localzuk

Education has clearly become more and more of a niche for Microsoft. The effort put into EDU SKUs seems to reduce year by year, with most things they do for us being an afterthought. Honestly, I am looking at Autopilot and InTune and wondering how it could possibly do what we want with a shared environment. The big issues with moving to 1:1 are primarily cost, and then training and integrating them into the curriculum. We ran 1:1 schemes for our children for 3 years, and end result? We had increased disruption in lessons due to children forgetting to charge their devices, broken devices etc... And no noticeable improvement in academic performance. So, whilst "Technology and it's implementation has moved on" but the question is - what is the value of it if it is effectively just a cost and not a benefit? Schools should be dictating their needs of technology, not technology dictating the way schools work - and Microsoft (and to an extent Google) need to listen to that.

Sadly, not that simple. First, because the law doesn't really allow that sort of flexibility when deciding in the public sector - there's strict rules to follow. Second, it comes down to the criteria and decisions made by the Trust and how well they stuck to them, and didn't make any unfair decisions or assumptions. Which is why I'm such a proponent of frameworks, and sticking to their guidance/rules like glue. Someone else has done all the risky stuff.

True, but that legal peace of mind may well be worth it!

My main concern with this case is that whilst there does appear to be a win here for Bromcom, the ruling also states that it wasn't intentional by the MAT. The learning exercise being - even with legal advice and trying to do everything right, you could well still get caught out. IMO, its more evidence that schools and MATs should REALLY try to use existing Framework agreements. Most of the legal legwork has been done already. We went with the G-Cloud framework, which allows direct awarding, for example. Oh, and an extension to @elsiegee40's comment - note that most supply contracts usually include clauses about discussing the company or contract during the contract period. So, it may be worth taking that into account (and seeing if such clauses exist and what limitations they apply to you) when commenting publicly.

For a nice simple solution? I'd recommend Sign In App.

The numbers on their site aren't limits of handsets from what I know, but more "guidelines". You have unlimited handsets with any number of users. At least, that's what I have. In a school, our "simultaneous lines" calculations are very different to a normal business - we have 122 handsets and during a normal day I rarely see more than 3 calls at a time. Using their calculation, they think I would need close to a 48 sim call license, which would be silly. Fire away with any questions. Edit: Click on "Full Feature List" on their pricing page, and under Pro you'll see extensions is "unlimited".

Solid as a rock - I've not had any 3cx related downtime in the 5 or so years we've used it. Only downtime we've had was with our old SIP supplier, or with the leased line supplier for one school (OpenReach unplugged it thinking it wasn't in use any more). We have 122 handsets on it at the moment, with a few more being added soon. We run a 16 channel professional license, and use Gamma as the SIP trunk provider. It lives in a 4 vCPU VM, with 8GB RAM, though that is overkill - it is sat using 0.48GB at the moment. Considerably cheaper to run than any hosted solution - we pay about £70pm for 16 SIP channels (including loads of minutes), and £450pa for the license for 3CX.

We host our own 3CX VM on our central cluster with all sites using that via our WAN.

Some options: https://twistedwave.com/online https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/audio-editor-music-editor/dfmpaemifkgbnlgcccccnfjjkeiikeie?hl=en

They mention takeaways - does that mean Chinese restaurants will have to stop using those plastic tubs for everything? Will it apply to those polystyrene containers you get at kebab/burger places too? That'll be huge if it does.

How long ago did they get added to the rule allowing external sharing? I found there can be a significant delay between it being allowed/membership changing, and it actually allowing a user to do it.

Via credit card. Can't buy topups via resellers any more. Basically, I go into the subscription in Azure, and there's an option to top up in there. It uses the card on file.

We have a credit card on our account, but we don't PAYG. We top up our Open subscription periodically when we're running out of credit. Ensures we don't suddenly get any crazy charges.

I've been using it for about 5 or so years here and not had any of the issues you list. With things not updating, I would make sure you've got all the filtering/firewall exceptions you need in place. Apple has a LOT of domains and IPs it uses, and they do periodically change.

Ctrl+F5 doesn't seem to work for any of our users having this issue. I've suggested they clear their browser cache/cookies entirely, and am waiting to hear back from them.

They've got an incident listed on their status site now - https://status.bromcomcloud.com/

Server updated to release 4.1.

I'm Trust IT Manager I believe officially. Main difference between this role and when I was Network Manager? Managing people, and strategy/budget management. In my experience, budget and strategy was generally managed by the Bursar when I was Network Manager, and any other technicians officially were line managed by the same person who line managed me. Now, I'm the line manager for all IT related staff, and set the budget for IT across all schools, and decide/implement strategy. I spend a lot more time working with the CEO and headteachers now, vs nearly everything going through the Bursar when I was Network Manager. In a larger Trust, my role would likely end up being split in 2 again on top - there would be a "director level" or "C suite level" IT director, that handled strategy and overall budget, then back to an IT Manager who did implementation with delegated portions of budgets etc...

VaultHunters 3rd Edition Server address: mc.edugeek.net:25566 This is a 1.18.2 Forge modded minecraft pack. You can download it via the CurseForge App Current pack version: Alpha 0.0.1 As always, to be whitelisted on the server, please visit your Profile on the site and add you Minecraft username to the field there. The server updates the whitelist every 5 minutes. Up to date information is always available via the Discord channel. Announcing the next EduGeek Modded Minecraft server

Pack updated to 1.4.2

Has anyone here got a heatpump type tumble dryer? If so, do you know if there are any models which don't need a water outlet hose, but have a tank you can empty?

I have now finished a rewrite of the whitelisting tool. Or at least stage one of the rewrite. Instead of running every 3 hours, it now runs every 5 minutes and is MUCH faster as there's less duplication of data processing. So, to whitelist your account on any of our Minecraft servers simply go to: http://www.edugeek.net/profile.php?do=editprofile Scroll down to the bottom of the page and enter your normal Minecraft username in to the Minecraft Username box. Then wait 5 minutes.

It really depends where you are. Prices are a lot higher in rural spots than they are in cities, for example. We can't get £250pm leased lines here at all, for example. No FTTP here either, and some of our sites only get 40Mb/s FTTC.

Pack updated to 1.3.0

We've been told new kit from some suppliers has between a 40 and 52 week lead time. So its not you.