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Ormiston Horizon Academy are looking to appoint a Lead IT Technican to join the team. The closing date is midnight on Monday 23 April 2024. The post holder be the senior IT team member on site for resolution of business-as-usual issues, responsible for using available resources to ensure IT service levels and standards are maintained in the academy. For further details, or to apply, please visit our advertisement at the link below; https://mynewterm.com/jobs/136680/EDV-2024-OHA-81175

Ormiston SWB Academy are looking to appoint a Lead ICT Technician to deliver outstanding provision to our students. You need to be determined to drive up standards, have a positive approach and be committed to making a difference. In return you will get to work in an innovative and supportive Academy that offers; Supportive and visible Senior Leadership Team Staff well-being initiatives Fantastic facilities and resources in our purpose built £25 million Academy Superb pastoral support Centralised detentions Incredibly friendly and supportive environment Staff benefit schemes For further details, or to apply, please visit our advertisement at the link below; https://www.tes.com/jobs/vacancy/-1917527?preview=1

For various reasons I would rather not dwell on; I find myself in a position that the system I've inherited effectively manages 3 different schools and I now need to look at migrating 2 of them into a single domain each. So in effect our domain has School A, B and C but when I'm done I need 3 domains; the original with School A and two new ones with B in the second and C in the third. B and C are currently their own Organisational Units and have their own HyperV server running a DC, File Server, Print Server and MIS Server. This is further complicated in that we have VPNs to said schools and manage them using SCCM for support and deployment. But I'll cross that bridge once the bulk of the work is done. Just hoping to get some advice as this won't be happening until likely the summer. My plan for now is to create a new virtual server at school B and C and install AD and create their own Domain. Then to use something like ADMT to migrate their users and get things like DNS, DHCP, Group Policy and whatnot in a similar state. Once that's set up I plan to get their 365 tenancy set up and then just export PSTs from our existing Exchange 2010 and import them to each user (you're only talking circa 40 staff at each school - students aren't a major issue). So, so far, I think that should work. However the file server is a bit more complicated because of permissions. I can leave the current domain and join their new one but then I guess I'm going to have to go through and reconfigure the permissions. I'll be able to script some of it based on the filename (for documents in particular) but I'm wondering if there's not a better way. Would it be worthwhile to create a new server and just attach the VHDX files to said server rather than leaving and rejoining (and just do fresh permissions). Has anyone else been through anything similar or can think of any major blockages that could impede the above? Or even a better approach to tackling it other than 'start fresh' and let them deal with it?

I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up moving to an annual model too but here's hoping not. Would free up a good few thousand for us which these days is a good chunk of our budget.

Aren't the Chrome Management Licenses one off costs too rather than annual (perpetual for a device)? And from when I last bought some I'm sure they were a good bit cheaper than the £26 odd the Cloudready Bundle licences were.

Yeah you're preaching to the choir here. I'd love to move onto something more modern, but I'm afraid that's a project for another day especially in light of the current situation. I would LOVE to have the time free to do a migration but as it is I lack the manpower and time to do what needs to be done already. If I could just get a solution to this for now that takes that off my back atleast but, from everything I'm seeing online, I'm not going to. Got tickets in with Capita too but from my experience with them I'm also less than optimistic.

Whilst I agree with your sentiment (and indeed voiced the same thing to members of SLT here) that doesn't really help in the here and now. Long term it's definitely worth looking at though I agree.

Yeah, I hadn't had any involvment in that process as been caught up with Covid prep so the first I heard of it was after the decision was made to purchase. I honestly don't understand a lot of the decisions that seem to have gone into Teacher App particularly with the management and deployment sides. Just seems like an incomplete piece of software. Hopefully someone on here has deployed the client to Teacher machines successfully in the same kind of setting but I shan't hold my breath.

So we've recently been subscribed to SIMs Teacher App. Had a pain figuring out deployment and it's still less than ideal and I'm wondering how others have gone about it. The install was only finished today and I've been doing some testing and am encountering an issue that I’m hoping isn’t as designed. Basically our staff move around a LOT. We have had a teacher sign into a machine, download the app, authorise the device and sign in fine. Great. Now I log off that and log on as the next teacher. I have to go through the WHOLE process again including ‘authorising’ the device with a NEW code! As Staff are likely to use several machines a day that is really not something we can expect them to do especially when you consider there are close to 80 teacher desktops on site. Can anyone confirm if this is how it’s designed and that the store app has to be downloaded and SIMS teacher authorised per user, per machine. E.g. if 7 users use one machine we would need 7 lots of authorisation codes per machine? I appreciate we won't have this issue when they use home devices but SLT would like Staff to have access to the Teacher App on their classroom PCs as well as the usual SIMs client. On a completely different note; the management console is missing so many key features. No way to download all authorisation codes for devices other than copy and paste, no way to import all devices on mass, etc. As I mentioned we have about 80 Teacher PCs (and a good amount of Office PCs) so if we ended up having to use multiple authorisation codes per device we could end up with someone having to click 'add' almost one thousand times! Am I missing something here?

Ormiston Shelfield Community Academy is an oversubscribed academy with over 1300 students on roll at Key Stages 3-5. The academy is looking to appoint a Senior ICT Technician with the experience, vision and drive to make a significant contribution to ICT across the academy. Being very hands on, you will join our ICT Support Team and help in shaping our ICT services and infrastructure to meet the changing needs of staff, students and parents. Working alongside the ICT Services Manager you will bring your experience to oversee the maintenance of the academy’s client devices and associated services to a high standard across the site, including troubleshooting and diagnosing faults. You will play a key role in the day to day running of the academy’s ICT Infrastructure and its impact on Teaching and Learning and also aiding with the support of the ICT provisions provided to local primary schools under an SLA. The ideal candidate will: • Be a positive, energetic and aspirational individual • Have excellent communication and personable skills • Have experience of working within education • Have a full driving licence and own transport • Have a proven successful track record of ICT troubleshooting with appropriate qualifications • Have some experience with the following services; Windows Server 2008 – 2016, Active Directory/Group Policy, SCCM 2012 and Microsoft HyperV Please contact Mr Killian at [email protected] if you would like to arrange a visit or have questions regarding the role. The support staff application form is available on our website and should be returned to [email protected]. The closing date for applications is 12:00 on Friday 31 July 2020 with interviews scheduled for Wednesday 5 August 2020. https://www.scacademy.co.uk/page/?title=Vacancies&pid=200 Job Description and Person Specification available here - Senior ICT Technician- Advert OSCA106.pdf Senior ICT Technician JD and PS.pdf

Yeah, I ended up just doing a loopback policy so that when students log on to these machines it redirects their documents to the Local HDD. They can still access networked docs via a drive mapping and they are aware anything they save locally is NOT backed up. I got the teacher to configure the software on his profile too and extracted the settings from his appdata and then scripted each user to download and import that snapshot of his appdata into their own when they log in. So all the software, channels, etc. are configured for them automatically. Has been working well enough.

Just a bump in case this was missed. Anyone able to help?

One of the Primary Schools I support has a majority of Promethean panels across the school however they still have 2 rooms with the ancient RM Classboards. Due to a rebuild after computer failures we need the Interwrite software however the company has since been taken over by TurningTechnologies and they don't offer the older download. Does anyone have an MSI of InterWrite they would care to share please?

How are people running this on shared Teacher machines? My worry would be allowing a 'sync' would quickly fill the drives. Can it be restricted for redirection only? That would be handy.

Anybody perhaps have some thoughts on using some kind of loopback policy to prevent profile redirection on select machines? Thinking maybe the solution lies there somewhere but will have a proper sit down and look next week.

We've recently replaced a bunch of dying Macs with Windows 10 PCs running Cubase 9.5 Elements and I'm just looking for some advice on getting them set up to work for our users. I know Cubase recommends NOT using roaming profiles (our students are mandatory profiles but same applies) however that isn't really feasible in our environment but I'm happy to do what I can on the music machines to allow for this. I also know Cubase is not setup well for networks but it's the only thing our department could afford unfortunately. So it is what it is and I'm left trying to get it all up and running. I've gotten the software licensed and installed fine and running well as a local user but as soon as a Staff member tries it logged in they experience delays and errors (because of the roaming nature of their profiles). I've seen a few threads on here around older versions and scripting reg key edits to disable appdata relocation for particular machines so perhaps this is something I'll do more research in. Otherwise can anyone share their setup based on experience of the same or similar issues?

I've used DPM 2012 and 2016 and, unfortunately, it's never been trouble free or reliable. Not really what you want from a backup solution however sometimes needs must. I encountered quite a few different issues and for some weird reason doing this fixed a few. No idea if it will fix yours but worth a try; Create a Folder called 'DO NOT DELETE' at the root of each drive and in the protection group configure that folder as an exemption to the backup. I have absolutely no idea why that ever worked but it's something I came across when researching one of 'many' errors and it resolved quite a bunch. Just had a quick Google and seen this too but I'm assuming you've already had a search and would likely have said if this resolved. Troubleshooting error: (ID 112 Details: Cannot create a file when that file already exists (0x800700B7)) – Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 As an aside; we've now moved on to Veeam Backup and Replication Essentials which, whilst it isn't free, is a far superior product in my limited experience with it.

I'd take ownership of the folder and be sure to replace all child properties with that ownership too, then give yourself full permission and try again. Failing that I find Unlocker works wonders though can sometimes require the files be removed on reboot if they're really locked down.

Thanks for that Warwick. We're still Windows 7 here but will go the Powershell route too as we soon plan to go into Windows 10. As an aside I've modified the script slightly to only delete profiles that haven't been used in 'x' amount of days (to avoid Staff profiles deleting daily). Wanted to share on here should anyone else want to do something similar. $profiles = $null $profiles = Get-WMIObject -class Win32_UserProfile | Where {((!$_.Special) -and ` ($_.LocalPath -ne "C:\Users\Administrator") -and ` ($_.LocalPath -ne "C:\Users\UpdatusUser") -and ` ($_.LocalPath -ne "C:\Users\LocalAccountName") -and ` ($_.LocalPath -ne "C:\Users\Administrator.domain") -and ` ($_.LocalPath -ne "C:\Users\prtg"))} $timespan = new-timespan -days 7 -hours 0 -minutes 0 if ($profiles -ne $null) { foreach ($user in $profiles) { $last_active = [Management.ManagementDateTimeConverter]::ToDateTime($user.LastUseTime) if(((get-date) - $last_active) -gt $timespan) { $user | Remove-WmiObject } } } There may be neater ways to do this but seems to work well enough in any case. --- EDIT --- Looks like it doesn't run so well on Windows 10. Works fine on Windows 7 and Server 2016 so will need to do some digging.

Each to his own but I'd hardly call that a 'Rule'. If that's what works for you then great. Myself, I've had to deploy a few exe's for software that have very few switches or require configuration that isn't easy to do post install on mass. Repackaging has been invaluable on both occasions. And for that; we use EMCO.

We use EMCO here to good effect. Not free but works a treat. https://emcosoftware.com/msi-package-builder I've also played with WinINSTALL LE in the past but that is no longer free anyway. - - - Updated - - - I should clarify we then use SCCM to delpoy the MSI or Group Policy at a last resort.

That sounds like fun! haha It is amazing how quickly they can get a bit unweildy, I'm setting some time aside in the Summer to go through them and make them a bit more logical in their processing. As we have a number of feeder schools use our Internet we have a mix of policies hitting various groups at various points and it can get a little confusing sometimes. Need to plan it all out logically and start again I think.

Not sure if Smoothwall has changed but we literally introduced a couple months back and this is incorrect (atleast at it's current update). The web filter applies top down, so in your case, assuming those categories were in the same positions and I allowed porn in the Global Allow List then it would work for everyone. Typically Smoothwall puts a few blocks right at the top (for things like hacking, virus, etc.) as an immutable block but if you were so inclined you could move that policy further down the processing order. As soon as it hits a rule that applies to a particular URL it stops and actions it. I believe there may be an option to 'continue processing' but may have that confused with something else.

Sorry to have hijacked your thread for a moment there newpersn. As I've alluded too we're in a similiar position and we're using a computer with a JBOD chassis for storage and Veeam Backup Essentials Enterprise to back up our whole cluster. It's not in place yet so don't have any further advice to offer other than everything I hear about Veeam comes highly recommended. We have a new SAN we're implementing too that offers snapshots and replays so have another form of retention there. The only part we're missing is offsite which I think I'm going to try the CloudBerry/Google Drive route Primus has highlighted.

Thanks for that Primus. And yeah; I appreciate it's fully a disaster recovery solution only (as opposed to often used backups) but that's the kind of thing I'm looking for. With our new SAN and Veeam we're pretty much covered for both long and short term backups but no real protection for Disaster Recovery. Never heard of CloudBerry, will do some digging on that, is that free too?