msi_school

This reminds me of my first job, where we used to spend an hour on a Friday afternoon looking at the most popular site in the web filter and blocking any that where inappropriate.

Apparently their auto attendant is saying they are aware of the issue and working on it.

I don't understand the process behind pouches, I assume the rule is that if a phone is seen it is confiscated, isn't that the rule anyway?

Schools have been trying to model self control with mobiles for 20+ years maybe we should trust the staff with the experience in the field to try a new approach, I know I appreciate it when they let me do so in my field.

Keep good records of parents requests to be removed from the mailing list, as they will invariably complain about missed messages once they are off the list.

At some point you have to trust staff to be professional, I would explain the filtering to this member of staff and your boss and then recommend its ok, you might even get new agent based filtering out of it. The only person who's safe guarding is reduced is the user and they have been warned of the issues unfiltered at school would be a different issue for me, they are using it away from the students in their home environment.

isn't that a win?

We bitlocker all our user devices, there is no good reason not to. I get my data encrypted at rest and whilst it can be argued how useful this is, at the very least it ticks the box for the auditors. There are some potential weaknesses with it as discussed above but there are potential weaknesses with any thing in IT. It takes a couple of seconds to setup and has no measurable impact on the end user as long as you keep a copy of the recover keys it's painless. As I said why not bitlocker?

Could be, but pulling lots of new network to your end points is a drag, it might be worth getting them tested first.

Have you looked at the DFE guidelines these are quite good and give you a back up when defending your decisions I was going to recommend single mode fibre, although as the DFE guidelines above recommend a minimum of OM4 you can have problems explaining that OS2 is better. I would not replace the Cat5e unless it is causing an issue, it can run 10Gbps up to 45m and 1Gbps for 100m per the spec so for end user devices this should be plenty for the next few years. I would strongly recommend that you get a data cabling company to do the install not an electrician and make sure you get a full test report on the install to British Standards 50173.

Microsoft have been threating for years to stop office from working on LTSC

I have used the Community version with a number of different organisations and I cant see any down side for a school, the only thing I can see missing is the cloud storage but as @dhicks says there are ways round this.

Why pay to update the software they know most of their markers are going to shout and scream until we make it work?

This is caused by the documents folder being a special folder and the desktop.ini forces explorer to display it as Documents rather than its filename, there are two options I have found to resolve this: 1 Place the Documents folder one layer deep in the users home drive so they have a home fold which contains their documents folder, this is simple for the IT team but can confuse the users and requires changes to an existing set up. 2 Set the permissions on the desktop.ini files to deny for the Teachers/Administrators who want to navigate to these folders this prevents explorer from forcing the display name change, this is easier for the users but requires the administrator to change the permissions on all theses files, I believe I used a icacls command in a logon script when I had to do this.

I did this with a two week timetable a couple of years ago and it was very small I think a credit card is about 10% the size of an A4 page. so a lot of people could not read it but I know that ours is not to reason why. I could not work out how to get them to print via the badge printing software so we just exported the timetables from SIMS and printed them using the card printer as a normal printer. We ended up doing the ID cards on a mifare and the timetable on a separate basic card before putting them in holders and distributing them because I did not trust myself to get the printing and the cards in the same order it also turned out to be easier for students with existing ID badges.

I tried using Gemini and Chat GTP to summarise several pages of a bullet pointed timeline to one page for circulation to the SLT and they both put actions in the wrong month. I then tested them with some general knowledge question such as who is England most capped football player and which teams have won the Rugby world cup and they got the answers wrong. Since then I have used them for drafting emails but I don't trust them to do anything more

I have always seen the flv test, it opens VLC on our devices.

I used Extreme in a prep school about seven years ago so my experience may not be very relevant. I found the kit to be solid and the CLI to be easier than Aruba, it was pretty much set and forget. we did not use XIQ so I cant comment but I have heard its good. Plus the Purple switches look good in the cab.

Not the OP but I would guess they are using a function button on the keyboard

I used Signin app with Paxton cards, once it was set up it was a doddle but, I could not get it to import the card numbers from Paxton and in the end had to get staff to register their cards on first use like on papercut.

@Koldov I assume you are aware of the Analog phone switch off in 2025? https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-transition-from-analogue-to-digital-landlines

The above answers look very useful, personally I would look at getting your data in the cloud and at least removing local storage. On a less technical angle, do you have a plan for, supply teachers, staff forgetting their Laptop, forgetting their charger and new staff wanting a device before the old staff leave? I would also be aware that if any desktops are left in classrooms, this will throw any staff who use the room with a laptop.

PDF 24 is often a useful tool for PDFs as is Sedja

1 Shilling and 2 shillings coins only went out of circulation because the new five and ten pence pieces where introduced

Never tell them the time, it stops knee jerk that's too short reactions.