OllieC

SIMS Parent App Lite is included; I could set that up and get a text out... don't anticipate great uptake from that, though as it requires an app and registration...

Started giving this some thought today and think I need to put it out to the hive mind before I spend days potentially going about this the wrong way. We're missing a significant number of parental email addresses; with the current situation I need to get these populated. I've managed to get SIMS to cough up parental email addresses and filter the empties.. my plan was to just text these individuals, however, I can't find any way to create a group from a list like this in Groupcall so I suspect I'll have to text all parents (an expensive inconvenience). I've also looked at the Groupcall comms export and it doesn't populate the "regarding" field or the phone number on the incoming messages, making it very difficult to match direct responses to a text to the relevant student. I need a way to reliably capture new emails in a format that I can try and convince SIMS to accept. I've considered using Microsoft Forms/Power Automation to update the spreadsheet but I'm struggling on getting a solution that is simple enough to actually get a good response, but also without creating a mountain of manual data processing on my end... the only unique student field that I can reliably get off a parent is the students' exam number (this forms part of their usernames). But I'm on the fence about how sensible this is still. Has anyone else had to sort out similar and had any success? Cheers, Ollie EDIT: So yeah, there's 1732 "parental" contacts on SIMS without a primary email, so yeah.. I need to automate this as much as possible. I've also realised that using the exam number alone as a key in power automate won't work as there's multiple contacts for each student and I'm not sure of a sensible/technically possible way to match this accurately. HMM. SECOND EDIT: Brain is finally getting warmed up; have rationalised down to only collecting email addresses for priority 1 parental contacts and found another hidden email field that appears to be far more consistently populated; this means I only have to update 1 contact for each student AND there's only 300 that are missing. Now I've got to find a way to just text these 300 parents...

I'll drop you a PM

the dream is to just rip them down (well the dream is touch panels but $$$). I teach 80% of the week and I literally never use mine but some departments are quite attached to them and I don't want to upset anyone!

I do my budget, it's me I'd be leveraging with. if I had my way, there'd be a touch panel in every room - there's absolutely no chance of getting more money to fund this; far higher priorities expanding right in to my long-term plan first haha. Cheers for the link, might still be a bit steep as I can currently get a job lot of 10 on ebay for ~£900 but good to know it exists and is certainly a viable option!

That's the dream but we're skint - touch panels solve so many problems in addition to the old boards (dying projectors, poor ceiling installation, incorrect cabling, no speakers) *and*we are extensively using ActivInspire - migrating from this to SMART Notebook is no bother but gets restrictive outside of the two brands.

In a predicament with our IWBs.. majority are TDS Activboards circa 2004 and the Windows 10 functionality is already poor and soon-to-be completely crippled. I've got three departments that "rely" on these boards so probably need to replace around 20-30 boards and wanting to keep it as consistent as possible. Wondering if anyone's offloading any newer boards? Happy to do SMART as long as they're USB/W10! Can collect West Mids, Staffs, East Mids easily enough I reckon. Cheers

Omg I hadn't been receiving notifications for this thread - glad it's not just me suffering. Thanks for the tips on rebuilding biometric database etc - I don't actually know if I have access to this area of TrustE; there's a level that only their support has access to I think. They remoted in the other day and did some database repairs in MSSQL but this has done nothing to improve. I'm going to push to get an account manager to visit because it's just farcical; the clunkiness of the software, the pricing etc. The people I've dealt with in support on the phone seem like they are genuinely trying at least but that alone isn't enough to make me a happy customer. Will certainly be looking in to different solutions if they can't do something to improve things quickly. Interesting point on printers; when I started at the school (pre technical role), the printers all had NRS biometrics which *never* worked. Moved to keyfobs (staff) and exam numbers (students) with the new printing contract.

Looking for some advice on what to do here or at the least, a shoulder to cry on (kidding!). We've got a NRS Trust-E cashless payment system (V6). One server running the database and trust-e software in the catering office with 5 or 6 tills. Civica tried to sting us with a ~£750/month over 5 year upgrade which was totally unnecessary (told me that our tills were W7 and EOL.. they're 8 POS and 10), then after insisting that they wouldn't include the parentpay TLS update as part of the standard support contract, I have made the decision to stop paying for support - I gave them the choice: we pay support if it includes the sync2 update, otherwise we only pay for sync2. Just from generally talking to them and viewing our "options" for upgrade, I dislike the way that they operate... marketing x64 Windows as a chargeable feature for example just reeks of moneygrabbing and is indicative of them being used to schools/trusts just signing anything that they're told to. We're currently having various performance issues, tills freezing and hanging regularly on the tail end of transactions; it's really slowing down things for the kitchen staff. From experience of resuscitating tills that have been stuck in offline mode etc, it comes as no surprise; it seems an absolute hodge-podge of a system, seemingly written in VB6. From my experience of it, I'm not impressed. Has anyone experienced similar, or have any known fixes for performance issues? What are other people doing to get this thing working as it's supposed to? I've read snippets throughout the forums suggesting running trust-e as a remote app; is this practical? Am I likely to encounter issues with usb biometric and their silly TTL pin pads? If I really really have to, I'll pay the support so as not to inconvenience the caterers but it goes against everything that I believe in my role as NM. Cheers

How well does the SP staff share work? Are you mapping it as a drive or just accessing through browser?; are you ending up with hundreds of downloaded files sitting in user areas cluttering things up?

Every time I go to play with setting up some kind of collaboration service in 365; whether it be small scale or whole-school I get frustrated and walk away. The eco-system is like a thousand developers vomited every idea on to a live platform. Sharepoint, Yammer, Staff Hub, Teams, Groups, Planner (and countless others I'm sure) - all of these discrete/indiscreet tools, each with hundreds of additional bits of complexity and caveats (new/old sharepoint experience?). Microsoft feels so much like a rudderless ship in this area and it makes setting anything meaningful up a total minefield; for one I feel like any energy put in to this will be wasted because they surely can't keep on with all of these separate overlapping bits and pieces forever? So in short, what's your experience? What is working/what's not? In the short-term, I'd like to improve communication and organisation within my own team - we already use a shared OneNote for documentation; I'd like to extend this to slack-like communication and shared calendar and job allocation/tracking (to supplement, not replace our helpdesk). I'd love to be able to replicate this to other areas such as facilities, science tech, admin etc if successful within my own team. Longer term, I'd like to implement a whole-school portal for staff and students (wouldn't be end of the world if these ended up being separate), where notices, policies, handbooks, briefings, calendars, notices, alerts, documents can be shared (with the relevant groups of people) centrally. I suspect this would be SharePoint but for all I know one of the umpteen other systems that they offer may do this better/tailor SP functionality to this task better. As part of this, I'm eyeing up migrating our staff shared area to SharePoint, but cautious of having the exact opposite to the desired effect of saving storage in school - thousands of downloaded (and duplicate downloaded) files sitting in user areas. Not sure I'm confident enough in OneDrive mapper yet to avoid this issue. Has anyone wrangled this forty-headed beast and won? Thanks

What issue is there with using PFSense? Done right I see no issue. In my situation I'm also protected already by a perfectly adequate firewall.

I've been considering putting a pfsense box in for some time; it's one of those projects best suited for the future though. No traffic issues as such, load is spread out nicely enough around the school.

Stacking is something I've not given a huge amount of thought to in the past but it would be a nice way of bringing the distribution infrastructure together;l can definitely do it with IRF; maybe sometime in the future. Plenty else to worry about first! And re doing the routing ourselves; agreed! I get twitchy around the ISP bits because I can't even see the config of their router, it's a big unknown that has a frustratingly large impact on my own infrastructure.

Got QoS on the switches for the voice VLAN and having a separate VLAN itself stops the phone broadcast traffic from cluttering everything else up. We've got so many 24/48 port switches for access spread out over such large distances it's not practical to directly link each access switch to the core; it was only thanks to remnants of some redundant fibre from an old network that I was able to get every distribution room pointing to any kind of core at all! I've got the fibre to make it 20GbE to the tech block in future and I'll probably upgrade the biggest cluster of switches to one of those nice modular ones that can serve the whole block and cascade those faster switches elsewhere when I see the money! I've got spare switches meaning if anything does give up, I can switch out while HP warranty kicks in (next day replacement). It's not the best solution but I can rely on it. For simplicity with my installation I've broken up the existing major network (ample in size) in to subnets adequately sized for each VLAN; and it means that I can keep server and switch IPs the same (especially useful for various NAT'ing and firewall rules that're done by the ISP currently - it's one less thing to break) If the routing is right then I can't see how much can go wrong; I'll be doing the vast majority myself although have got a tech who will be checking specific port requirements (APs, printers) etc - going to configure everything I can in advance then take the plunge on a weekend. I've contacted the ISP to see if anything needs doing on their end.

Already actually have a separate VLAN for IP voice traffic recently implemented but that sits on a completely different address range so not had any of the concerns around routing internet traffic. VLAN requirement becoming more important re BYOD/guest and looking at bringing in IP CCTV to completely overhaul our current CCTV system. I also absolutely want to separate off servers/switch management from general use - my rough VLAN plan is: - Management/infrastructure - Servers - Voice - CCTV - Printers - Main - Wireless - BYOD/guest Our network is arranged with distribution switches fed from the core all by 10GbE fibre except two low-use locations that are on 2Gb LACP links then access switches all on 2Gb links from the distribution. I've considered putting the tech block on its own VLAN as there's ~150 machines there running off a single 10gig link from the core. Hmm; I like the idea of having a secondary guest network; I may want to do slightly more granular control over access though - limiting year group access for example (as only our sixth form are allowed phones in school) and guest logins from our sign-in system.

Currently only have hosted firewall from ISP; setting up a pfsense box has been on the list for some time now. Probably a sensible time to make that happen.

Cheers, Chris! Core is 2920-24G, distribution and access switches are a bit of a mishmash of different models.. a quick glance over my network map shows a mix of 2920, 2610, 2626, 2520, 2510G, 6108, 2530, 2910al, 2824, 2810.... all managed and on latest available firmware at least! LACP for aggregate links from distribution to access switches in each comm room so I'll keep a close eye on trunking for those! The ISP bit I'm iffy'est about; when we switched they asked if we used VLANs and wanted the addressing for each subnet. Are they assuming that I'll be using their router as default gateway hmm. I'm going to get through all the switches putting in VLANs and tagging trunks etc in preparation today.

Hi everyone, I'm about to reorganise our network and I feel like I need to do a sanity check before I take the plunge. I've planned out the VLANs needed and done VLSM for the subnets. I've also drawn it all up on a network map so I don't miss anything when I actually come to implement. We recently moved ISP but stuck with the major network allocation that we had before for the sake of simplicity (plus it'll support 8000 hosts so I've no urgent need to change things up); I've broken this up in to subnets for VLANs as needed (and done this in a way that means servers/core infrastructure retain same addressing). All HP switches with a Layer 3 main core which is fibre'd out to distribution switches around the school. ISP Router upstream from the core. So - trying to put together a bit of a checklist and I've a few areas that I'm not overly certain of... Configure VLANs with addresses on core switch Configure VLANs on all other switches Configure VLANs in ESXi/tag interfaces as required Set up DHCP scopes as required Configure trunks between core/distribution/access switches Tag access ports as required Adjust statically addressed devices to match their new subnet My queries are: Inter-vlan routing - is there anything specific I need to do (other than enabling IP routing on the core) to ensure that traffic can travel between VLANs? ISP router - do they need to add routes to the new subnets? Guest Wifi - how do I ensure that a specific VLAN can't reach anything other than the internet? ACL/routing table? Unsure! Please let me know if I've missed anything or am doing anything completely wrong and any advice on my queries greatly appreciated.

No it's not signing; I'm wondering if there's somewhere else that signing should be configured for a project. I've been assured it is doable somehow but the person that's done it has long since forgotten. VM solution is very much an over-my-dead-body scenario. It strikes me as absurd if there's no sensible way of doing this without the added overhead of needing a VM.

Hi everyone, Scratching my head about this at the moment. We use visual studio quite extensively; all of our year 9 do a unit writing VB and then all CS year 10/11/12/13 use it. Recently implemented AppLocker and I'm really trying to avoid path rules, especially in user-writable areas. I'm currently having to set a path rule in their documents folders to allow them to run their projects. I've been told it's possible to sign projects and create a publisher rule in AppLocker for this but I'm stuck on how to achieve this. So far I've set up the code signing template in our Windows Certificate Authority and got it autoenrolling for students. In an active Visual Studio project, if I go to the project properties and Signing, I can select the signing certificate from the certificate store but the executable wizard in applocker doesn't let me chose any of the debug executables to grab publisher information. Is this actually possible? Is there somewhere else that I should be signing projects? There has to be a decent way of doing this without using a path rule! TIA

Hi everyone, Just had to make an emergency computer room of 30 laptops - currently storing in an old drawer unit from tech; not ideal! Anyone in West Mids, East Mids or Staffs got any trolleys spare? Willing to pay sensible prices and collect. Cheers! Ollie

Not sure if this is the best place to post this. I'm in a situation where we have year 11s allowed out at lunch and sixth form allowed to leave the site throughout the day. We are currently logging this on paper and it's time consuming, especially for the member of staff on duty at the gate dealing with yr11! All 11 are to be issued with lunch passes and sixth form with ID cards... I can place a barcode or QR code of their 4 digit exam number (unique to each student in the school) on these so I was wondering if anyone knows of an app (preferably free but sensibly priced perpetual licensed is fine) that can simply scan a barcode/QR code and log an exit or re-entry with the corresponding times. Ideally export/share as XLS/CSV. Not fussy about android/IOS - happy to buy the appropriate devices for it. When researching I'm finding a lot of enterprise/corporate apps that are free for 3 then a $/per user above; also a lot of very over-featured considering our basic requirements. I do also have a little OPN-2001 barcode scanner (https://www.opticonusa.com/products/companion-scanners/opn-2001.html) that outputs a list of barcodes scanned and timecodes as a CSV that could be ingested in to an application; the original plan was to develop a programme to download and display data from this (has a .net API) but time constraints have made this tricky. Any ideas appreciated! Thanks, Ollie

This would be the ideal for me absolutely however LEA are providing iPads. There's been a lot of emphasis from the VI team about them not wanting to "stand out" in lessons. One perk of the ipads is teachers can airserver PPT to their ipads when presenting in lessons which is far more convenient than a laptop in non-computer lessons being as both students are going to be using pen and paper in most lessons. I'm thinking GPO is going to be the most sensible option, might fall short of one or two of the requests though; don't want to look like the school isn't providing adequately for them. I believe they'll have a TA with them so I think anyone will kick off over missing mouse sonar to be honest!

Hi everyone, Got two VI (visually impaired) students starting in September. Had a meeting with the VI support team from the LEA at the end of term and we discussed some adaptations that they'd like to be available for the students. I'm pondering the best way to go about it... some of them are very easily done via group policy, some are not. With regards to IT rooms we'll have two dedicated computers per room where hardware adaptations can be applied but I'd like them to be able to log on anywhere in the school and still be able to use the computer so needing software modificationst to follow.... Requested adaptations are: Large icons - looks like it can be done via group policy registry wizardry but seems fiddly, might not work 24 size font for Windows - easy with group policy (reg) Large mouse curser - easy with group policy (reg) Microsoft Mouse - function button activating zoom - will keep this just to the specifically adapted PCs as we don't have the same mice everywhere Mouse sonar enabled - seems an absolute dog to manipulate in the registry! Shortcut to magnifier - easy group policy shortcut It's looking like it won't be entirely possible with group policy; I was considering creating a mandatory profile for these two users however I've not touched profiles for years! We just use default profiles on our system... can you even use mandatory profiles with Windows 10 anymore like you used to be able to? Or! Is there something more modern like UE-V? Any kind of input would be useful - people already applying adaptations, even if not the same.. how are you going about it etc etc. Cheers! Ollie