mikes

Yeah our LEA (not swansea) is similar, as far as they are concerned each comp does its own thing. We have entered into a dialog with our LEA but I think they are only a bit more experienced with the Hwb than I am (and I am not sure if the Hwb give them that much support). If the Hwb really want schools to move over there should be a pre-set up Intune environment with all policies already set (at the moment if a pupil logs into one of my Hwb machines they can install Roblox if they want), groups made, and a selection of education apps pre made for allocation Can't see our LEA having 1 print server for the whole authority? That sounds like a nightmare to me, for them to manage. They would have to get a print contract for the entire county plus get all schools to agree with it ?? The whole point of moving Hwb is serverless but with Papercut I'll need to keep our old domain running. But at least if our SAN fails then we will only lose printing. And also local shares because GameMaker will not run on OneDrive so I'll need a file share for that.

Here it is, unfortunately it goes into very basic detail what was involved. From a school in Powys. Unfortunately it doesn't list any issues or snags they came across, which seems par for the course IME. I will hear "it all went well, no problems at all, system is much better". But when I go to see it in person I'll often see kludges, issues, staff dissatisfaction, stuff like that. Reading this document it seems they actually have their old domain still in use for papercut, users have to authenticate against that. There's probably more not mentioned too. I have done some more experimenting; an issue I keep coming across is the reliability. Yesterday and the day before; the functionality to upload computer hashes was broken for EU intune (which allows you to remote build computers), but there is no error message or notification about it. It just silently fails. So I spend a good 5+ hours trying over and over various things to get a hash uploaded until I figure it's an MS issue. Now today I am configuring groups but the settings I chose before are not there, I am getting an error about group settings being unable to load. So I guess I can't experiment with student computer group settings until it suddenly starts to work again? I was getting messages about server requests being throttled so I wonder if they haven't set up routing or IP addresses properly? Onto the positives I have stations hwb users can log into, with Office and Adobe CC installed; Impero works minus the browser plugins, I did get printers showing up using Papercuts cloud script thing, (not the clone tool) but it only worked for the user I ran the script on not for all users of the device. But I have 9 or so months to work on it so there is time yet. Hwb Onboarding Case Study (Report)V1.pdf

We use both here (secondary school LA). Staff can choose to use MS or Google, most still use our legacy on premises MS system (office and file shares), our biggest cloud platform is Google as every staff member uses it for Classroom. Not many staff use the MS cloud platform. Though we are moving over to the Welsh govt Hwb soon, they also offer both so really it is their choice not mine. Both are closed source proprietary platforms so I'm really not that bothered by the choice. I'd have more enthusiasm if we were moving over to an open source solution, perhaps UK or even EU wide (but I'd also like to be an officer onboard a starship so we know how likely both will be!) But Google I think abstracts things a bit too much e.g. it doesn't show where a file is stored. You could be working on a big document unknowingly to you, it was created by a user who has now left, shared to you, and you are editing a file that is actually on their users' documents. It's very easy to end up with these situations on the Google platform

yeah they don't care they just want me here to fix things. Will have to look into any legal requirement of them to offer training but I don't think any exists. Did the school have to pay the £16,000 ?

yeah if software was well written, perhaps a smart fridge wouldn't be so bad. But then this is more points of failure. I want a fridge that will last 10, 20 years. OK it might break due to a compressor, or just getting so old it's kind of manky. But having a fridge fail (and all your food spoil) due to a firmware update, nah that ain't it. And again with my point above, sometimes it is hard not to think that some of these software companies intentionally sabotage their older products as a way to force users to have to pay for the latest version. Or if not intentionally, they are happy to "look the other way" if the servers that these old products rely on, aren't maintained. So having a fridge that a big company can remotely mess with at any time they want, again that isn't for me. Especially now big companies have realised that Governments really don't care what shady things corps do nowadays and are perfectly willing to let them do it. Is this really worth having just to get a fridge that what, notifies you when your food is coming out of date? Do these fridges even do that? (unless you laboriously scan in every single item) Give me a 15 year warranty and I'll consider it

If this goes the way modern enterprise software works, affected customers will have to "purchase an upgrade to the latest version, or purchase a subscription to FridgeCare Monthly to keep your Fridge up to date". More than once have I had perpetually licensed software break and the only solution is to buy a 1 year license for the latest version !

Must you travel / have time off to do it? It would interest me but needing to travel/have time off would be a no go for me at this school (I doubt they'd be willing to give me the time off)

They are allowing plug in solar kits now (for those of us without our own homes), but I'm not sure if they are yet worth their price (£600+ for 200W). If these companies can use any excuse to ream us they will. So will this result in a lower standard of living where people have to make their own energy/heat. My friend lives rural and has a log burner in his house but that wouldn't really work in the average town/city suburb. Heat for free provided you get the wood but it doesn't really heat that well unless you sit by it.

Cached credentials still work so if they are used by the same person you won't see it yet. Was thinking of deploying this the other day but my policy still holds, I'll never deploy a Windows update until at least 2 weeks have passed.

yes that is one thing to consider. Using external apps that require a Google sign in etc. Staff may not be able to use certain resources when we use Hwb (there are issues with GDPR/consent and these external apps anyway) Our issue with Google classroom was - we created Hwb google classrooms on Tues 2nd/Wed 3rd, unfortunately our staff member responsible for timetabling hadn't done them properly or hadn't finished them, so they were wrong. And Hwb doesn't do an auto sync during the Rollover period of the first 2 weeks back, so any pupil classes in your MIS will be what you get in Google Classroom for the first two weeks. But for us we had loads of pupil moves etc so a lot of students have the wrong classrooms in Hwb. But this should sort out Monday when it does a sync. I did find a document from some other school who had written up their migration to Hwb, I will see if I am able to post it here

I was planning to use the Papercut web mode but after the latest security vulnerability I'm very dubious on that now

I filed a ticket with Hwb but they haven't replied; honestly I don't know how good their support is, any complicated questions I get bounced back to my LEA who don't know or care. It seems when Hwb is working properly it should be delegated Hwb -> Local Authority -> Schools and you can get a wildly different experience based on your LA. Now there is a Teams hwb tech group which I haven't taken part in yet as I didn't want to flood it with 50 questions but if the information isn't available anywhere else I'll have no real choice. At the moment I'm having an issue with my LEA disabling Chromebooks if they are not version 148 or higher (which came out in May). They can only be re-enabled when they are up to date. But they won't update when disabled unless I find every one of them, manually log in, then update. So I'm going to have to chase this up with Hwb because I thought Hwb's policy was 6 months. So if you do move over to Hwb be prepared to have your LEA messing with your setup for better or probably for worse

I'm not sure what you'd really be able to change, their setup is pretty standard across all schools. For us we are messing with Google Classroom and have hit a snag, it seems our Arbor information shows as correct in the Hwb interface, but in Google Classroom the pupils are in the wrong classrooms; am trying to chase this with support see what's going on !

#1 regarding teachers and "things for the sake of things" Yes teachers already have too much to do so they aren't going to be happy having their workload increased by having to adopt a bunch of IT provision they don't understand. E.G. Smartboards, we had smartboards fitted to every classroom but the teachers weren't told anything about them - they came back in from Summer to new smartboards. Hence basically none of them were used as interactive boards. Really - teachers should have been asked - is this something you want? Speaking to the teachers actually what they wanted was a way to project from a tablet while walking round the room. But nobody asked. This sort of thing has happened in the past; in Primary school our school had brand new computers bought for every classroom (early 1990's). But teachers weren't told anything about them; afraid of breaking them the teachers forbade any of us pupils to go anywhere near them; these computers just sat unused. Management should have told the teachers - "don't be afraid to use them - if you break them no worries we can fix them". Now with 1:1 - ; a BSF school nearby had 1:1 but I believe scrapped it. #1 parents from deprived areas aren't going to be good with spending £300 on a device for each of their kids, do you provide them all? #2 2 or 3 pupils per lesson would have an uncharged chromebook or will have forgotten it. You then have to mess around finding replacements. #3 A chromebook screen gets smashed. Who pays? It's likely the kid smashed it up but the parents said it just happened. Do you argue with the parents? We have trolleys here but of course they also have their downsides e.g. maintenance. Keys peeled off, "anatomy" scratched into them etc. Honestly I really wonder if the technology go to this device heavy is really there. Chromebook/laptop companies are just not making cheap and robust enough devices, the latest devices actually seem less robust than earlier models. I would like to see a £100 device with robust screen technology and a kind of keyboard you can't pull letters off. But we'd need new display technologies, keyboard technologies etc.

It's a pain I had to do a new Compliance-Search - I'm sure there's a GUI for it as well as we are just A1 and have access - in the MS security portal (purview?) under Ediscovery I did a Compliance Search for the subject and also put a date range in to speed it up a lil. Once the Search was done I could then run a powershell script against Exchange Online to delete the mail based on the compliance search for all mailboxes. Of course check the results of the compliance search to make sure it hasn't returned all mails. It's not a very intuitive process at all and I was having issues with things randomly not working, but this is typical Microsoft. I remember there was a bug the same as yours with results saying they hadn't finished when they had. It's a bug but I don't remember any more sorry it's been months since I last did one, every time it crops up I have to google how to do it to find out MS have changed it slightly !

With Moore's Law currently going backwards (costs per performance are actually going up) - maybe this will bring some software developers to actually work towards optimising their software again. Having a lot of computing power has enabled dysfunctional organisations to just throw crap to the wall and see what sticks. Perhaps now that might be worked on? E.G. NT4 ran on a 33Mhz single core CPU with 16MB of RAM. Windows 11 has over 1000 times more computing power yet does it work that much better than NT4? (There's some "law" in the vein of moore's law that states that software performance actually stays static despite increases in performance due to bloat and mismanagement)

yeah I must admit I like trying to do that as well, make them think they have a bite then something goes wrong. Some say it's not a good thing to do if it makes them aware that my number is live, but hopefully it might make them put me on an "unreliable" list as I don't really get that many scam calls any more. Few years ago I had a call from one of the Cialis scammers and had low battery at the time, I played interested but said my battery was low I need to charge it. My phone died on the call so I plugged it in to charge and went out. Came back 2 hours later to over 20 missed calls. The guy was ringing me every 15 mins or so, and tried 30+ times for a few days later. I regret not answering later and stringing him along more but if he was that desperate they can't be getting that many bites? Had the usual WhatsApp pig butcher from a pretty young asian girl very interested in my life and what I like to cook etc. Almost certain these are bots now. But recently I am getting random mobile phone or landline calls, from random numbers (e.g. O2 mobile number) that don't show up on a search. Or the odd random landline. So I presume they can be spoofed as I answered one to get an automated message in Chinese. And a year ago I answered one to hear a live British woman (not a bot) asking me about my recent accident. I said I hadn't had one (hadn't had an accident in a long time) and she sounded a bit confused and annoyed and hung up. But this definitely sounded like a legit British employee otherwise they have very advanced accent changers. That McAfee one is quite scary on the surface, I guess you wouldn't really think - why a scammer would need access to hear what I'm saying to get access to my bank account, unless I'm saying my login details out loud - but the thought of being wiretapped and having someone listening in on you does bring up something viscerally frightening in you, I can see it being very effective

Yeah I think T/T totally for a technician will be rare now. For me it's a legacy from when there were 2 IT staff the NM who was full time, and then me. When the NM left (and the school noticed very little difference...) instead of a new one they increased me to TT plus 4 hours. Which is fine I'll have 2 weeks in this summer to sort Chromebooks out, server maintenance etc. 6 weeks off in total without going in once is a strange thing, when the 6 weeks ends almost feels like starting a new job again. Now in the USA apparently they get 2 or 3 months off for summer. Finish early June and come back Sept. Now that must be a strange thing though US High Schools being much bigger and having much more going on I'm sure they have projects to do during their summers.

yeah the good thing about working in EDU has finally come around. Having the holidays. It would be very difficult to go back to corporate finishing at 5pm, working right through the summer etc. My old corporate job I remember one time I wondered when I could next take a full week off and it would have taken a couple of months to build up that entitlement for 1 week. Of course if I re-read this comment in 6 weeks on the first day back in it won't feel so good !

Do any of you get access to a Sharepoint site as part of Hwb ? The schools I visited seemed to have one (were able to set up Sharepoint groups etc) I'm not seeing any such thing on my Hwb instance at the moment

Yes I am sure we bought a perpetual license for Impero and that our contracts with them are for support; I will have to double check this though. But obviously it is checking in behind the scenes ! What would happen running the Impero server without Internet Access (I was tempted to do this with our Papercut server after that vulnerability issue)

yes I visited a school in the north of there and they are mostly moved over. I am southeast of there in my county they aren't really concerned. They provide Internet Access/Switching etc, but everything on the user side of the Ethernet port is the schools concern (e.g. domains, computers etc) . So it is up to me. They have given me access to our LEA's Hwb Intune Portal (it works by Hwb delegating to LEA who can maybe delegate to school techs) and I am working from there. From what I gather in a lot of authorities, it is the authority itself who sets up the Hwb/intune etc environment, they deploy this then to their member schools and the schools work from there. In the Hwb groups the vast majority of posts are from LEA employees hardly any from actual school technicians.

Ours is down too - our renewal is in July so wondered if it had ran out but I was confident ours expires on the 17th (can't load the console to double check as it says in the bottom right) - our Server has gone back to a newly registered state and putting in our activation code does nothing. I'm guessing I just need to wait and it should come back up - will get on with some other things !

no idea, there's no IT manager here. But I think different local authorities have much different levels of control/support for their schools

yeah universal charging is great but I just wish they could have chosen a better/more robust connector. What happened to those Magsafe connectors you never see that style any more?