craigw

If the users are in 1 OU and the OU contains only leavers then in Exchange Mgt Console -just filter Mailboxes based on OU (or even easier - sort by OU column) and the select all or shift select, right click, properties and change Attribute. If the OU contains other users as well - then if working from a known list of usernames - yes powershell is easier. 1 other method we have used; as part of the leaving process we change 1 of the custom attributes of the user to "leaver" and then again in Exchg Mgt console you can create a filter and get only those mail boxes with CustomAttributeX = leaver and again select all and edit properties.

Hi there Film studies continues to grow in the school and we are now at a point where we are beyond having students edit video projects locally on the iMacs. We need a solution that will allow video to be stored centrally and ideally have students from multiple machines edit different scenes in a project etc. I know this will not be cheap - but any advice on what other school may be doing? Obviously speed is the issue. A direct connected Thunderbolt Raid systems such as the ones from Pegasus are great, but looking for something that will allow multiple student access as the same time from a few machines is the holy grail. Worst case we could break it down and have 6 groups of 4 workstations working from their own central repository maybe? Any one got something up and running? Cheers Wally

We are rolling out the OneNote Class Notebook App in Office 365 and are seeing issues when trying to A) Create a new notebook B) get notebook Links In summary we can log onto Classnotebook site but not do anything with the notebooks. Teachers are able to sign in no issues - but Clicking on get notebook links for example - leads to the infamous - Oops something went wrong - please refresh the page. This just tries again and gives the same error. Frustrating thing is it not consistent. Same teacher on 2 different machines from same PC image - 1 works - 1 doesn't. Reference Number tends to change each time - but 1 example is 9cacf5e5-47a2-4295-917e-919de7da7c9b Things I have tested: IE 11 and Chrome - same error. Teacher has full control of SharePoint Site One Note App installed into site is latest version Has anyone got any idea where to troubleshoot or seen anything similar? Cheers Craig

Anyone seeing or hearing of issues with iOS8.4 and Family sharing of Apps breaking. We are starting to get calls from students saying that under 8.4 - previously shared Apps are no longer shared and must be bought from the Apps store. Starting to dig, but certainly seems like something has gone awry. Wally

Here is the setup: Office 365 setup but not Exchange Online. At present all the Exchange infrastructure is on prem - mx records etc all point to local. Everything works fine except.. When invitations are sent from services such as sharing a Onenote Class Notebook - the following is happening. Sign is as [email protected] - invite user [email protected] Greg gets an invite from Joe - but as Greg and Joe are on different domains - invite actually comes from an MS email address on behalf of Joe and works fine. When Joe invites another internal user - [email protected] - Office 365 sends the email as [email protected] because it sees Alice and Joe on the same domain (and I assume) assumes that Exchange is either online or hybrid at a minimum. On prem exchange see the email FROM [email protected] and says "no way did that originate from me" and rejects as spoofed message - as it should! So - 1 solution is to add the Exchange Office 365 IP list of 40 or so IP's and subnets to the Allowed IP list on the Exchange on prem boxes. This should work - but will obviously whitelist the WHOLE office 365 system to mail relay through the on prem. Not ideal. Anyone else got this setup and found a way to get these invites working. Wally

Can the problem iPad reach any part of the network at all - or just not the proxy? What wireless network are you using? Do you use any type of firewall or access control lists on the wireless controllers? Do you push SSL certs for any reason? The two things I have seen on our network is a student not being in the correct group for profiling so that when they connect to the network - they may well connect but they are then denied access by the ACL's on the wireless controller (so they never reach the proxy). Secondly - we have seen strange ones where the time and date on the iPad was incorrect and this messed up the SSL certs and even though a student was in the correct groups and had the correct IP they couldn't get out. Set the time correctly and bingo - student had access again. It certainly is a strange one - let us know if you get it sorted. Wally

Will hopefully do a POC with Sonicwall in a few weeks to test their authentication model. One of the things they did mention that was different was how they handled users multiple AD groups. Our current Bluecoat proxy works on standard firewall top down first match scenarios. Eg a student in two groups - All Students and All Sixth Form Students - if we put the rule for all Sixth Form Students - allow Facebook - higher in the list than the All Students block Facebook - then Sixth form kids will be allowed Facebook. Sonicwall guys said this was not how they worked and that groups had no priority - only individual users in a policy override group membership. So to allow sixth formers to access facebook we would have to list them individually in the allow rule rather than by group. Would be interested if anyone can confirm this or otherwise? As an aside...We had Sophos in and were quite impressed until they cautioned us of scenarios with shared computer access...eg libraries - in that their AD authentication model was to cache the credentials of the user against the IP for 15 minutes in their tables. When pushed on this they admitted that this would mean when one student logged off and the next logged on - the database and reports would show the previous students ID. Pushed further it was not just reporting but actual access rights...so that if a teacher logged off and then a student logged on - they would get the teachers access. Obviously in a work environment with 1 to 1 computer access this probably not an issue...but for us it was an instant deal breaker. So at present we are "talking" to Sonicwall / iBoss / Websense. Cheers Wally

@Roberto - Can you enlighten on that some more? We are talking to Dell at the moment and they have told us that their AD integration is based on agents running on workstations around the campus in each vlan that handle the authentication requests - I am not trying to prejudge, but it seems an unusual way of doing things. Is this what you are referring to and if so - what is the real life experience of using it? Cheers Wally

@BKGarry Have you managed to get your OU's syncing? Using GADS and selecting the org units under the general settings on the main page - and all our org units synced up accordingly - no need to create anything manually. With the launch pad you talk of - not really - but if the users sign into drive or any google app - then up in the right hand corner are 9 little squares - click on that and it drops down the box to pick from all the other apps.. we just find that as users do not have gmail - the most common link they use is drive.google.com as their starting point.

This is long overdue - but thanks - big thanks!! I now have this working from a logon script that calls the bginfo program which reads from a text file on the network. The only thing I had to do to make this stable was make sure bginfo.exe was called from the local machines - but deployed this with GPO and then no issues. On logon the desktop now shows the house points as per the text file which the teacher manages!! Also added in the machine name at the top of the list (we already rename my computer to the machine name but some users find this hard to read...) so this has helped when remote supporting staff.. All round - excellent little utility.. Cheers Wally

I would pay in an instant...the time spent managing it would be offset easily. We tried pushing the teacher videos into Clickview as this is a great platform for searching and sharing the content - but they have a very finicky(..horrible) video importer. As most of the cameras nowadays record in other formats we then have to convert to a codec that clickview is happy with first and then import again - all becomes a bit too hard for little gain. Thanks for other suggestions - Mediadrop looks interesting (even as a clickview alternative)- I guess the main problem is that for teachers the easiest thing is still to attach a USB cable to their camera or iPhone, Click next when the video / photo wizard runs and bang, all the photos are on the network for easy use. I can certainly see why they do it...

Have considered the scheduled task option - in fact this is what we do with the jpg problem using the excellent PhotoResize utility - but jpgs are less risky as there is the one file format. The problem we have with video is the multitude of file formats (mpeg, avi, mts, mov, mkv, mp4 etc etc )- often with the same extension but using different codecs. Doing this unattended could end up with some dodgy results. Maybe worth a shot though...

Hi there - looking to see if any one has any novel ideas on how they are handling the large amounts of video we are starting to see fill up our network shares. Firstly - I know storage is cheap and throwing more storage at the problem will make it go away for a while...but when you consider backups and long term storage then this is not really my ideal solution. Anyway - the problem we had 5 years ago with cameras taking larger and larger photos "by default" resulting in jpg files going from 128Kb to 8-10Mb per photo is know moved onto video. Every teacher seems to have an digital camera nowadays and "video evidence" is all the rage. The problem is the default file format on these cameras is HUGE. The worst culprit seems to be MTS video files - great quality along with huge file size. One folder I just found has a typical 4 minute video at 600Mb. I just ran this through the Anyvideo Converter with iPad MP4 as the output format and the result 27Mb....and for what they want to use it for - the quality is perfectly acceptable. Now - I have better things to do with my time - as do the teachers - than to reformat videos - but I can't see this as sustainable. I am thinking of setting a Media server that is not backed up - but getting staff to put media in one spot and lesson plans etc in another seems counter productive. Pumping all this video up to the cloud also seems a bit pointless - so any other ideas? Wally

Hi there We do exactly that but arrived at it from the other end. We have Exchange on prem and implemented GAFE without Gmail. Setup GAD and the accounts sycn each morning. Recently implemented password sync as well and it runs without any issues at all. Students and teachers make good use of GAFE and I have not seen any issues where not having a gmail account has limited the use of GAFE.(Would be keen to hear if anyone has another view). We have just implement Office 365 but for the moment are keeping Exchange on prem. Given the way we work (multi user desktops - not one to one laptops), the number of admin users etc who manage multiple mailboxes, and the familiarity with Outlook - I cannot find a business case to A) move to Gmail B) move Exchange to the cloud. The 1 reason I keep revisiting it though is the incredible amount of storage for email that I can't compete with on prem - but other than that I don't see a business case. So just this week we have AAD Sync and password sync now running for Office 365 as well which will mean the kids and staff get OneDrive - Office Web Apps - Writes Access to the iPad Office apps and most importantly Student Advantage for free (as we are licenced for Office via EES) which means they can download and install Office on up to 5 machines. Cheers Wally

Whilst this is not a multi Wan Router as such - Check out Peplink range of load balancers - Compare the Peplink Balance family. We have multiple leased lines that first come into the standard Cisco routers (provided as part of our agreement with ISP) and then into the Peplink load balancer. Then based on rules we can route traffic out different lines bases on ports or source IP etc. For example all our wired traffic and email goes out one line and then all our wireless traffic out another. The load balancer then provides redundancy in case one of the line is down and will auto route to the other. We looked at other brands and these were quite cost competitive. Wally