localzuk

You can add all your existing groups as groups in AD, with the same email addresses, and it *should* link them together and keep them all.

Then I would doubt that you made a product that is comparable with something like Tapestry or Build-A-Profile IMO. Can a member of staff choose a child, press the camera button and take a photo directly into that child's progress profile, and then immediately be able to write comments about the child's progress? Can parents log in to the system and see only their child's progress? You said "Don't buy a system for logging your pupils progress with photos etc, that's just a cms, use Wordpress." I'd say you are wrong, without custom work. So we have to wait 10 years now?! That works even better with management. "We can do it for free, we'll just hire people with the necessary skills. Though, in the meantime we can't use anything because those people are still in year 5." Sorry but your answers are idealist at best. Not to mention, why would these newly trained programmers decide to come work for schools when they can go work in industry for considerably more money? There have been dozens of discussions on here about how bad IT staff get paid across the country, so why do you believe they'd suddenly be able to hire programmers across schools? Just wouldn't happen. You we. That's the point. You said you can create stuff for free. You can download stuff for free. Open source can do it all. Eg. Your FreePBX system only costs £5pm or something like that. Its false accounting. Only later did you alter your comments and start adding costs in, which you brushed off as "oh, but you already pay for those in commercial software" - so what's the point of changing if you have to pay to train staff, pay to develop your own stuff or pay to get support for the stuff you implemented for "free", and go through all that upheaval of migrating to a new system, when you could have continued using what you already were using, and carried on paying the same as always? And through all of that, you still managed to miss the point of all this. You persist with a "one size fits all" open source can do everything, you simply have to pay to train your staff, you simply have to hire staff with those skills, you simply have to wait for children to learn programming in school, idealist way of thinking. Throughout this entire discussion, and on other posts where you've brought up open source solutions, you have consistently ignored the real costs of moving to open source products, and waved them off as inconsequential or "one off" costs that management would accept. You appear unable to accept that Open Source software is not the panacea for all education IT's ills. Remember, change costs money, regardless of what that change is usually. Up front. Many schools and Trusts don't have the funds for an upfront cost, even if it reduces costs long terms. Example - how many schools buy their photocopiers outright, then just pay for the cost per copy and repairs. Would be cheaper than leasing over the long run. Very few do. Because very few can justify that up front cost, and the possibility of the machines not living up to expectations down the road. Same concept applies to software. Especially when needs seem to change so rapidly in education, as different governments come and go and change what schools must do. You could spend all that upfront money setting up an open source solution to something, with the associated time and training etc... only for the govt to scrap the need for it. Whereas with a yearly licensed product, you simply stop paying.

I would suggest that this will not be the case other than in very large MATs possibly @HPlum78. Like that MAT that developed Assembly, ARK. But then, when that software started to gain traction - they sold it to GroupCall. So, your argument seems to be that schools and MATs should stop running their own IT dept and outsource it, but should instead develop their own software, instead of outsourcing it. Are we not just playing musical chairs at this point? What is different about using outsourced IT support vs buying in software developed by companies? A large number of members of this site have had experience of outsourced support. I would hazard that there aren't many who would talk about those experiences positively. Indeed, my last jobs was bringing IT support back in house for a group of 4 schools under the banner of a foundation school, as the outsourced BSF support had been expensive and not the best. Even in my current job, we took over support for the other schools that joined us - because they were paying a lot for, in my view, inadequate support. One school was paying more for external IT support than having a full-time IT Manager and a part time technician - but they only had a tier 1 support for 3 of the days, and tier 2/3 on the other 2. So I'm not sure your argument really holds up on that part.

Why not put in place a custom domain for your G Suite tools? You can have things like mail.yourdomain.sch.uk and drive.yourdomain.sch.uk via Company Profile -> Show More -> Custom URLs. Create CNAMEs pointing at ghs.googlehosted.com. You can have custom URLs for: Mail Calendar Drive Sites Groups for Business When you add them, and you have SSO in place, it will automatically show you the SSO login window. If you don't have SSO, I'm not sure what login it'll show you, but I imagine it'd be the /a/yourdomain version of the logins.

And you work in a school/MAT? In 13 years, I can honestly say that I don't think I have come across anyone paid to do developer work in schools. I've seen lots of technicians and network managers dabble on the side, and then years later when they've left, seen schools have to abandon software due to not having anyone to make changes etc though...

True, in house dev is, on paper, a sunk cost. However, that time you're using developing that in house stuff is time that you could be doing other things. So, it is diverting funds from one thing to another. Never know when that time debt is gonna catch up with you because you spent so much time on development and not enough doing the real job.

Hang on? So its gone from needing to code something or hire someone to code it to being free? I'm confused then. Are you saying the time you spend coding the custom plugins is free? Or that someone you've hired to make those customisations worked for free? Or, what happens in reality - you spend weeks coding the plugins to do what you want, you work back and forth developing what the school want, having to change bits when the school suddenly change their mind, and because it was "free" and you did it yourself, you have to make those changes too. But first, you need someone with programming experience and knowledge, and with our GDPR/security focused organisations these days, someone with programming skills who can create these plugins securely. So, your "I'll do it for free" has a price tag attached. Looking at the 11 schools in our rural area, I can safely say that my team is the only 1 with someone with programming experience on it. That's because they are mostly first schools, a couple of middle schools and 1 secondary. They don't generally hire programmers. We have circled back to my main point, again. Time is not free. Training is not free. Doing things in house is not free. Every school is different. Every IT support team has different demands, and different levels of skill. Using blanket statements saying you can do it in house, you can do it with open source, its easy, its simple, just spend money on training, etc... aren't possible everywhere. Something easy and free for you, will not be for everyone.

You somewhat contradict yourself in that statement. Wordpress may be open source, but it is NOT a system set up out of the box to handle pupil progress tracking etc... Making it do that would require, dun dun dun, either a commercial add on or bespoke coding. And that is something that I will say happens a lot with open source projects. They often *mostly* do what you want, but not quite. Or you can buy a product developed for the exact thing you need to do (eg. Tapestry or Build-A-Profile or whatever). I can just imagine the discussion to get approval. "Hi boss, yes, I'd like to use Wordpress to track children's progress instead of the system everyone uses now and costs us a couple of hundred quid a year to license. No, Wordpress doesn't do any of the things the existing system does. We'd need to hire a developer to write plugins to do it for us. Oh, and we're then going to give that away to everyone else. Why are you laughing?" It just isn't a scenario that the vast majority of school management will ever accept. Great. Get elected to government and change the way schools funding for IT is managed. You can deal with the lawsuits when Capita sues the DfE for destroying their chance to make money through unfair competition.

That is my whole point.

I suspect you are slightly missing what is being said. No-one is saying open source software should never be used, that'd be absurd. We are saying that each tool should be looked at on its own merits, based on needs of the school/Trust, and based on the capabilities of the IT support. It is criticising the "Open Source can do everything, you're wrong if you pay for stuff" attitude that has been exhibited by some users recently, as that simply doesn't take into account larger issues. Here, IT is provided according to needs, budget, and staffing. We have some open source software in use, because it doesn't require lots of work to implement or deploy (Xibo, Inkscape, VLC for a few off the top of my head). However, we moved away from Asterisk and FreePBX a number of years ago due to the high admin costs of keeping it running in our circumstances, the lack of people with the skills to manage it should I have left, and the need to expand to other schools. That was a decision based on the TCO of such a system - and it would be higher than simply running 3CX in a normal VM on our servers etc... Take staffing as a key issue. We advertised for a senior technician recently. The first time we advertised, we had 4 people apply. None of them had experience of working in IT support in an organisation of any size like a Trust, and none of them had any experience of the normal Windows systems we run. We re-advertised and got 2 people apply. Luckily, 1 of them had some great experience and we hired them. Now, that is based on our standard Windows network. Nothing too out of the ordinary. Imagine what our applicants would have been like for technicians with experience of Linux, FreePBX and the like. We'd've had no applicants at all. It is just unfeasible here.

Indeed. I saw someone post a question on the FreePBX forums asking if anyone had tried running it in Azure as they had hit some issues and they were treated with the same attitude I always see in open source forums - that Microsoft are "Micro$oft" and that people there wouldn't do such a thing etc... Helps no-one. Except, that isn't really the case is it? There are tens of thousands of dead open source projects out there, and then more on top which are "maintained" by 1 person who looks at things 2 times a year. Making something "open source" (which, technically, software written in-house is anyway, just not using a public license generally), doesn't mean it will attract anyone to maintain it.

You are painting a wide brush with this statement. It may be possible, but it will require up front investment that many simply do not have. Many are in rural areas where the skills needed to implement open source tech are not freely available. Until that person leaves, and then you have to hire a replacement. Yup, whilst also taking into account current workload and ability to find the time to implement a significant change in how things work. Not quite. For £1000 you spend that time learning something. You then need to spend more time implementing it, and maintaining it. Or, you pay each year and someone else looks after it for you. Great, so now you are paying similar amounts to commercial software for software that, in my experience, is usually less polished and has poorer documentation. Well, no. I'd say the confusing interface is a problem first off. "Endpoint Manager" vs "Phones" in 3CX. So what would be the point of moving to open source software if your staffing costs just go up instead? Not really sure I get the point there. All in all, this post of yours is the thing I'm talking about. It is a very wide-sweeping set of statements that effectively say that open source can do everything and save everyone money, it is simply untrue. There have been projects all over the world where municipal areas, schools, governments have tried to move wholesale and I have consistently seen them shift back a few years later because of the troubles they have. Making a decision on what to use should be based on needs, not based on "its free" or open source. If that tool does the job best, with the resources you have, then great, choose it, but you have to take into account the TCO for all solutions - regardless of if they are free at the point of install. Replacing all our systems we use here, with their open source alternatives would cost us a significant amount of money - both in training for my team, and training of our staff. Lesson plans would need updating across the board. The cost would be huge to us, and the turmoil it would produce would be even larger. And, I suspect we'd also see an increase in problems to deal with too.

I have seen various comments by a few posters recently regarding using Open Source for everything possible, whenever someone has asked for advice about a paid solution (eg. 3CX phone systems), so I thought I'd put a thread up over here to discuss the ideas. Now, those of you who have been around on the site for a while know that I am a big fan of open source software, and have used it a fair amount in my jobs. However, I am also a pragmatist, and a realist when it comes to what will do a job and do it well. So, previously, we ran a FreePBX based phone system on Ubuntu, all put together from scratch (no decent distros doing it all for you back then), including editing config files to sort out gain levels on our analogue lines etc... Worked well for about 8 years. However, we no longer run this system and the reasons are as follows: 1. We are now a MAT and the staffing has gone from 2 people for 1 school to 3 people for 6. 2. We need that reliability that comes with a product that is tested by a company before release, and has support backing it up. 3. The time required for doing things like upgrades, introducing new handset types, etc... far exceeds the few hundred quid we pay for 3CX licensing/maintenance. 4. In the time I have been doing this, the documentation around Asterisk and FreePBX seems to be just as shoddy as it was back then - look at the FreePBX roadmap for example. Created in 2014, lists 2.11, 12, 13, 14 ,15, 16 and PHP 7.X. To someone who just wants their phone system to work, this is useless. Not to mention, the darn thing is now on version 19, so the roadmap isn't even current! 5. Big Red Bus planning. With my old system, I wrote an 80 page user manual for it, with every possible thing documented for someone to take over. It was out of date the first time I did a version upgrade. With a paid solution? My employer could contact 3CX and get paid support for the system, as it is a standard install. I've focused on FreePBX vs 3CX there, but the same argument can happen with lots of tools that we all use. Samba vs Active Directory, OpenOffice vs Office, CUPS vs PaperCut/Windows Printers, etc... Each tool has its disadvantages as well as its advantages. Each user has their own constraints - some may have lots of time to set things up, others may be time restricted. So, instead of saying that paying for a service is a waste of funds, we all need to recognise that every use case differs. Your own may be vastly different to others. Personally, we may end up going back to FreePBX still. But that'll be decided on needs, not purely based on it being free to download. EDIT: Apparently, the current version of FreePBX isn't 19, its 14 but the disc image is labelled 1904... So yeah, not at all confusing.

I have a question - why is this being taken to "SLT"? Why not the DPO, the head or the chair of governors/trustees? They do realise that data breaches can now lead to rather large fines right?

Compare the cost of higher speed internet with the cost of replacing servers and running them. The link becomes a cheaper component of it all we found, We have 1Gbit shared between our schools (which works out around 1500 children). We rarely use more than 200Mbit on it, but the difference in price between 200Mbit and 1Gbit was so small as to make it silly not to go the full speed. However, we are starting to roll out 1:1 Chromebooks shortly, so our concurrent users will go from about 300 usually up to about 600, then adding 300 each year for the next 3 years, so we'll see how it copes!

Just to say 32 SC is a LOT. We've got 60+ extensions, and we rarely have more than 4 simultaneous calls going on. We've got a 16 SC license and about another 30 handsets to add. For 3CX licensing, you don't need a license for every handset.

Minecraft works best with higher clock speed (as most of it runs in a single thread), plenty of RAM (but not too much as this can cause issues too), and a fast disk for it to live on (SSD is pretty much a must IMO).

Finished Expanse S3 recently, but still have that sci-fi itch. So, I'm re-watching Killjoys.

Another aspect as to why this is a big no - when a school signs up for Office 365 or G Suite, it is set up to be domiciled in an EU data-center. It also removes email scanning for personalised advertising. Personal accounts do not have this, and using them would be a very clear breach of the DPA 2018.

We've got 80TB in there now, and pay about £100pm.

Just for the screen (inc wall mount bracket as they come with one), and a 1 year license.

We deploy Inkscape and Paint.Net for our children now, along with the default Paint 3D.

Good shout with GAM. Hadn't heard of that. Installed it and working nicely

How do you go about delegating access? There doesn't seem to be anything like that in the admin panel? Or is it done in the account itself?

How are people who use G Suite dealing with shared mailboxes? Are you using Collaborative Inbox with a Group, per Google's suggested setup? With its completely different interface etc...? Or are you doing something else?