mikes

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?

I am looking into doing this for the end of next summer not this summer, maybe Basically due to budgets. Our servers and SAN are from 2019 and it looks like we are having no budget to replace them; we can barely replace computer rooms it seems. I've visited a few schools in S Wales, there are some caveats like Google Groups - they had to run their own Google domain because the Hwb one won't let you set up groups in Google; so they had to make the groups on their own domain then add that group in to their Hwb Google Share. In these schools there was a lot of staff pushback; staff had got their way of working which they've used for years - now they are told they have to move their e-mails; home folders, Classrooms etc to a new Hwb system and a lot of staff refuse to do it citing Union concerns. Other staff disliked it and find it a good way to blame the IT department for any problems they have e.g. losing files etc. (also what's really sad is the culture of people keeping bad things hidden then lying that things are fine and good. So nobody can ever learn.) But my option is either wait for my servers or SAN to fail, or enroll all our systems into the Hwb intune system so all we need on site is Internet access for them to work. Or I say my option, our head of IT is the one really pushing for us to move over to Hwb, but I am going with it because I see little alternative at the moment. Our SMT have come from other schools who used Hwb as well so I am hoping there won't be much staff pushback here (the staff who do complain will just be teaching staff not "important" staff) Any issues with reduced service, the school will just have to deal with it. If they ask me to do a SAR, I will just direct them to the hwb support desk. I've now got access to the Intune system from our LEA, and have built a machine and deployed some software. It's basically unconfigured though so I have to make all my software packages again, configure GPO's, configure OneDrive integration, configure AppLocker, compliance policies etc. Which is quite a bit of work but it does mean I do have access to configure it myself. As I work through the summer hopefully I will know more pros and cons. One advantage is again all they need is Internet Access to work so there's no VMware environment, legacy domain setup etc that could fail like I have now.

Damn let us know if you find anything decent, I never updated this thread but earlier I said our license ran out in 2027, that wasn't true our software stopped working in October but I did manage to get a new license file for it. I told DT last year that this would be the last year they could likely continue using it as is, will see what happens next year. We are looking to try and scrap a lot of our paid for / subscription based products (such as Adobe CC) with alternatives but haven't looked into it that closely so far

We just had this today, had a teacher phone up her keyboard/mouse stopped working on a desktop I have set up in her office. Then at around 12pm I had calls from a few classrooms their input (both keyboard and mouse) have stopped working, no LED's on the keyboards responding but the mice were lit up. Changing USB ports didn't fix it. When I rebooted, I could log on then 5 mins later the USB input would stop. So I wonder if this is some new Windows issue? Haven't updated in a week so can't see it being that. This is on 25H2

Yes that's what I have done in my environment basically instead. Stop the first run, setup, welcome type dialog boxes. When users sign into Chrome they get their saved passwords and favourites which is 95% what they want roaming anyway. Have to put in reg keys to stop nag boxes; I was once at an important presentation by our Head in front of a load of bigwigs and the Lenovo Driver Update popped up in front of her presentation. (To tell her that there were no new updates!) So laptop users can customize their Windows if they want but tbh hardly any of them do these days anyway. Win 11 is so user unfriendly I don't think many know you can Part of the issue now is that modern software "insists upon itself", thinking updating itself it is more important than what you might actually want to use your computer for. (due to the devs Questionable Ethics, sorry 🤣)

Yeah I just accepted the loss of functionality as well. Microsoft have designed it this way so we must use it this way! I've found whenever I start implementing fixes and changes to the ways MS have "improved" their OS since 95+, you can bet there will be unforseen consequences or an update breaking it further down the line

I bet a large amount of the waste in this instance won't even be tech; it'll be from staffing issues. Bloated leadership, long term sick, etc. And I can see they leased devices too, who wants to bet they paid more in leasing than they would have had they just bought the devices outright

We are having problems today, was slow in the morning now we are getting "Sorry something is wrong"