itskdog

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.

I recently tried switching BrowserSignIn to 2 (Force) rather than 1 (Enabled) to see if that would help.

When we were on A1 it seemed to just work with no configuration. Just set the encryption on the email (yellow padlock icon on the "Options" tab on the ribbon) to either "Do Not Forward" or "Encrypt" The only problem was opening attachments that were made with Office as those would automatically get stamped with IRM and would cause trouble with Office 2016/2021.

By cost I was more talking about things like SSO services, patching solutions for everything other than the OS (to meet the 14-day deadline), replacing servers to have a supported OS, etc. that were already in there before, it was more that there's still no enforcement even in the updated version, which will affect the number of schools who will be ready by 2030. And of course even MFA for staff will get pushback from technophobic SLT members, and you can't really have an exception for them as otherwise everyone else will complain and you can't say "Even XYZ has to do it, we're not even making an exception for them".

Installed Outlook Classic the other day to work with PSTs, and I opened it as soon as it finished installing - said "Welcome to Outlook 2016" in the wizard, clearly M365 Apps are just Office 2016 with a coat of paint now.

Strongly doubt there will be too much buy-in from many SLTs without any enforcement. As long as it's just a stick with no carrot, the expense and inconvenience will put people off.

We use Riso MFDs here so Hive isn't suitable as they only have the Lite version in the firmware, so still have an on-site MF server. Configured Entra as our sync source, set up SAML for web authentication (found that was quicker than using OAuth). We're using Print Deploy + Mobility Print to authenticate to the printers, users just need to click "Sign in with Microsoft" once upon logging in to a PC for the first time to authenticate (doesn't support automatic Entra auth like CDM or OneDrive, unfortunately). Pushed out Print Deploy and User Client as Win32 apps, PaperCut have documentation in the manual on how to do that. (User client needs manually updating with every server update) Also make sure to change the config key to make the User Client check the UPN rather than the username, see this post for details:

Looked into CapCut - it's getting blocked on the web filter for AI, and the titles in the search results say it's AI, too. Possibly not permittable for under 13s, plus we'd need to update the school's AI policy and get that re-approved. We already have Canva as our replacement for Publisher, and AI is already set to staff-only there, so I've asked the teachers to check that out first to see how it goes.

What video editors do you use in your schools? With Windows Movie Maker being long-EOL and the school moving to Windows 11, Intune, & M365 A3 a year ago, we tried using Clipchamp, but the teachers have had lots of difficulty with using it for the Year 6 ICT lessons compared with Movie Maker (from the old Windows Live Essentials bundle that we used on Windows 10) as it relies so much on OneDrive for storage and the projects aren't traditional files but exist only within the Clipchamp app. Needs to still be simple and easy-to-use like Movie Maker (so that rules out Resolve, for example), and ideally free too.

Syncing worked for us, (at the very least, students moved up to their new classes), but CPOMS connects directly to Arbor, so you could be right that it's an Xporter issue. Though the handful of services we have that still use Xporter rather than Wonde do seem to be working fine from what I've seen.

"My apologies, I'm sorry for deleting the entire database and the backups. I shouldn't have done that."

How are you deploying this? Manually, GPO, Intune?