midweek

We have a bunch of the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapters which are brilliant. However they've effectively discontinued these so one alternative I've just been looking at is this https://eu.j5create.com/en-gb/products/jvaw76 Seems pretty good so far but not using it in anger yet.

I've been using Unifi APs and Switches for years now. While there certainly was a period a few years back where their firmware was causing issues this hasn't been the case (for us at least) for some time now. Really like their stuff.

Couldn't get an HP G5 dock to work with a SMART GX175 recently. Had to revert to a USB-C cable direct to the board, which worked fine. Was with a brand new HP Elitebook.

Similar to others, we have it but won't be renewing as we've migrated almost everything to Sharepoint which makes it redundant for us.

There is a slider above that called "Apply device name template". What happens if you set that to no?

We are M365 here and I will say that it has improved a lot in the last couple of years. Just seems more reliable and easier to use than it was. Intune still has a way to go though. Can't comment on Google (we have it but don't really use it) but I know a lot of the Indie schools up my way use it and are almost evangelical about it.

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Sadly for me Skeleton Crew is Goonies in space but without the charm.

Securly here too for several years. Since we switched to the browser extension for Edge it has mostly been smooth (including Youtube). Support is fine when we've used it (the aforementioned Eric is very helpful). Safeguarding stuff has been well received by our pastoral team. Overall I much prefer it to the Smoothwall filtering it replaced.

Are we breaching any Microsoft licensing agreements by doing this?

I'm looking at this too but the most restrictive cost seems to be the Azure VPN Gateway to get the Azure servers connected to your onsite network since they canned the basic tier. Unless I'm missing something and there is a better way (like a wireguard server?).

I have both CU for W10 22H2 and W11 23H2 on our software update list for 2024-11. Our ADR for Windows 11 just has "Windows 11" as the product. Not much use to you but it at least it gives you an idea that it is working elsewhere.

Exam requirements is the one thing stopping us moving to Intune from onsite AD. If we had a fleet of dedicated exam devices then maybe, but as an indie school we have a high proportion of digital requirements for exams so this would be too expensive.

No issues here using the Edge browser extension.

Well I bought a 3 year license at the start of this year so I suppose I have 2 years before the inevitable enormous price hike.

Same for Powerpoint only. Just cleared the browser cache and it's back working again. May just be coincidental timing! EDIT: Scratch that. It's back to not working.

I recently had a quote including Crowdstrike and it was over half of my annual budget (that was with a huge edu discount too). No doubt it's where we should be but the cost is prohibitive so we do the best with the tools we can afford.

Seems to be back this morning.

Same. Have a ticket open with Microsoft. Glad it's not just us!

We still do BYOD. Despite my advice and warning, there is no appetite for the financial and administrative impact of anything else (we're an Independent though so a lot of focus is on budgets and costs to parents).

Very tempted by one of the Fortress Gateways. How does it deal with pupils using VPNs on their devices? This is our biggest issue with our current PfSense setup. I'd be happy to pay for the extra IDS/IPS license if it gives us control over stuff like that.

That's 3 days we've been using Edge with the extension only (no smartPAC url, no DNS forwarding to the Securly smartDNS IPs) and it seems to be functioning as expected. Actually a bit better than when it was the smartPAC as embedded video in some websites that were previously an issue are now behaving. It still blocks everything we would expect. Youtube and video embedded in PowerPoint now plays without the faff of a google sign in. Fingers crossed...!

So far so good. Just had to make very sure the browser extension block/allow stuff was correctly set up via GPO for Edge. We don't install any other browsers.

I've just done the same today and can confirm it doesn't ask for the sign in for Youtube. Are you still forwarding your AD dns to the smartDNS IPs Securly gave you? I changed that to Google (but I guess your ISP DNS or Cloudflare would work the same) and the extension continues to function but allows youtube, and some other embedded video on other websites, to work without a sign in. Seems to block what we expect but I guess I'll find out tomorrow when staff and pupils try to break it!

Looked at this and they discontinued the basic level tier so the VPN Gateway is now really expensive (relatively for a school with a small number of VMs) on the minimum tier of VpnGw1 in the UK. I've read you can set up a linux VM in Azure and use something like WireGuard but no idea if that is viable.