mikes

We found the warranties too expensive - we have 3 redundant Lenovo servers - one of them died and nobody noticed as VMWare handled the VM's by itself. (faulty RAM module - easily fixed). Not sure paying the warranties is worth it - we'd have spent enough in the past 3 years without warranties, where we could have bought an entirely new server - I know you get support but with 3 redundant servers how important is it really? VMware/network support contracts seem more valuable to me

I remember having a nightmare getting it to work, it just wouldn't apply. I ended up with a separate GPO I could apply to workstations. But then when I did it, staff showing presentations/assemblies would have their laptops lock half way through. I had set Computer Config / Policies / Windows Settings / Security Settings / Local Policies / Security Options / Interactive Logon: Machine inactivity limit to 1200 seconds (20 mins)

Does this only apply to top set pupils? So the naughtier kids or lower ability kids who don't put any effort in at all don't get punished? I've seen a lot of - rewarding really badly behaved pupils in a vain hope of improving their behavior (to the point of buying them mcdonalds) - while those kids who try to put effort in, are polite etc, are pulled up on utter trivial things and are barely rewarded at all - isn't this totally backwards?

We see kids on phones all the time, even my friends 10 year old has a data plan - we almost decided to go the route of collecting everyone's phones at the beginning of the day and handing them back but decided the admin headache would be unworkable (lost phones, how do you prove a kid doesn't have one stashed in a bag etc...) Either govt needs to crack down hard on social media use for under 16's (which will just backfire - kids will use underground social media - i.e. I block Google chat and the kids just edit spreadsheets back and forth to chat to eachother now) I think the big problem isn't phones/technology per sé. It's a cultural one. Imagine if in the 1980's when kids were programming BASIC on a BBC Micro, or in the 1960's where kids were emulating binary counting in their desks by hand, they were all given access to modern networked mobile phones - do you think we'd have the problems we have now? The problem is people have lost faith in the system and kids who had no faith in school have children of their own who also think it is a waste of time. Perhaps the education system itself needs a big change.

Pretty sure Microsoft have retired Wordpad intentionally

in the USA there are apparently AI applications setting prison sentences, handling immigration - not sure how strictly you could call it "AI" if it is based off a fairly simple points system, but it's still ultimately a machine deciding somebodies fate. But I'd think an AI policy should come under a data policy - how we are using the data

Yeah who knows. Perhaps the guy said "yes technically you can bypass this EoL with this reg hack and continue to work but it's not something I'd advise due to the security implications" and all the school heard was "yes you can bypass the EoL" and that was that. Didn't mean to say all consultants are bad but honestly the majority of the ones I've seen have all been about - "right, what is the most cash I can get out of this school for the least amount of effort" - proper solutions never came into it.

yeah I am not our schools policy guy but I'm sure we only really have a CCTV policy and our "biometrics" policy pretty much only covers MIS and "promotional material" e.g. newsletter. We don't use biometrics for canteen/sign in here (LEA handles that anyway). In Wales the LEA's seem to work closer with schools for better or worse so they'd probably provide us a template. But I can just see there being another page of legalese half the parents can't understand about biometrics that they'll just sign anyway because they have to, then we'll have a Chinese style system that automatically monitors students, detects when they drop litter/push another student/are out of lesson without a pass, and adds/deducts points accordingly. Until the kids smash it up and we end up like the school in Akira. (actually a pupil did run up and slap a camera and it seems it broke the horizontal PTZ, the pupil is being billed for it!)

below tl;dr = of course consultants are in it for themselves, wouldn't trust a thing they say. Also if you are the ICT Tech - if it all goes wrong is it really your responsibility ultimately? I am just ICT Tech so ultimately nothing is my responsibility as I am not in a network manager position. They would have to make me a NM then I would dictate where the spending goes. Otherwise my advice is my advice and you ignore at your own peril. My story We actually had consultants advise we replace our servers and switches which were around 3 years old, to solve a slow network problem. The real problem of course we were using 6+ year old Intel Celeron laptops with rotational HDD's around the days of Windows 7. They said don't worry about the computers. Obviously their margins/levels of work are much better doing servers/switches. Replacing our servers/switches would have done nothing as the load was negligible, the "network was so slow" was because the struggling laptops/desktops were stuck at 99% CPU taking 5+ minutes to even get to a stage where they'd booted up to connect to the network in the first place. I said basically - if you think the switches and servers are the problem - go ahead - replace them - you will get no help from me at all, I will stay well away from it you can handle everything yourselves. Suddenly they gave in, all got new computers (decent i3's / i5's but the SSD being the important bit) and my reputation went up so much the governors sent me a letter of thanks (that I hadn't pissed £30,000k+ up the wall as we replaced everything, desktop and laptop)

Our chromebooks have just dropped off Impero (apart from 1 mysteriously) - got an e-mail off them yesterday explaining the fix explained here (bit late!) - they say they are still investigating so hopefully this is something they are doing! (EDIT) it's a hwb thing our own enrolled clients are working fine - our hwb ones aren't - bet they've changed the damn setting EDIT actually it seems the extension has disappeared from the chrome store - it says This Item is Unavailable - strange how our non hwb ones are working but I suspect they might be older logons perhaps

Sorry to bump this thread - is this true for 24H2? All I did was Get-AppxPackage *BingNews* | Remove-AppxPackage -AllUsers without removing the provisionedpackage part and it seems to have worked - at least no users have the Bing News any more - has 24H2 changed this?

That's what we did when we needed a batch of 5 computers - we bought some Lenovo Refurbed Tiny PC's off Amazon for around £95 - they are only 2 or 3 years old! Core i5, wireless, SSD, and they run Win 11 just fine! We are upgrading to Windows 11 over the next few months - trial room in half term - our main problem is we still use DirectAccess for our VPN and Windows 11 Education does not support that - so we have to either buy Enterprise licenses for our laptops or move onto AlwaysOnVPN. And yes about logon times - it must be awful with 12 year old kit - we have about 3 computers that don't support Win 11 still in use that we'll be binning - they still use HDD's and are a DOG to use - 15 min logons - I don't know how the staff put up with them - I actually offered them new stations but as every new build I do now is Win 11 - they wanted to stay with their old kit until summer!

In the hypothetical system I described, it would be a CCTV system as normal - and it would scan faces against a database of known faces and keep track of those locations/cameras. It wouldn't keep track of unknown faces. But of course I guess it would have to "scan" those faces to determine if they are known or not. If they are not matching then no data would be stored. But - would such a system be legal - would you need consent of everyone who visits the site (say a contractor to fix a lift) - or would you only need consent of those "known faces" you have entered into the system? would you be able to mass import from a MIS and the consent from that and the normal CCTV consent/warning policy cover it? (obviously excluding the students with no image consent) It's more a thought experiment as I doubt the technology for this even exists, or would be reliable with current 1080p cameras - it's nothing we could ever implement. But something for the future to consider e.g. an unknown face who has not signed in using the sign in system is on site - kind of thing.

No sorry I saw it at the top of the list because web-seeker had replied to it - my mistake!

Rugged cases - it's keyboard protectors we need. That and more robust screens. I honestly looked into what they were using in prisons but even those seemed to be too fragile (being valuable possessions in prison the inmates treat them with better care than our kids treat ours!) If the next BETT has a show of robust Chromebooks maybe I'd attend and take a look. At least the new model 100e's have easily replaceable keyboards this time. But again - getting paid 8 - 4 (7 hours) for a 6am - 9pm day - it's just too much imo. Does anyone get more pay for going?

VPN extension?

We changed the GPO in start layout to point to one of the XML examples here and pointed to 2 url's I have in a redirected start menu. Not sure if I have our start menu set up the best - ours redirects to a network share \\dc1\studentmenu but it seems others here use a local start menu so might have to look into that. But pointing to the .lnk on those network shares has worked fine. Otherwise getting to the file explorer in Win 11 seems so unintuitive? for me the quickest way was literally to go into the recycle bin and click computer from there!

Thanks - I deploy mine through group policy XML (I think, can't remember) and couldn't get the file explorer to pin, it got rid of Edge though - using this for file explorer worked so now I have file explorer pinned :-)

yeah I noticed that too - sloppy as it looks like a path with a default value left in. I deployed ours via group policy preferences to our dedicated exams user and the client does load. Haven't done any exams with it yet though. We are doing it on paper where-ever possible despite the protestations of the teachers who want them to do it on computer. "They are more comfortable on computer" the teachers say. Problem is in a computer room they will rush through the exam, press submit, then sit there bored for 40 minutes - they can't leave the room and they can possibly distract others. At least on paper they might look back through the paper when waiting and might see some answer they missed earlier which they can't do on PC client as once submitted it's submitted.

We bought 3 LED projectors about 5 years ago from Amazon I believe, forget what brand they are now - but they were absolute GARBAGE. As in so dim you needed absolute darkness to even see an image. Should have returned them really. I've seen on youtube there are fake lumen ratings for LED torches I can imagine the same being true for projectors. We won't bother with projectors at all now interactive TV's are for us now for classrooms.

Damn, we are moving over from our local hosted SIMS (which being local we've never had a problem with) to Arbor - we've had problems with Schoolcloud going down during an online parents evening, and Classcharts going down for half a day once every 2 months or so. I hope we don't get this with Arbor as well. Our migration is LEA led so nothing to do with me so it won't fall on my head regardless. I wonder if they are being DDOS'd or brute force attempts are happening? I hope they are transparent - one thing that worries me is what is Arbor security like? We will always have a teacher that writes their username and password down in huge letters on their laptop for every single student to see - with SIMS they'd need to have gotten a copy of the SIMS client but if it's web based, well we will see what the 2FA is like. I've heard of stories of DN marketplaces being DDOS'd then being asked to pay ransom for it to stop - of course this never works (paying danegeld getting rid of the dane etc...) but a big company like Arbor should be able to handle it I'd think. Be interesting to read the PIR as we get ready to migrate over. Do they keep a list of past PIR's ? (edit they do at least that is something. I like how they stopped all outside UK access for a period due to an incident - better safe than sorry)

yeah we are doing a data cleanse, our LEA moving to arbor - I don't know what the original docstoragesize was - but I have a crude secondary backup (just does a robocopy over the top every night onto a bitlockered HDD) - that robocopied SIMSDOCSTORAGE is ~120GB in size after we did our data cleanse - deleting students older than 31 and deleting their associated contacts - our actual simsdocstorage now seems to be about 30GB. I'm not sure if our docstorage was actually 120gb in size before because of the way the backup works (it's a crude secondary backup just in case so if folders get renamed there'd be duplicates) but our SIMS HDD does have a lot more space now.

Thanks - we use these guys and I have just checked and they've basically already made a pre-made template that I can just use - stating which parts meet and which parts don't meet the legislation. Our website is a bit of a mess (stuff built up over the years) and I know there are images on there without alt text but hyperlinks being defined only by colour as being a no-no is a new one on me - how are hyperlinks supposed to look? should there be an icon next to each one? or are they just talking about having an underline as well? (ours doesn't have an underline). Our problem is teachers can edit their own parts but they aren't gonna know w3c guidelines such as alt text. They can barely comprehend you shouldn't upload a 4k 3MB jpg and resize it in the editor. Anyway the template explains all this - pretty impressed tbh they did this with no cost at all, doesn't look good for Juniper! Putting ours on and editing the blank bits took me 2 minutes

I'd be tempted to say "Sorry we do not have the budget for this - we are looking into other webhosting providers with more reasonable costs as a fix for this" or something along those lines. We use an education focused website provider and have had no such e-mail of the sort!

Didn't want to downgrade myself - do you know if they re-enrol or is the rollback fairly painless? We enrol ours with a temporary Hwb admin account they give us for 7 days so I was nervous about pushing them back to 130 then our entire chromebook fleet getting stuck on a "Please enroll" screen - the fix Netsupport provided has worked grand so I am leaving it like that for now. Good thing it got fixed before the kids noticed too as monitoring them via smoothwall cloud is so much more onerous! But yes, I noticed online too everything they reference refers to Impero Connect which I guess is their cloud client - Education Pro has only had very minor updates since 2023 - we are still paying support until Mid July - June is apparently when Manifest 2 override support ends - so hopefully we get a month support to get a new extension if they make one. But as you said it's no longer under development - I wonder if they can even make one that supports v3 as I've read v3 is a lot more restrictive in what you can do. Tempted to set our G-suite in May to stay on the May version and wait and see what happens but a) no updated chromebooks! and b) it might be the g-suite option itself that goes so the individual ChromeOS OS version might not even matter? It's a shame as we like Impero Education Pro because it's easy to use, internal only, and provides a UI that even teachers can use and the screenshotting of safeguarding words is invaluable too. But might be time to look into something different. Does Netsupport have a product that does what Impero Education Pro does? that supports Windows and ChromeOS?