 year old servers that are on their last legs and I've been asked to spec new kit for them. Both are pretty small (200 kids max) and only need to run the basics so just a DC, a file server with under 1TB or shares and an RDS host for about 5 concurrent sessions max. One site has migrated MIS to Arbor but the other has signed up for another 3 years of SIMS so that one will need a higher spec. I was thinking about getting one of those HPE Microservers for the site using Arbor as they are pretty inexpensive and in stock. The SIMS site has rackmount capacity. I've not kept up with hardware specs for a few years now hence why I'm asking and there's also the component shortage going on so sourcing recommendations are also welcome. Many thanks.

Looking for best practice on this one. Just taken on a MAT of over a dozen schools. Staff and teachers will all use the same domain to make moves easier. Students will use the individual school's domain. Using ACM to sync SIMS to 365 then use the Google connector to auto provision users to the Google tenant. I now need to find the best way to organise users and devices in Google. I have seen various ways to structure AD in corporate environments but I'm hoping to get peoples thoughts specifically for a MAT's Google tenant. I've outlined below what I have come up with and what has been suggested by others but I'm open to suggestions from someone with experience in this. Many thanks! Site then object (this makes sense at first but then not so much when policies get applied to object types across the MAT): School 1 Users Teachers Students [*]Devices Teacher devices Student devices [*]School 2 Users Teachers Students [*]Devices Teacher devices Student devices Site then user (after writing this I realised it probably isn't ideal): School Teachers users devices [*]Students users devices Object then user (makes sense but the structure will end up being huge with 15 schools): Users Teachers School 1 School 2 [*]Students School 1 School 2 [*]Devices Teacher devices School 1 School 2 [*]Student Devices School 1 School 2 Object then site (I think this is the one might be the better option?): Users School 1 Teachers Students [*]School 2 Teachers Students [*]Devices School 1 Teacher devices Student devices [*]School 2 Teacher devices Student devices My next hurdle is automatically putting the users in the right OUs when 365 provisions them but that's one for another day.

Thanks Steve, yes the drives are pretty small. They were upgraded to 128GB SSDs, a few have 256GB. I should note roaming profiles is not enabled, just redirecting appdata to a share via GPO. This worked perfectly fine until recently. I've just read about excluding the teams folders from the redirection but that means the machines having 2GB of appdata each which adds up quickly and like you said, defeats the point. Profile cleanup might work, I'd just have to tell the users to stick to a few preferred machines in each room or site to avoid them having to wait through constant profile creations. Those Chromebase AIOs are sounding pretty good now. Funnily enough, I was up your neck of the woods last week in Royal Wootton Bassett where we're moving a school fully to the cloud.

Hi, first post here. Hope to use this place quite a bit since I just moved from a corporate IT department to over to an education MSP. Basically I have the same issue as mentioned here: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/teams-javascript-error-windows-10-1709/bdecf01b-0b17-4ef0-aa94-be26e9f1276c This has just happened to one of my schools who is redirecting %appdata% to a network share. Teams loads fine when the profile is created but after signing out and back into Windows, the javascript error pops up and Teams will not load. Identical error to the one in the post above: A JavaScript error occurred in the main process Uncaught Exception: Error: EEXIST: file already exists, mkdir Using Windows 10 Edu 21H2 and latest version of Teams machine wide installer. UE-V doesn't solve the issue as the point of redirecting appdata/roaming is to stop the hard drive from filling up as this is an environment with shared PCs where each machine can easily see 100 users sign in per month and Teams likes to dump approx 2GB of data into that folder. I'm kinda getting the sense that Microsoft doesn't have a proper replacement for roaming profiles and noticed a niche situation in education premise IT rooms with machines that have different users signing in and out all day. Many thanks.