midweek

Are there any thoughts or recommendations when it comes to Digital Asset Management software for an archive of school photos? I am in the process of migrating much of our on site storage to SharePoint and thought this might be the time to investigate proper photo storage management.

Sorry, not specifically. I do remember it being a lot more than the equivalent roaming profile though. The default max is something like 30GB but I think ours were less than that. Depends on the user too but I seem to remember 5-10GB not being uncommon. We didn't include Office containers though.

We had FSLogix running in a physical environment for a while. I think the concurrent login thing is possible using differencing disks (although I don't remember exactly how I set that up!). However our FSLogix profiles often suffered corruption, similar to roaming profiles. Plus it takes up a lot of storage space. Ended up just using local profiles once we shifted our document storage to OneDrive.

I have a fear of flying! Even so I checked and it was cheaper than the train but still more than diesel costs.

I'm visiting London from Scotland for a weekend soon and it was going to cost me twice as much to take me and the mrs on a train than to drive my diesel-guzzling 2009 BMW down (including the ULEZ fee!). Nuts.

From a very brief look, T&Cs say only available in the US.

We've been using Securly for the last year - https://securly.com/ It's been good so far. Fully cloud based so would suit your setup.

Doesn't Smoothwall have a 90 day notice period to end your contract?

We ditched Groupcall for text messaging. We added the SMS module for iSAMS but it is really very limited compared to Groupcall (albeit much cheaper). Your SMS messages have to be incredibly generic as it doesn't allow any variables. We used text messages to report absences to parents but this isn't really viable anymore (can't do "%childsname% is absent today" and only "your child is absent" as a generic alert. If the parents have several children this is confusing). I suggested using push notifications to the app as this is automatic but it was felt there was too high a chance of false alerts when teachers flag the child wrong during registration.

I always understood the provision of equipment in the exam was "where it is their normal way of working within the centre". I'm guessing the £140 keyboard doesn't get plugged in every time the pupil uses a device in school so the provision of a standard keyboard should suffice.

Could be worse. I've been asked to provide a 10 Year Plan!

I used fslogix here for a couple of years for our staff logins. While it was mostly great we still got the occasional corrupt profile. You also need to have plenty of network storage for your profiles as they get much bigger than roaming ones. I ditched it recently when we moved to OneDrive Sync as it didn't play nice (in my environment anyway). I probably could have sorted it out but it was just easier to stick everyone on local profiles.

If you do go down the local profile with Onedrive route, I found this blog post invaluable to keep login times to a minimum - https://katystech.blog/windows/windows-10-and-super-fast-logon-times

Local profiles with OneDrive sync and files on demand. Works surprisingly well. Only real issue is chrome doesn't remember favourites from one pc to the next (we are an M365 school, no Google accounts). Edge does though so staff can use that.

We use rubber cable covers and hazard tape in the exam hall. Luckily we have dedicated laptops for the purpose and we insist they stay in place for the entirety of the exam period. I wouldn't trust battery only. Had an instance many moons ago where a student failed to notice the laptop wasn't plugged in and proceeded to ignore the low battery warnings until it died. Parent threatened to sue me directly (School were excellent in dealing with it though).

Thank you all for the responses. Seems like IT Suites aren't going anywhere just yet! In my case we are an independent school so don't have DFE prescribed requirements to worry about but I am being asked to fit extra PCs in a room that I feel is cramped as it is. We are currently around the wall with an island in the middle of the room but it's really dated.

Just a general query to you EduGeekers about what you think the modern secondary school IT suite should look like or if there should even be such a thing as a conventional IT suite in a school. Bit of background - I've been asked to look into upgrading our aging IT suites. The ICT teacher is keen on a very traditional setup (rows of bench desking facing a whiteboard) but slt believe this is old fashioned and want me to look at alternative, modern solutions. Has anyone done away with IT suites in favour of a different approach? If so how do you find it?

Just as an aside - what are you using as a firewall?

Thanks KK20. Luckily I have a little bit of time before I need to take the plunge so I do have a trial in the works. The quote is not hugely more expensive than Smoothwall so if the trial goes well I'd have no issue with making the switch.

This is a little disheartening. Was looking at Securly as a possible replacement for our Smoothwall but it's more expensive and lacks the firewall element of Smoothies UTM. Wondering if it's "better the devil you know" for another couple of years....

Had a similar thing a year or two back which turned out to be a DDOS attack (DNS Flood, presumably paid for by some students) that would last for about 5-10 minutes and then everything would go back to normal. Our ISP confirmed it but said our 1Gbps link was "too small" to trigger their DDOS protection. We had 4 or 5 WAN IPs and switching between them immediately resolved the issue. Couldn't find any tell-tale IP Location searches on our Smoothwall so never did catch the culprit. Also have Unifi kit and have just resolved a bunch of problems by removing a couple of LAGs between Netgear switches. Never affected the internet connection to the LAN though.

In the new user interface the vlans are under "advanced settings" instead of networks as it was. Confusing.... I've pretty much got this setup and it has been nothing but trouble for the last little while. Some of our UAPs are experiencing disconnections and packet loss when users roam onto the points. Happens on about 20 of our 75ish UAPs. Everything is the same for the UAPs that work and for the ones that don't. Thought it was a routing issue on the Smoothwall but even if I bypass that the UAPs still do it (Smoothwall's advice was to move VLAN routing and DHCP off the Smoothie!). Unifi support have been pretty useless but I guess you get what you pay for! From my experience of using Unifi for about 6 or 7 years - they are not what they used to be. Too many firmware bumps, problems with RADIUS and DHCP etc. Wish I'd just paid the huge licensing fees for our Aerohive as we barely had to touch that setup. Unifi it's every day with rebooting APs and so on.

Our exam coordinator has just got off the phone to them and they said there is no guarantee that the tests will be rescheduled. We need to prove "exceptional circumstances". What a farce.

We have an S10 that's 3 years old now on a 1Gbps line. Had a couple of freezes and connections drops but nothing serious. What issues present that upgrading the drives fixes just in case I'm missing something?

I have been asked (read "ordered") to provide an entirely wireless experience in some new junior school classrooms. Laptops & iPads to Apple TV's on 75" screens using airplay/airparrot. The laptops will have USB-C so at least I can fall back to that if/when it all goes Pete Tong.