talksr

Yes I understand schools with SIMS seem to have a function for this. I understand that the school will be moving from ScholarPack to Abor, so I wonder if the Abor solution may have something. I will look into the mailmerge suggestion, thanks for that. Do you think this would be something that staff in the classroom or office would be able to easily do? I have never done one myself before, so had not thooght about that!

Hello, Every year, we seem to have issues with staff being able to write reports. The school wish for staff to fill in a template document with all of the details for each pupil: Name, grades etc and then some text boxes where staff are able to enter in specific info about the pupil in question. The reason for this is that every report looks identical, has the same number of pages etc. In the past this has been done in a locked Word Document and also a PDF however staff have reported issues when opening on certain devices such as Chromebooks as well as issues whereby the text they insert into the text boxes is not highlighted red if there are spelling errors, so they are making mistakes and saving the report without realising. I had thought about creating a Google Form for staff to input necessary data for each pupil, but then there is no backend solution that I am aware of which would take the data and put it into a template Word document. What soloutions do other schools use for this? The school has ScholarPack for the MIS which doesn't appear to offer a service to help with this, just wondering how others deal with this.

Hi there, Looking for some advice. We have an old Windows server 2012 R2. I am looking to get rid of this and move to our new Server 2022. So far, I have added the new server as a DC to the same domain as the old one. I have added DHCP failover on the new server and also istalled DNS as part of joining to the same domain. The domain functional level is currently Windows Server 2008, I was thinking of upgrading this to 2012. The new server has ceased FSMO roles. I still have quite a few GPOs to go through and update paths as most of them are still pointing to MSIs or shared areas on the old server. I am looking at the DNS as I know this may cause issues if I am to demote the old server from the domain. If I go on the old server and visit the DNS Properties>Forwarders, I can see there are two IPs listed...the two DNS IPs from our ISP. I have added a third... the IP for the new server. Is this all that is required to allow me to demote the 2012 DC?

Hi, Just wondering if anyone has any recommendations for software (if free, even better) that would take an image of an entire system. There are a small number of computers in the school it would be really handy to be able to take an entire image of such that if the SSD failed, we could just restore the image back onto a same sized replacement SSD. The main example would be a unique system like the site manager's computer which is not domain joned, is independent but has lots of not very common software such as various CCTV packages to access various NVRs, fire panel control software, access control software etc. It has been years since I have had the need to clone a system as we just use SCCM/WDS of Autopilot these days but for these one off systems, I think it would still be handy to take an entire backup copy now and then as the time involved in starting fresh and obtaining, installing and configuring some of this software would be quite time consuming. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated:)

Thank you, ahah yes you are right. Silly me, I must have tried a few weeks ago and never finished it.

A quick question on this subject. The host server is running Hyper-V very nicely. From the host server, I have the new DC virtual server set up and installed. I would like to add a Data D:\ drive to this virtual server for storage of user folders and profiles. I note that the OS hard drive is listed under the SCSI Controller (sr-02.vhdx). Would I add another hard drive in this area or would I be better to add one under the 'Hard Drive' subsection which is slightly further down? Thanks in advance for any help with this.

Thank you everyone for your contributions, they have been really helpful. I have gone head and broken down the staff shared area into several teams/sites and this has worked very nicely. One thing I have noticed which maybe would have contributed to the original nightmare of masses of files going missing is that quite a few staff are utilising the OneDrive application on their computers rather than use the browser. If they make any relatively large changes, it seems to take a considerable amount of time to sync. I was looking on Friday and one staff member deleted some files from her own OneDrive folder in Explorer and the OneDrive app said there were over 35,000 files to be updated in its status. Has anyone found a way to force the OneDrive application to keep everything off of the computer? We have a high speed broadband line, so we really don’t need for OneDrive applications to be storing large files and folders locally. I am wondering if this has been contributing to files missing etc as having over 35,000 files left to sync at 4:30PM in the afternoon on Friday is just not going to happen as the staff member would have soon been logging off, shutting down and going home.

I notice that some of the devices on my M365 tenancy are showing as Windows Azure AD Join under Device Enrollment Type whilst others show as Windows Auto Enrollment. Is there any way to convert them all to Windows Azure AD Join as I am assuming this would be for devices which are on Autopilot. I would like to ensure all devices are fully controlled so that if they are wiped, they can't be used unless an M365 admin signs into them to prevent against any thefts. This is all a little new to me, so I would appreciate any assistance. I pulled the info on PS using the following command: Get-IntuneManagedDevice | fl devicename, Operatingsystem, OSversion, Model, Deviceenrollmenttype Here is an example of the two different enrollment statuses showing in the response:

I forgot to mention, I have also spoken to NVidia and tried deleting and reinstalling updated GPU drivers, that also did not help and sometimes, the system immediately rebooted whilst installing the graphics driver only to fail to boot again which would suggest a GPU fault, however we are getting the same on a totally different computer and we don't get this when using other monitors.

Has anyone else had this issue? I have been unable to get to the bottom of this. HP system with a Nvidia Quadro P2200 GPU connected to 2 x DELL UltraShartp UP2716D monitors. The GPU has a 3m DisplayPort 1.4 cable going into monitor 1 on DP in port. From here, it goes to monitor two via DP Out port to miniDP In in on the second monitor. It all works with no issues at all, unless..... 1. You boot the system with both monitors turned off. When you then turn them on, the system (which seems to be in a booted state but unresponsive to caps lock/num lock) will switch off, turn back on, try to boot and then switch straight off again. You can see the HP boot screen so graphics are working, eventually, it will go to Automatic Repair. It states Windows couldn't load correctly. If you try and restore, it will fail. 2. You boot the system with monitor 1 on only and monitor 2 turned off or set to HDMI rather than MDP. The system would do the same as point 1 and go to Windows couldn't load correctly. The only way I have been able to salvage the system is by opening advanced restore options, going to CMD running the command: 'dism /image:f:\ /get-drivers |more' and looking for any drivers listed with Nvidia in the name. I would then run a command for each Nvidia driver like this: 'dism /image:f:\ /remove-driver /driver:oem39.inf'/ If I then rebooted, the system would come straight back on with no issues. This is a time consuming job not helped by the fact the SSD is encrypted so each time, I need to find and type in the encryption key just to get the CMD prompt up/ The workaround was, just make sure the monitors are both on and set to the correct inputs on the monitors, and it has worked nicely. We also tried switching the monitors around, so one became 2 and 2 became 1, but it made no difference. We have tried five different display port cables of varying length, quality and makes - that also didn't help. The PC has now been changed to a DELL Precision 3630 with an Nvidia Quadro P620 so not as fancy as the last one. Guess what, exact same issue. I can't understand, is this an Nvidia specific issue whereby Nvidia GPUs are not liking these two monitors, or is there something wrong with these monitors? If I put the system on two HP monitors, no isuses at all. I am sure I also tried two DP cables, one to each monitor and still had the same issue. I have not had this issue with any other of our other systems, and this is the only desk we have with those two Dell monitors. I understand the monitors were quite expensive, so they really do need to be utilised. Has anyone else had an issue like this? All devices in Dev Man are fine, no errors. Here is an example from the event log. This is where the system is booted with monitors off. When monitors are turned on, this is what happens:

Thanks for the post. No sadly, it is just an HP server running Windows server software. Yes, I did look at the auditing over a month back to try and get to the bottom of it. It produced a LOT of info, but I did narrow it down and it did seem to point to the users in question but they are certain it wasn’t them. I also included instructions on how they can link their RM CC3 Windows 10 systems to the OneDrive so they have OneDrive on their login profile rather than having to access everything on a web browser. All I can assume is that if they are not telling lies, something happened on their PCs which caused this to happen, and they were unaware. Maybe they accidentally pressed delete when a folder was selected within OneDrive on their explorer and a prompt didn’t show to say ‘Are you sure you want to delete?’. Moving forwards, that’s why I thought separate shares might be best, but I am just worried, if I put three different shares in the Document root for the SharePoint site, there is no stopping someone highlighting all three and hitting delete on those. I am assuming the only other alternative would be to have three different SharePoint sites each with a share in the Documents? It seems a longwinded pain in the backside way of doing it, but just trying to do some damage limitation to make sure this doesn’t happen again. It has been a very valuable learning experience which has been the only positive thing about it. Waiting a month for a restore has been very bad and thankfully, I had not deleted the local copy so ended up keeping that so staff have just been doing things the way they always did but I am keen to get them off of that as soon as I can, just worried this will happen again in the near future.

Thank you both for your helpful comments. Is it possible to use the Microsoft 365 backup tool on a Windows Server? I am wondering if i could run it on our current Windows NAS? The school has zero budget, so we will not be able to purchase subscriptions or backup devices.

Hi all, I was just wondering if anyone else has experienced this, knows of a better way of doing things? I recently moved a public staff shared area folder to the cloud to help save storage on our server. The Staff Shared Area was a total of 273GB:mad: Despite my repeated requests for staff to please delete things that are no longer needed it has not helped. I also asked for anything that doesn't need to be public, to be moved to staff personal drives:mad: I moved the Staff Shared Area to a OneDrive I created within a SharePoint site called Curriculum Staff. Within the Documents section of this SharePoint site, I created a folder called Staff Shared Area and put in all of the files from our local Staff Shared Area. Within hours of this going live on 8th Jan, half the folders had gone missing and what remained was folders with nothing inside. :mad: First and second stage recycle bins had thousands and thousands of these files, there were too many to restore and the site would keep crashing so I had no choice but to log a call with MS. I needed a way to batch restore the files and all of the ways of doing it using PS were not working, maybe due to our Azure subscription as we are just a primary. It has taken Microsoft a day short of a month to restore these files. Really embarassing as I have gone on and on about how the Cloud is the way forward. I appreciate the area is massive, but surely there must be a quicker way to resolve a situation like this in the future? MS have not told me how they restored it all, the recycle bins are showing "Deleted by user x" but the users in question are certain the deleted nothing. It is not the switchover to Cloud I had been hoping for having written guides for staff on how to access the new Cloud based Staff Shared Area and how to 'add shortcut to OneDrive' so that the shared area would be in their OneDrive whenever they log in. As a counter measure/damage limitation, I am thinking of creating different shares for some of the folders within this Staff Shared Area. So having three shares rather than just the one so that if something is deleted, hopefully it will be within one of three shares rather than just the one. Does anyone have any experiences of this/advice? I am very disappointed it has taken Microsoft so long to resolve this, it has massively knocked staff confidence and left me wondering why I bothered to switch over to the Cloud as within a matter of hours, all of my work was in tatters. :mad::mad::mad:

Thanks both, that is really useful.

Hi there, Just a quick question.... I have a RAID 6 Double Parity across 4 x 600gb drives. I happen to have two 1.2tb drives which will also fit the server. I know I would need to rebuild the RAID but could I mix the 2 x 1.6tb drives with the 4 x 0.6TB drives? I would have a total storage capacity of 4 8TB to be put into the RAID. Thanks in advance:)

Thanks, that is really helpful. Glad I am not the only one who has been in this situation. Unfortunately, only working in primaries, they just don't have massive budgets, money and time are scarce, but I would rather spend some time and money now and put in the best solution so I can tick the job off knowing that they have a good solution in place.

Thank you everyone who has contributed. I really appreciate it. I am going to take your advice and create VMs on the new server - this makes the most sense. I did get some VMWare quotes, but decided to scrap that on account of the costs, some of you did mention this. Hyper-V seems a good option to me. I have a few further questions and I would be greatful (not used Hyper-V for a long while)... 1.What are the best backup options for this? I would be keen to backup the entire VM and it's system state. Should I be considering Hyper-V Replication? 2. In terms of creating my server role VMs in Hyper-V, the host server has a 1tb HDD for storage. I have made a folder in the root called Hyper-V which has machine configs, VHDs etc. Is this best practice? One of the VMs will be a file server and would have a fairly large D\ with all of the staff shared area stored on it. 3. The host server has 4 NICs. Would you allocate one physical NIC to each VM? Are there any benefits to it? 4. If I am to split the roles from the old server into different VMs (File, Print, Domain etc), what licencing implications are there for the server software? Would I need to buy x amount of Server 2022 standard for each VM or is there a different licencing structure for VMs as they are not physical? Thanks again, I really appreciate the advice.

Thank you, very helpful. We are already a Impero Customer so I will check this out as had not even thought to consider Impero.

Hi there, We are an LGfL School. The head needs detailed monthly logs of internet activity for safeguarding. We have always run these though Webscreen but they are not very easy for a normal person to understand and interpret. I have contacted LGfL to see if there are any better ways to display this info and they tell me that there are things in the pipeline with the introduction of SchoolProtect. The head isn't wanting to wait for this and said she needs something that can give a better overview of what is going on. We have looked at Smoothwall and wondered if anyone has any experiences or opinions on this and its implementation. An example would be, one of the LGfL reports shows top 50 denied categories for the month. We couldn't make it any bigger as the report just kept crashing. P0rn was one which showed 157 times. There was no way to view more on this. I had to log a case, as if I tried to do a detailed report, there was no P0rn category, apparently it comes under Adult. We need something that normal users can quickly and easily open and view without all of this faffing around. The head wants to see which websites were accessed for a said category, at what time, and if poss the hostname of the system as IP addresses are not that helpful. For this example, every request was not to a standard URL but an IP so I expect we have a system with some rouge software on. Would this be a suitable replacement and how does that work in conjunction with Webscreen/LGfL? Thanks in advance

Thanks everyone for your posts, I really appreciate it. The school wants to continue with on prem but I am slowly convincing staff that this is quite old fashioned and they are starting to see the benefits of M365. It is a primary, yes. Are you saying you could p2v using HyperV? I know this was possible with VMware but I have not used HyperV in years. My only concern with using HyperV was the fact that this server has a BIOS based RAID which again, I have never used to using a seperate RAID controller. I am assuming if I used VMware, I would need to install the software for the BIOS RAID on every VM (It has some IIS web based interface)? The spec for the new server is farily decent: HP M350 G11 Intel® Xeon® Silver 4410Y 64gb RAM 4 x 1GB NIC 1 x MR408i Storage Controller 2 x 240GB SSD - RAID 1 for Host Server OS 4 x 600gb SAS - RAID 6 for Storage Server 2022 Standard installed

Thanks, on the new server? Could do, but I am going to have the current older one going spare in the future. It is an HP ML390 G9 I think, so it has a few years left in it. Or could stick VMware on it in future and use that for role splitting maybe?

Thank you both.... Ok so a few extra things I neglected to say..... Old server has ranger on it - god knows why as it is so old, all of the stations also have ranger on. I don't want anything to do with that, just want vanilla. Also, old server is in a state, it has not taken any updates for years, it is very unlikely it will in place. I have had lenghty discussions with MS about it and even they said, it is unlikely it will in place sucessfully, so I think we would need to totally wipe that and re build which is fine as I would like to repurpose it and use it for things such as Paxton Entry, Print Server, Inventry etc. On the new server, I would ideally like to Azure AD Connect it if our basic licencing will allow for that so eventually, users would sign in to stations using their M365 logon and not our local AD logons which are all woefully non-cyber secutity compliant. So it is a bit more complex than your average situation!

Hi there, We have an old 2012 R2 server. The school has finally purchased a replacement with Server 2022 on it. They are very short on my time so trying to look at the best way to move everybody to the new one. Orginarily, I would start a fresh with the new server as there are just under 100 systems. This would involve wiping the systems joined to the domain and adding them to the new server with a similar domain. The new server would have identical DHCP and DNS settings, but would not enable these until the old one is decomissioned. Not sure we are going to have the time for that. Does anyone have any experience of using a swing server to take the existing domain and place it on a second server, and then to decomission the old one? How do shares work if they are all on the old server which you will get rid of? Same for GPOs, their settings would mostly point to files such as MSIs which would reside on the the old server which would be getting the chop. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I would rather do a fresh install but conscious they don't have a lot of time and have an unsupported OS so time is of the essence. Still feeling like fresh might be the best way as it will last them far longer than migrating stuff over.

Hello, Does anyone have any experience of HP MR Storage Administrator? We have a new server (HP ML350 Gen 11) to install Windows Server onto and unlike the usual HP servers we have, this has a totally different storage controller called HPE MR408i-0 Gen 11. It seems to be BOIS based. Does anyone have any experience of this? Is it any good? I have set it up so we have two arrays, one for the 2xOS disks and another for the 4 data drives. I am just a little unclear on what we would do if there was a fault on the RAID. Would this show in iLO as usual, how would we rebuild an array if we didn't have access to the RM Storage Administrator web interface? Any help would be gre

Hi there, Second day back for us today. Yesterday marked the day we transitioned from an on-prem public staff shared area to one in M365. We spent the afternoon with my training the staff on how to access this and link it to their own OneDrive. Perfect, no complaints, everyone happy. This morning, I have had through frantic emails stating that the area is gone and files are missing. I have visited the Sharepoint site in question and one staff member appears to have inadvertently deleted a substantial amount of files and folders. Not an issue, I will just restore them from the Sharepoint Recycle Bin. A good learning curve for staff anyway but moving on from this, does anyone know if there is a way to prevent deletion of folders? I am the administrator user, all staff users are automatically added to the Sharepoint group as "curriculum staff" This is cagegorised from our MIS which syncs with LGfL which then syncs with M365. Curriculum staff group have "Can Edit" settings enabled. They are also enabled as "owner". I would be very grateful if anyone could point me in the right direction or tell me if there is a better way of doing this. Our old Staff Shared area was an on prem server with no backup facility due to the sheer size of all of the files. If someone accidentally deleted something, it would delete immediately and there would be no way of recovery so the OneDrive solution has already proved it's worth in less than 12 hours of being comissioned!