itskdog

Microsoft said 1st October, we told staff it would be 1st October, and had a few panicked teachers asking for help exporting to PDF at 3pm on 30th September. It's now the 23rd, and I even rebuilt my PC the other day as I messed up trying to figure out how AppLocker works and ended up blocking all apps (causing BSODs on a reboot 😕) and it's still here...

We don't use this, but does the "Configure Start Pins" policy not work for you? Customize The Start Layout For Managed Windows Devices | Microsoft Learn Seems the cmdlet exports JSON in Windows 11 rather than XML like Windows 10, but I don't see anything there about pushing a BIN file.

As the guy I spoke to at Apple admitted the change hadn't been announced publicly, thought I'd mention here so it's recorded somewhere and hopefully search engines will pick it up, too. Licences for free apps on ASM are now unlimited (technically almost 2.15 million, max 32-bit signed integer) as of a few days ago, so there are no longer any buttons to get new licences if you've run out. This may require reinstalling the Content Token on your MDM (followed by a manual sync) to pick up the change, and at least for me, Mobile Guardian has been having trouble with getting Talking Tom onto one of our SEN department's iPads, claiming it cannot find a licence.

Yeah, had a few of those here this week. The date on the portal is fine, so when I check the portal instead of the email notification for "Today", it ends up not showing, so I have to go hunting for it. Doesn't help that we've got a lot more alerts lately because Year 6 are doing their WW2 topic which they link in with the ICT movie-making topic, so lots of alerts for "terrorism" when they search for pictures to use.

Tbf, the internal Civil Service AI tools are actually named "Humphrey" after Sir Humphrey himself. No idea if they named it as a complement or a criticism of the product.

Worth noting that if you're an LGfL school, you can get Redstor for free if you go for a 5-year broadband commitment, which is how we're currently doing it. (Though if it weren't free, I would consider changing as the backups seem to randomly fail and there's no access to the logs from the portal.

We have an IDP Smart 31. Had it for about 6 months now and it does the job really well, only had 2 jams and 1 ribbon break in that time, with over 100 prints (manual two sided). Network is an optional extra along with double-sided, so make sure you check that with your supplier before purchasing.

That doesn't do it in every location, only in SharePoint. Unfortunately, the setting for this doesn't have a GUI control, it's only through PowerShell, but Microsoft have a script at this link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/microsoft-365/solutions/manage-creation-of-groups

There is a potential future of these tools working, as hidden watermarks are being applied to the text generated by these models with slight alterations to the probabilities of the next token as the text is generated, a bit like OpenAI's SynthID for images. I could see a future where you can subscribe to a tool similar to how Turnitin is already widely used for plagiarism checking, that just reaches out to various APIs for different companies to check against their watermarks.

If you're fine with self-hosting and need something free like Freshdesk (used to)/Zoho (current), I see lots of people recommending osTicket or GLPI (which also includes asset management & discovery) when people ask on the IT subreddits I follow.

Checked ArborHQ today, seems to be a known bug they're working on. Also someone seems to have checked the chat log I had yesterday and actually turned it into a ticket and notified 2nd Line.

That's at least something. There definitely used to be a "consents" option not that long ago though, as I was using it all the time. Once we ditch ParentPay and get rolling with payments in Arbor, then I could try to push for having parents manage their own consents in the app, but for now while I'm doing everything by hand and paper forms (still glad I pushed for doing it in the MIS rather than an Excel spreadsheet, though, even if it's slightly longer on Arbor than it was on Integris)

Coming here partially to vent, but also partially as a sanity check. Just been on a live chat with Arbor, as I went to add photo consents (don't ask me why IT do that, it dates back to before GDPR when we could have it be opt-out rather than opt-in), and the "View" drop-down at the top of the student profile was missing the "Consents" section, and it's quite a long scroll to get to it otherwise. The person I was speaking to didn't seem to understand the issue (they thought I was saying the Consents section used to be at the top of the page, not the drop-down box), and when I asked if I could have a ticket opened to be notified of updates to the bug report (that they kept referring to as "feedback"), and they said "no, it's internal communication so you can't be copied in", when other times when I've raised a bug report with a provider they've kept the ticket open in an "On hold" state. Can other people see "Consents" in the drop-down or is it just our instance?

HP & Lenovo also have a similar scheme that gives the school cash back in your bank account when you purchase new stuff from them. HP's is called Brighter Futures, and Lenovo's is ConnectEd - both do up to £150 depending on the CPU grade of the new PC (3/5/7/9).

Just tested, same here. No reports of issues from staff, but good to be aware. Their status page also reports a major outage: 2Simple Software - Status

Our MFDs don't support the full version of Hive, so we're staying on MF at the moment. Set up Entra sync instead of AD sync (make sure you back up staff ID numbers before deleting the old accounts!), and used Print Deploy+Mobility Print to push the drivers to the PCs. Your PaperCut supplier should be able to help you with this. I would recommend setting up SAML Auth (new in v26) instead of OAuth for M365 login to the web UI if you can, as I find it's quicker and you don't have to pick the account name, and make sure to disable username/password login on the web UI, too.

Also worth noting if you're using licenced bands (where you pay a small fee to Ofcom every 5 years) or licence-free. Licensed radios can push more transmit power (but of course there's the cost of replacing all your radios at once, you can't do a phased replacement). We're currently using licence-free Hyteras and we trialled some licenced radios that we borrowed from our supplier to test, and it worked even at dismissal time when there were lots of extra bodies absorbing the signal. Now just to try and get budget approval for them...

Also, spf also has an "include" option to specify a domain, so you don't have to keep changing the IPs on the school's end.

If the DPO is external (we use Judicium, though their support can be hit-or-miss at times) they may have training for your DPL alongside the staff training they provide.

I suppose you could take the PowerPoint and add extra slides instead. The fact that the stats they show at the start have be re-surveyed since then by LGfL who conducted the original survey, and those are also a few years old too, just adds to the confusion.

Is your SPF and DKIM also accurate, with both your regular email (Microsoft, Google, etc.) and Arbor configured? Is your DKIM set to p=none, p=reject, or p=quarantine?

We buy Mifare cards from InVentry in packs of 100, and use a Smart 31 with their own-brand IDesigner software for about a year now. Haven't had any issues with it fading, the ribbon has an overlay panel.

Do you have any device cleanup rules? When the device reconnects it's supposed to come back into the list, but I personally don't have an issue with leaving them visible as I usually search anyway.

I guess a single roll-call system rather than having to use the printouts from Net2 + the SIA iPad? Especially for staff who forgot their pass so have to sign in on the iPad. On Inventry it was only a couple hundred when we looked into it (though we didn't go through with it in the end), but that was just the door add-on, as the MIS link was in the base price for us.

Good luck with that once they're part of XMA. We only have licence renewals with them but they seem to take forever to reply back, and even when we request quotes for other IT equipment to compare prices and get multiple quotes, we often don't get a reply before we've already filled out a PO for someone else. Especially difficult in February when you're trying to use the last bits of your budget before the accounts close.