steveg

Largely as the title suggests, we need to replace an aging phone system that is no longer supported. We're moving most stuff to the cloud but will have some server infrastructure on site so looking to host in a VM, to allow some communication internally should our internet connection go down. At the moment I'm leaning towards freepbx and Sangoma phones, but could be swayed away. One feature that is important to us is call parking to hotkeys, which seems trickier on 3cx.

It's not just you! Have had lots of reports with several of the latest releases. Only thing we also did at the same time was change to computers which have integrated AMD graphics, not sure if this has made a difference? Other issues are text randomly re-sizing and files not looking how they did when they were previously saved. Staff are starting to ask for the older version to go back, as it worked more reliably.

You can't: https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403784418321-Can-we-recall-an-email-SMS-or-in-app-message Recalling emails almost never works anyway.

What os are the client computers running? Wasn't ranger stopped being supported quite some time ago? Def install hyper-v role on new server and virtualise all the new servers. Fire up a new DC, should still be able to transfer roles to it by joining to the old domain I would have thought, but I don't know much about Ranger. Hopefully you can then just un-install this from the clients, once they are all gone decommission the old server. If you are planning to use 365 logins, would an alternative plan be to not buy a new server and have a fairly rapid migration to the cloud? Spend the money on A3 licencing instead.

Thanks, that makes sense, think I will go for option 2, most are 1:1 iPads but this makes the most sense.

When my kids were little I could read Stick Man word for word without looking at the book!

We're moving to intune from Airwatch for our iPad management, the main reason being cost. Can anyone point me in the right direction for creating device groups for different trolleys of iPads we have and the best way of getting iPads into these groups? Or do I not need to bother and can I just assign everything to the user, it seems to work in quite a different way to Airwatch. I have an enrollment profile setup and got it pushing out the Company Portal app so a user can enroll. In Airwatch as part of the enrollment they would be added to their device group, which I would then assign apps to with device deployment, I can see in Azure I can create dynamic groups, but not sure what I could then use to identify which group that iPad should go to? Hopefully this sort of makes sense!

I have the same issue with smartboards, but only with computers with AMD graphics, integrated in this case. They are supposed to be releasing new firmware to fix the issues, but as a work around I've found using the display port input doesn't have the problem, our desktop screens have hdmi so we were able to swap it around to make it work.

You can do a live feed into excel from a custom report, would that achieve the same thing? https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008595254-Using-Live-Feeds-to-export-data-out-of-Arbor

We have readers on exits, but also have a green break glass to exit option on fire escapes. Being a primary school children have never pushed it, but I imagine it wouldn't be long before a secondary age pupil did. I'm not sure if these are a requirement or not, all of our doors release with the fire bell and are tested weekly, I guess it comes down to the risk assessment and the question what happens if they don't release?

We're a primary School, we moved almost 3 years ago and haven't looked back. Had some issues with the clubs booking side of it in the first year, but all resolved now. I would say the weakest part of it now is the parent app, it's largely functional but isn't the most user friendly. It's been reliable and fast pretty much the whole time, has dropped our admin teams workload quite considerably as staff just access the info they need themselves because it's much easier. Take time to plan and design assessments exactly how you want them and to understand how it works on Arbor. we didn't design ours quite right and have had to re-do them, but this was only about a days work to get it sorted how we want it. All the way through it's important to manage expectations and take a step back. Rather than trying to re-create exactly what they had in SIMS we ask the question of what they are trying to achieve, as often the SIMS way wasn't the best way and there is a different or better way of doing it in Arbor.

Has anyone got any smart lights in use in a school? We are fitting out a calming / sensory room and these lights look ideal: https://panelhut.co.uk/collections/rgb-panels/products/40w-rgb-bluetooth-600-x-600-ceiling-panel-colour-changing-remote-and-app-controlled But not sure how well they will sit on the school network with the app etc? Planning to have a dedicated mounted ipad in there which could control them, and also be used for music etc so that wouldn't be an issue, but not sure if any issues with having these on the network? The apps usually aren't the best quality.

Whatever one you go for make it is a Laser one, we went from an 8500 lumen dual lamp one to a 7000 lumen laser projector (an Epson) and it is so much better, I'd estimate twice as bright.

Thanks all for the input. I will complete a DPIA before we go ahead so we can asses the risk of analogue vs digital. Am I right in saying that the licence you get gives you a specific frequency assigned to you (and your location) and then the radios you buy are setup to work with this, so in theory no one locally has the same frequency assigned to them? (I know this doesn't make it more secure as anyone can scan all frequencies but should stop others broadcasting and us picking it up by mistake?)

Resurrecting an old thread, but a couple of questions for those that have radios already: Licencing - We have been advised by Onedirect that we need to purchase a licence per radio, I thought this would be for the site? Which is correct? Licenced analogue radios - what is the chance of interference? How many channels etc do you have available? Security isn't a major issue - they will be used to request assistance to a specific area rather than discussing any individuals, but we don't want them to keep going off with other peoples broadcasts, which is the problem with the brief trial we had with unlicensed ones. Digital radios - I assume these add basic encryption / additional channels to further reduce the chance of interference? They are a bit beyond out budget but I will recommend if the benefits are worth the extra costs - around double the price.

Got the donor drive and swapped the pcbs over, windows wants to initialise the disk (which I doubt will work). I haven't done this as I imagine it will wipe the data off the drive, think I might have to give up on this one!

Drive is dated 2007. Managed to find one with same model and part number on ebay so will give that a go, more just because I don't want it to beat me than anything else now!

I think it's a Hitachi drive (it's at home so can't check) out of an old toshiba tecra M9. I'll have to have a look on ebay and see if I can find the same one, it's pretty old now so unlikely.

I'm pretty sure it's just not possible (would make it a bit pointless) but is there any way to bypass the ata password on a hard disk? The old sort where you set the hard disk password in the bios? Looks like there used to be tools for getting around it but looks like no one makes them anymore, either because they didn't work or no one uses that sort of password anymore and just uses bitlocker etc. The data isn't that important, I'd just like to see what was on there!

I'm currently re-configuring our ipads here for this reason. 1:1 iPads the children authenticate to the wireless with their own account. The shared iPads I have made new accounts for this purpose - For example IpadG01, IpadG02 etc, which is infinitely more useful than smoothwall telling me the ip address of the ipad like we had before. Now each trolley will have a log book on it, and every pupil in a class with have an iPad number assigned, so they know when their class uses the iPads they will always use number 6 for example. This combined with the record of which class has the trolley when should be enough for us, but time will tell. Normally with the email alerts we can respond to them in minutes and they are still on the same iPad. Any system for logging on with iPads has never gone well with our youngest children.

We're mostly using the iPads lower down in a primary setting, so trying to avoid too much signing in etc, while still complying with KCSIE guidance. Hopefully being able to identify the exact iPad, and then a record of who had it at the time will get us most of the way there.

All our staff ipads authenticate to the wireless using radius with their network username and password. This means on smoothwall they are identified as themselves (via Radius Accounting). At the moment all pupil ipads are on a WPA3 network with a proxy set to connect to smoothwall with our infant filter list applied. This works fine, but logs it against the ip address of the ipad, which takes a fair while to track it back to the device. I want to change the pupil ipads to the same wifi network as staff (it's a flat network at the moment anyway, so just a different way of connecting to it)in 2 ways: 1:1 devices will connect using their own username and password. Shared devices - I will create a user account for each ipad, e.g IpadA01, IpadA02 and sign it in with this. Each child will always use the same ipad number and teachers will record when their class has the ipads. Am I missing anything obvious here? Long term when we vlan the network (it's grown a lot over the last few years) I should be able to use this to dynamically assign vlans based on their user groups.

So we can either password sync to Google and use the Google login and not require a full email, or use the Azure AD login and benefit from things like conditional access that we pay for, but require a full email?

We use sign in app, which is great for taking a register for visitors, has worked flawlessly on the last 3 fire drills. I believe it does also support registers for pupils, but we haven't used this yet. All our classes are required to keep an up to date number of how many children are present, normally written on a whiteboard by the door, they keep this up to date throughout the day. It's always easy for them to identify any missing children. We normally gather up 4 or 5 children every fire drill and they have always identified them all. Last time I spoke to a fireman they said they would ignore if we say the building is clear and check it anyway, which does make sense.

Does that require them to enter their full email as a username?