msi_school

I don't want my or my business manager email address public because it presents a surface area for phishing attacks, however generic accounts such as we use for capita are hardly obscure most schools have bursar@ or finance@. Username@ email address whilst private are not sensitive and in a lot of cases are already public knowledge. Using the ICO self Assessment form https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/report-a-breach/pdb-assessment/y I would say that this would not even reportable except for the amount of email addresses released and is not worthy of a fine. On the other hand if this is displaying a pattern of poor data security and one of a number of data breaches then that is a different matter although I don't know if the ICO is able to take this into account.

Have you updated to iOS 13 because it is causing all sorts of certificate fun

I fully agree with @AButters. I have found that it is important to train the teachers as much as the pupils about using individual accounts, and at some point someone is going to have to bite the bullet and teach passwords. Is it not better to do this in the low key stages where we are teaching all the other building blocks and where failure is less critical. When I worked in a prep school we used the same username for the whole school career initial, surname, year of entry which was printed in each pupil's diary or on a card for EYFS. The password policy changed by key stage, EYFS on simple pass word for the whole group usually the group name ie PP1S, KS1 an eight letter simple password in the pupil diary such as bigboots, KS2 similar password but not written down and KS3 a Dinopass password such as jollynose49. at each stage the teachers knew the passwords and the pupils could not change them. This did cause problems especially with a family with a greek surname so we had to shorten it from Papadopoulos to Papa after a great deal of negotiation with the parents and with teachers mainly unhappy with the system changing from one account for the whole student body resolved in some way by keeping password lists in the class rooms and finally by the Head telling them to sit down.

This link is broken, I used https://www.stowevalleymat.com/vacancies to see the vacancies page but I can find a direct link.

I enjoyed the book am trying to take on board the three ways, but the most important part of the whole process was when the CEO bought into IT needing to have a seat at the table and not just have tasks thrown at it. Once management realise that IT are a pivotal part of the organisation things will improve, this will be the case with the agile devops process championed in the book or a waterfall process which the organisation in the book replaces. I have just bought Project Unicorn and plan to read it this weekend.

You can set it on on per machine basis to allow circulate without login, this does require you to trust the users

I have used both Impero, scheduled tasks and BIOS wake up settings, Impero is easier to manage because it has a nice visual display of startup and shutdown times. Scheduled tasks are more reliable and BIOS settings are more reliable but require more work.

It is risk assessed, we do the ceiling mounted projectors because they will probably never be inspected again, we would not do the mobile projector beyond a visual for a year. The theatre test there lanterns between every show because the pupils rig some of these and can be expected to touch them while in use. There is no hard and fast rule for the kit but there is quite a thick file of risk assessments covering the rationale for the first inspection and the interval between inspections.

We use Mytutor but the pupils use it at home, as far as I am aware there is no access from school.

The frequency of a PAT and what is tested are all decided by your risk assessments, for example I test a ceiling mounted projector before install and only again if it is taken down however, I test an identical mobile projector every year. Installed IT kit such as Servers, UPSs and Switches are tested before install and then visually inspected each year. We have assessed that as they are installed in fixed locked cabinets in locked rooms and moved the risk of them being damaged is far less than the business risk of extended downtime windows.

I used to have my machines turn off at the end of the day and then come on for an hour in the middle of night for updates and shut down and then turn back on in time for the beginning of the school day. I actually found this to be better than staying on 24/7 because the two reboots finished the updates rather than the update not always doing a restart and then requesting one later.

We spoke to several MIS suppliers and they all discussed a buy out of the SIMS contract

I am with @mhaddock there comes a time when you have to let these devices slip quietly into the recycling bin.

His experience must be dangerously out of date. Noone in IT is going to recommend 19" monitors over 21-ish" monitors every study shows larger monitors are better, they allow higher productivity, promote better ergonomics and improve staff morale for a price difference of less than £5 I have just looked at Insight Uk (other box shifters are available) there cheapest 19" is 1600x900 and £48.99 vs the cheapest 21.5" is 1920x1080 and £54.99. If I was in position and I could not win with this information I would hold out for a phased replacement over a couple of years.

Thanks, I will have a look at this

Thank you @ShellfishClive that is a pain but atleast I know.

Hi We are looking to start using Google classroom across the school, with our Office 365 we use the Seamless Single Sign-On process to make life a little simpler. I have looked at the G Suite SSO options and as i understand the documentation it does not do the same thing, using a local logon to authenticate to the cloud. Could anyone advise if I am correct or am I reading the documents wrong? Thanks Mike

Your site appears to be down, is this the "EduGeek Effect"?

Same here we get them to sign our policies and they are then they have the same access as a normal member of staff. I have worked in places where they are locked down to less access but it never works because the teaching staff assume that the PGCEs (other teaching qualifications are available) have the same access as them.

I try to keep my VMS "single purpose" for ease of management. Having had issues in the past with system disks running out of space I always provision a fixed C drive and then a separate fixed "data" for the application. I realise that the separate disks are not necessary but I don't believe that it causes any harm. I try to only use fixed disks on production servers because it makes allocating space on the SAN easier.

Hi We currently send an email every day to the staff with attachments as a bulletin, this contain all the usual day to day fluff yesterday's had these continents: 1. Debate Club Years 7-10 2. Core CPD 3. Student Updates 4. CPD Next Week 5. Sims Server Updates – Friday Reminder! 6. Career Talks – Hospitality/Catering 7. Weekly Staff Bulletin Each item is a paragraph or two on the subject. These emails are great on the day but they are not very searchable, does anyone have a good way of archiving these in a searchable format? Thanks Mike

Just put the Purchase Order in for the cashless catering server upgrade this should be done next week and I am still working on some DT machines for CAM but I will just remove the network drivers if it come to it by Christmas

We allow read only USB and block write and execute. As @jthompson said staff write to USB infrequently the only problem I have come across is that you can't delete from a USB which tends to throw the user.

I can feel myself making a classic mistake here but apparently there are no stupid questions. How does using Outlook as a client for Gmail cause any problems, surely it is just an IMAP connection?

I did this many years ago to a BBC Micro, the VDG was on the same desk as the Micro and the screen just went black and the Micro never came back. I had never thought about this but with my NM head on I dread to think what it cost to replace the computer.