itskdog

You could generate a Temporary Access Pass (TAP) in the Entra Admin Centre if you wanted to complete OOBE as the user to save you reassigning the Primary User manually later. You could then log the user out and then log in as a local admin to apply any customisations (though I hope that shouldn't be too many, as most things should be able to be automated through Intune or GPO - the only application I've come across that I haven't been able to automate has been the Paxton Net2 Client, and that's not needed on too many PCs anyway)

They're both recent additions in the last year or two. We were previously paying extra for resilient BT DSL, but then they made a load of noise about providing resilient fibre to all their schools, so we got upgraded from BT copper to Community Fibre (who knocked down one of our APs when running the cable through the building to our server room, and didn't tell us it was very visibly damaged. Luckily for us they plugged it back in to the non-PoE port so it showed as offline in the Meraki dashboard)

Thanks everyone for the quick replies and experiences! Sounds like the "uneven surface" claim might be a bit of a scare tactic, then? DigitalID (which I've seen recommended as a reseller on here in past threads) mention it routinely on any page about ID card printers, even including a "are you printing on a plain card or an access control card" question when you first start looking at printers (the latter taking you to their Retransfer page) and they even link to this rather detailed article they made on the DTC listing stating in no uncertain terms that DTC printers should not be used with access control cards, and my Google-fu only brought other websites (plus the AI Overview) agreeing with them.

If you uninstall the Store version, it should fall back to the Windows 10 version, IIRC. If you're running Windows 11 Education, the new policies in 25H2 will let you uninstall it (and other default apps) from Group Policy/Settings Catalog.

We have LGfL as our ISP, so we get Senso Safeguard Cloud (monitoring), Sophos Intercept X (antivirus), Redstor Total Education Bundle (unlimited backup), and MalwareBytes Threatdown (anti-malware), plus a managed service of Netsweeper they call SchoolProtect (network filtering including HTTPS inspection) and HomeProtect (client filtering for 1:1 devices when off-site), and a redundant internet connection, all included free with our internet plan. (Redstor only comes free with a 5-year commitment, otherwise it's just discounted from the RRP). They also have a managed Exchange server and RDP gateway, but we don't use those. When we last had a major physical infrastructure upgrade (alongside migrating our email from LGfL to Office 365), our we did look at what the cost would be going direct to VMB for the same bandwidth we were upgrading to, and the price was not too much less when you consider we'd then have to buy all the extras ourselves, and that was just for internet without any of the extras, and the annual price hasn't risen by too much since then (IIRC we pay about £12k pa for a 1Gbps line + 400Mbps resilient)

Hi all, We have had an NBS Javelin DNA card printer that we've used for many moons now (let's just say I joined in 2018 and it was already in use then), but the ribbons keep getting cut when printing and the company doesn't seem to exist any more (or at least their website is dead) and I'm fed up with taping it back together every time a new member of staff starts, so we're looking at a replacement. Everything I've come across is saying "Do not use Direct-to-card (DTC) printers if there's any circuitry in the card (Chip, NFC, etc.) or the printer will get damaged, you must use a Retransfer one instead.", and yet encoders for those technologies are available for many brands of printer that I've seen recommended on threads here. Is this just scaremongering to make us pay more or should we be worried? Retransfer printers are like 3x the price of a DTC printer (£649 for an Evolis Zenius 2 vs £1,745 for a HID Fargo HDP5000 at Digital ID) - the cheaper ribbon doesn't offset it for us as we only print occasionally when a new member of staff joins or someone loses their card or leaves it next to their microwave at home, and there's lots of budget pressure at the moment, with every penny spent being scrutinised.

Note that the LE series don't have ActivInspire Professional licences, you can only use the free "Personal" edition with those boards, which are missing key features like shapes.

Another example, ParentMail. IRIS don't even have phone support for ParentMail, making getting hold of anyone when we didn't yet have the support site logins configured properly difficult, especially when we needed to reach out to get our MIS Link changed from Integris to Arbor.

All our desktops are HP ProOne or EliteOne now - only one power button, and repairs are no different to a laptop in terms of difficulty. HPs ones these days can even be used as an HDMI monitor once they PC part isn't needed any more, reducing the costs for people who want 2nd monitors in the long run.

My understanding so far seems to be that the solution here without disabling the timeout would essentially be telling staff they now have to wiggle the mouse every 15-20 minutes if they've got a timer on the board or a longer activity in the exercise books?

I would agree with you, but I don't make those calls. I'm mainly asking this for advice on how to avoid setting the timeout to unlimited like we used to have on AD before we moved to Intune over the summer. I've been able to do some testing with ActivInspire today, and it seems like that doesn't prevent sleep when full screen, unfortunately.

Will need to test if this works with ActivInspire as well if put into full screen. Will do research and investigate. Same goes for any class timer websites. However, I can still see a laptop left with ActivInspire (or even PowerPoint) open full screen between lessons from teachers that open up every flipchart they will use for the whole day first thing in the morning. We're a primary school, so less of a concern as students won't be inside during break/lunch without a member of staff anyway. Unfortunately, we have ActivPanel 6 IWBs, which unfreeze when HDMI signal is lost (and glitch out when the resolution changes when switching to/from extended display while frozen, too). Our NEC projectors in the school hall do that as well, from past experience, but that's less of an issue.

Hi all, Thought there's already be a topic on this but a search didn't bring anything up. What timeouts do you use on the school PCs? We currently have both display off and sleep set to 30 minutes (enforced by policy after complaints over the Windows default of 5 minutes), but teachers are still reporting that it's turning off in the middle of a lesson if they leave some instructions on the board, and as it's going to sleep it's longer than just waking from screen off. How do you balance the need for teachers keeping the screen on in situations like this while also ensuring security for when people walk away from their computer without locking them, e.g. at break or lunch?

I wonder if the SSL issues were related to the poor internet performance we've had recently. We get the free Safeguarding module from LGfL, who have said to keep website monitoring off and as those sites are already blocked in their web filter.

SharePoint is base 100TB for all schools, with +50GB for every paid A3 licence and +100GB for every paid A5 licence, IIRC. Used to be unlimited, but they added restrictions a couple of years back. Microsoft have an official tool for migrating file shares to SharePoint: Migrate file shares to SharePoint and OneDrive - Migrate to Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn It can even move people's home drives to OneDrive, too.

We set our print queues (one that forces black & white, set as default, one that allows colour) on Print Deploy as a Mobility Print printer, rather than UNC, as that seems to be the recommended approach with Entra joined machines, where they just click "Sign in with Microsoft" the first time they log in. It is possible to use the cloning tool to get the OEM drivers rather than the generic drivers, if you need those - Import Mobility Print queues into Print Deploy (Advanced) | PaperCut We're just using the generic drivers as it keeps things simple, and this is meant to be a temporary thing for now as we're in the last year of our lease and will be looking into a device that supports a cloud solution like PaperCut Hive (our printers are RISO, which now support Hive & DirectPrint, but only for printing, no photocopy tracking, which makes up most of people's credit usage), so we can retire our server as it's only used for Impero and PaperCut since we moved to Intune.

My first step is usually to reduce the refresh rate from 60p down to 50i or 30p if possible. Deals with it 90% of the time. If that doesn't sort it, I typically install the Intel Graphics Control Panel and switch to a compressed standard like 4:4:4 or 4:4:2 and see if I can disable GPU scaling to let the display handle it.

When RM deployed our new Intune/Windows 11 system, they tried to push us to do everything on Teams and use the web versions for everything, as part of the training session for staff we asked for. Seems like this is a major sticking point still for us then, as we're trying to cut our subscriptions for budget reasons, so getting their Explain Everything cloud replacement doesn't work for us right now given ActivInspire comes included with the IWBs. Thanks for the confirmation that it's not just our tenant at issue, at least.

Initially I spoke to a few staff that I know use Publisher who came in over the summer holidays, and they were hesitant at first. I had also been getting it in people's heads a little bit if there was any support requests for Publisher ever since it got announced in the M365 Message Centre. But as soon as I showed them around (especially the AI tools and graphics library) they seemed happier. It's almost like getting the old Clip Art feature in Office back for them. Will be sending a broader email blast at some point I'm sure, then we'll see the wider reactions, but I think many people just put up with Word to make stuff that should be made in Publisher anyway.

Hi all, We're a Promethean school for our IWBs, and all our staff use ActivInspire for their lesson planning, and share the flipchart for each lesson via SharePoint (migrated from old server file shares dating back to the early 2010s) or Teams (any new "Drives" people want for their department). We use Cloud Drive Mapper to get SharePoint and Teams showing as old-school mapped drives, but some staff seem to prefer going through the web UI anyway (which we say is more for accessing from a personal device at home, not for use in school as much, but if that workflow is fine for them, we don't want to slow them down by forcing them to use CDM). For some reason, when opening a flipchart online, we now get the option to "Open" as well as "Download". This then seems to open it like it's an empty folder in SharePoint, rather than going to the OneDrive client to open it locally as it does if you right-click then "Open in app". Has anyone else run into this and solved it (if it's a configuration issue on our end), or should I try my luck and reach out to Microsoft or our third-party support to see if they have any ideas?

We've got the free Canva for Schools licence and are encouraging staff to migrate over to it. In my testing I found that exporting a Publisher file as PDF and importing that PDF to Canva seemed to work as a transfer mechanism. Will probably keep a standalone device with LibreOffice or Office 2021 around so we can export to PDF for staff to add to Canva.

With shared devices, Intune policies should only be applied to the device, not the user. We've just had RM do a project for us over the summer to move us over to Intune, and all the apps and configurations were applied to the device (with 2 groups, one for staff devices, one for student devices), rather than the user, and we were encouraged to leave the device on for an hour or two to ensure it picks everything up before the user gets hold of it. Weirdly, there is a "Sync" button in the Settings app, but it clearly doesn't operate like gpupdate does as policies are still outdated even after syncing is supposedly successful.

Intel iGPUs like to do the scaling on the laptop rather than the IWB (Windows shows this in "Active signal resolution" on Display -> Advanced), so tries to push 4K to our ActivPanel 6 boards while we only want 768/720p or 1080p (whatever the laptop has). Lowering the refresh rate usually acts as a workaround, though sometimes I've had to switch to the Intel graphics driver rather than HP's customised one.

No social media accounts at all for our school. Everything for parents to know goes on the school website or ParentMail, and the website is managed by SLT now, with support from IT, rather than us doing everything.

Yup. On LGfL for internet who give us Safeguard Cloud for free, and have set up the right firewall rules for everyone already, and it's giving me errors for STUN/TURN. Doesn't affect us as we're only using the captures, but certainly this thread is making me reconsider moving away from Impero for tech support and sending messages to classrooms (which we use in place of a school-wide speaker/bell system).