midweek

They install into each user's music folder now. So every new user has to download them again. The way around it I think is to download them once, move them to a shared folder and then create a symlink that creates at first login between the music folder and the new shared folder (something like ln -s /Users/Shared/Logic Pro Library.bundle $HOME/Music/Logic Pro Library.bundle)

Just had a parent describe our proposed 1:1 device rollout as "Orwellian" due to Securly's 24/7 monitoring. 😕

Currently using Intune to Autopilot windows device and ipads (on a small scale for testing). I can safely say the iPads are easier to set up than the Windows devices!

Probably should be in the "what will you admit to" thread but we are full Unifi here and I misconfigured a VLAN profile a few weeks back. As all the switches were assigned static IPs from the fortress gateway they all rushed back to their default IP when they lost sight of the network. So all our switches had the same IP and wouldn't budge until I manually factory reset all 35 of them. Other than that, thumbs up for Unifi!

Had the whole thing go down for a few hours a couple of weeks ago (they confirmed it was their side). Regularly getting the blue dots when searching (Google maps is hilarious. Blue dots every time you zoom in!) We swapped firewalls over the summer and I was leaning towards this being the issue but if others are getting the same then it's probably Securly. Shame as we've had it for years and it's, mostly, been a solid product. As we're moving towards 1:1 the Securly Home platform was looking really good for us too. Edited to say we use the Edge extension for LAN PCs and SecurlyDNS for BYOD.

We'll be using exam.net for our prelims next week ("mocks" for you southerners...). We were using EWP but now it's tied into TextHelp (we purchased a 3 year license for their Claro stuff but they accidentally sent us a renewal at the end of year 1 saying it was over £10k a year to renew.....!) we've moved away from it to exam.net entirely. The staff like it and the pupils use it regularly. Will report back on how it goes in a couple of weeks though!

Our supplier says £1.37 ex VAT!! Hardly megabucks in the grand scheme of things, but still has me a bit miffed!

Oooft. We have Cricut cutters and they are hard work. We use PDQ Deploy to install it but, in our experience, whenever they have a fairly minor update the software checks in and simply stops working until the latest version is installed.

Ours are user licenses. SSO you can do on the education offering, which works fine. Opens a webpage to authenticate them but as everything is passthrough for us it works pretty seamlessly. It's the directory sync that only comes with the enterprise plan. So we're stuck with uploading CSV files for new pupils.

For me it roughly goes like this: *Start of conversation* "Our security posture is poor. We need to deploy 2FA to the children" "No, that would be overly complex, expensive and would be a barrier to learning" "Then we need to scrap BYOD and provide devices that can be secured using conditional access policies and hello for business" "No, that would be overly complex, expensive and would be a barrier to learning" "Then you have to expect a catastrophic cyber attack to be successful as our defences are not up to standard" "Oh no! You MUST improve our cybersecurity posture!" *return to start of conversation* Obviously it's more complex than that, but I expect the only thing that would break the cycle is the aforementioned catastrophic cyber attack. At which point I probably be referring them back to my warnings as I walked out the door.

Our fresh Windows 11 build has gone to about 60-90 seconds for first login (was probably half that or less with W10 on the same machines). We have verbose on and it gets past all the usual sticking points (printers etc) after 10 seconds and sits at "Preparing Windows" for the rest of the time. For W10 I did have a stripped down default user profile sitting in the netlogon folder which sped things up but W11 doesn't seem to recognise it.

I asked them if they were planning on integrating EWP with their other software back in January when they purchased the company and they said "At the moment, I don't believe there are plans to integrate it into any other products, so it should be staying standalone. " Very glad we are moving over to exam.net.

Isn't that data for maintained schools so not really applicable to iSAMS?

Thanks Leasing is our only option as I understand it. Or the status quo (a BYOD policy that isn't really fit for purpose). I'm just trying to prepare for the IT issues that will arise rather than the financial. Will pass on the details of those companies to check out.

Hi All We (an independent day school) are looking at replacing our BYOD policy with leased devices for the pupils, purely as there is no funding to purchase outright and leasing is the only option. The financial stuff will sort itself out hopefully (and isn't my remit fortunately) but what do IT depts do in scenarios like this regarding repair and replacement of damaged/faulty devices? Do you charge parents for a replacement (or parts and your time to fix) if the device is damaged? Do you include an insurance policy with the devices for the term of the lease and claim damage on that? Do you lease/purchase additional devices on the expectation of damage/loss/theft and just take the hit and offer replacement devices? All the companies we've asked about leasing no longer do the finance directly with the parents (which used to be a thing) so I would expect there is a burden of responsibility on us to provide repair/replacement services. What a minefield providing school owned devices is!