localzuk

I think you may be going about this in a cart before the horse kind of way. If your entire network is effectively outsourced to the LA at the moment, you should probably think about it in terms of services instead of physical kit. List what services you want to have in place if you were to switch over. List what level of redundancy you want. How much file storage you're using at the moment (not the size of the disks you have right now though, the actual total of your files). Then specify that lot as a "this is what we want to run, what is the solution you propose" to suppliers. These days, I'd expect that to result in some form of virtualised cluster. 2 or 3 physical servers (depending on the architecture of the cluster). Maybe a SAN or similar. My personal choice would be 3 x Dell PowerEdge servers with suitable spec, in a hyper converged cluster running Hyper-V. That way, storage and compute don't need to be separate and it is resilient. We recently bought 3 refurbished servers from ICT-Direct for this exact purpose, to replace our aging older 2 servers and 2 NAS system.

Pack updated to 1.4.1 - to fix the annoying Auth bug!

Honestly, I don't really get this. Why make the brand more difficult to advertise? An advert for Lilt can be easily targeted. An advert for Fanta? Do they mean the orange one, the lemon one? The lilty one now? It muddies the brand. Odd choice.

The issue at hand is that the govt has been consistently increasing its dislike of Chinese company owned CCTV and network, with increasing bans in place. So, planning around those bans getting larger/more strict, especially as the tensions with China are increasing as well, would seem sensible.

I have built a new Sharepoint site, using a template from the Sharepoint Look Book, and am trying to replace the existing default site with it. However, when I run the Page diagnostics tool, I get 2 errors: "Some assets aren't using CDNsPublic and private CDN are enabled. Please use the default CDN locations or ask a SharePoint Administrator to add custom locations. Learn moreFound 2 URLshttps://domain.sharepoint.com/sites/[object%20Object]https://domain.sharepoint.com/sites/[object%20Module]" and "This page has 30 calls to SharePointThis page exceeds the baseline number of recommended calls to SharePoint. Limit requests to fewer than 25 SharePoint requests for each modern page." I have no idea how to resolve either of them. The public CDN is enabled for the basic site assets, but the 2 items listed aren't real items? Then the calls to Sharepoint, how do I reduce those, considering this is from one of their own Templates? Especially as I have reduced the number of items on the page anyway from the template! I'm at a bit of a loss.

My fear with installing Hikvision today would be the escalating tensions with China and a wider ban coming in the fairly near term. So, we could end up installing stuff only to be told to swap it out sooner than we expect.

Pack updated to 1.4.

This is a very good step forward - it potentially means that existing solutions like Wonde's SSO will work across Chromebooks and Windows Doesn't look to be limited to SE either "General availability of this feature will be available on Education-focused editions of Windows later this month on Windows 11 Pro Education and Windows 11 Education!"

We go for these - https://www.crusaderav.co.uk/classroom-headphone-set-your-choice-of-32/

*Fallout music intensifies* But yes, as years go on, IT tech gets bigger - example, my waist has certainly increased in size

The DfE contact you directly for CTC. I've not seen any links to anything - everything about it is emailed to you.

I think this is part of the issue that many schools face when moving MIS. They always frame everything in terms of "it was done XYZ way before". As we're buying off the shelf software, I'm afraid we end up having to adapt to how that software works. Before SIMS existed, schools didn't do things the SIMS way either... Practice changed to fit the system. This is where strong leadership and good training are important - ensuring the end results achieve goals, even if the mechanism to get there is a bit different. Whilst some aspects of Bromcom don't do things the way we would like, other aspects are far easier than SIMS ever was. So, its very much swings and roundabouts.

Its an odd process for CTC to be honest. If you do a paper based exercise to determine what you might need, the quote you get during the procurement process may not even be the end result you get once you have selected them and done a survey. Its all a bit "cart before the horse". The DfE seem to have designed the process to be as complex as possible.

Thing is, the BoE states that their digital pound would need a wallet. And those wallets would only be available via regulated companies. So, effectively, you're back to named bank accounts but with a slightly different implementation.

The DfE's framework finder is here - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/find-a-dfe-approved-framework-for-your-school

The DfE's recommended frameworks for cloud related things are CPC, CCS and Everything Everywhere. They added CPC in December.

I'm not really sure what it is exactly. We already have a digital pound. Its used all day every day by banks. They don't exactly drive trucks full of cash between banks whenever someone does a bank transfer. Neither do they have vaults full of cash matching the deposit amounts. Our entire currency is backed by debt and computers. So, all I can think is that realistically it has to be a token and ledger/processor. Which is a crypto-currency. Just one without any mining etc. With the transactions being logged/processed on a BoE set of computers instead of, say, Visa and your local bank's? The other way it would differ from existing crypto is that wallets would only be able to exist via approved institutions. So, something like an offline wallet doesn't look like it would be a thing? As how would that be regulated?

Before you speak to suppliers, its probably worth figuring out a rough idea of how much the project will come to in total, and look at your school/Trust's finance regs. I found mine was well above our "need to tender, or use a pre-tendered framework agreement" limit here, so ended up using CPC Sourcing cloud to run the procurement - and that selected the companies for me. All depends how you have to run the procurement really. As it is a school/Trust led process, with the DfE just paying you back, you have to follow your usual procurement processes. We ended up selecting Ergo Computing via the CPC sourcing cloud process.

There's no practical reason to do one per VM. The only reason to split the daily's IMO, is if you have different backup requirements for the actual VM - where it backs up to, any scripts to run etc... When we ran Veeam, it was just one big daily job.

That's remarkably behind the times. Our council has been adding more and more to their collections. We can now recycle, kerbside: Plastic bottles, with caps on. Plastic pots/trays, tins/cans, aluminium trays/foil, aerosol cans, food waste, glass bottles/jars with lids on, cartons like tetrapaks, with caps on, paper/magazines, cardboard, batteries, small electrical items & clothes/shoes. Pretty impressive tbh.

We use Bromcom and Fastrak. We've had a few little sync issues occasionally, but easily solved by IRIS for us as the issues were always the Fastrak side of things. Regarding MCAS. It works. Parents aren't hugely impressed with the MCAS app though in general. Not got specifics though, just the general feedback I've had from others in the Trust.

If you have switched, you'd want to upload it into Bromcom - running 2 MIS's simultaneously is a recipe for disaster. However, if all the data is already in SIMS, it should be migrated during the move to Bromcom by the Bromcom onboarding people.

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