midweek

I don't use Mosyle much but there has always been a big disparity between what you can do with a supervised device and one that has been enrolled by a user. Is this a BYOD type scenario where the pupils enroll their own devices into Mosyle?

I've got a couple of Unifi switches and am probably going to replace all our ancient Netgears soon. Part of me thinks I should be investing in "real" enterprise kit, but most of me thinks Unifi will do what I need at a more palatable price.

For the mock exams just passed we had 18 laptops and 2 x IT suites locked down at one point. I had to create 65 digital exam users accounts. Our pupil count is only 650! Likewise just moved to ExamWritePad as M365 Apps are no longer fit for offline use.

Careful what you wish for. My office has horrible frosted plastic windows that the kids regularly rattle footballs off. Near heart attack inducing every time.

Ours does this too. I've only just deployed EWP so I haven't got round to doing any investigations yet.

We went from OVS licensing based on FTE about 3 years ago to a campus agreement based on A3 for Faculty. At the time the renewal quote for both was roughly similar (expecting a leap this year though!!). Honestly I prefer it as I don't have the annual fudge that is being given an FTE count that I know isn't true.

Microsoft is rolling out it's own M365 backup solution. Might be worth costing that too for comparison.

I think the DoH and DoT issue is a firewall one rather than a web filter one right? Presumably Smoothwall have to block traffic from IPs that provide this. Last time we had Smoothwall (few years ago now) pupils on our BYOD could use VPNs that used DoH and they just sailed through and any changes support made didn't make any difference. As I say my experience isn't current.

Same position as you and currently getting quotes. 1Gbps lines have definitely come down in price (in our case anyway but we are an urban school). Likewise I have found Securly to be really good. It has the occasional issue with embedded content like Youtube clips but their support is quite good at dealing with it.

When pupils try and use their school accounts with office app there is a popup about staying signed in to all your apps and an auto-filled tick box "allow my organization to manage my device". If they just click on through it'll register their device in Entra I think.

I feel your pain. I'm still an avid fps gamer after cutting my teeth on Day of Defeat years ago, but I just can't be doing with these high-intensity twitch shooters (Warzone was horrible!). My go to these days is PUBG (which is also free) as I can dictate the pace a bit more and have a couple of like minded friends I can group up with.

That reads like a minimum of 300 faculty costing $108,000 per year and only for over 18s. Further Edu only then.

PfSense and Securly here. I don't miss Smoothwall at all.

We have A3 licensing so can do some of this stuff, like conditional access forcing MFA for staff or blocking access by location, but it's only "safe enough" until it isn't I suppose. MS are shifting or creating a lot of their advanced security stuff into higher tier licensing models or add-ons which is annoying.

You're not alone! There are so many things in that report that would be relatively easy to fix in a corporate setting that are so difficult to get senior management to agree to in a school - MFA for pupils? Providing corporate owned and managed devices for all staff and pupils? Or forcing staff/pupils to enroll their personal devices into a managed device solution?

Maybe this? - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-extended-offline-access

We license by group membership too. Works well.

Sounds silly but if there is another Office app on the iPad (e.g. Word) sign out of that too (settings>reset word> delete sign-in credentials) Also if you open the Teams app after you've cleared the app data and it "remembers" their email address, rather than selecting it, click "edit" at the top right and delete the account.

In our rush to get Teams functional pre-pandemic we gave the staff a lot of leeway to create the Teams they needed. I regret this now and should have looked at School Data Sync and Salamander. It would be a lot of work and teacher gnashing of teeth to change it now but it is something I am planning (hoping!) to do.

Well that means our subscription is going from about £800 to $3000 next year. PDQ Deploy is a great bit of software but not enough to justify that.

I turned the SMS & voice option off (by accident!) when migrating to Azure MFA a while back. Some people where not happy!

They've updated their status page with the SSO issue and a "workaround". Only reason I know about this is Edugeek and we were due to have a parents evening early next week. Communication is lacking for sure.

Since Edge updated last week we are getting an extra Edge icon with a jaunty briefcase (Edge for Business). Linked to us forcing a work/school profile for users I think. Nothing to do with that?

We use Barracuda too (through Altinet funnily enough!) and it's been great. Easy to set up, easy to recover stuff. Price is excellent given what you get. Only a couple of niggles for us - the process is incremental forever so there isn't an option for a retention policy (at least the last time I asked!). It's meant to be coming though. Also from a GDPR standpoint, they can't search and delete individual information so if you get a right of erasure request that specifies backups it simply can't be done without deleting everything. No idea if this is the case with other providers or is a non-issue, but thought I'd mention it.

Until my school decide to pony up for a fully qualified M365 specialist, a cyber security specialist, a network engineer, a data protection lawyer, a data manager and whatever else they decide is "IT", then they are stuck with me "winging it" from youtube clips and Google.