browolf

Broadcom have ditched the small resellers and we have to renew with a larger UK supplier. The cost of Vsphere standard has gone up to ~ £60 per core minimum 96 which we are renewing this month. After October they will only offer Cloud Foundation licenses which costs around £125 per core. No one is going to agree to that. Our service partner that supports Vmware in schools is already developing a migration to Hyper-V solution.

My Head has an idea that ai could be used to condense send data into summaries for teachers. Apparently one of the problems in teaching SEND students is that there's so much data that it's impossible for teachers to know their send students very well nor how they should adapt their teaching. I'm not sure there's an off the shelf ai that could handle this kind of thing and building/vibing our own LLM/system is probably impractically costly and way out of our skillset . This sounds like an actual product. Anyone seen a product that sounds anything like this?

Just looking for data transcription tools - slt are waking up to it. Suggested Scriba and Neurameet to them. Both look good

I use pfftools to extract the contents of PST files and then a python script that uses beautiful soup to extract emails into text messages and then some other scripts to get rid of irrelevant messages and perform redacts. The process will often start with around 3000 emails that i can reduce to 500-1000. A lot of emails are lists are that aren't specifically about the subjects. The advantage of this kind of thing is is being able to design the final output which is 1 text file where individual emails are split with dividers containing dates and subject lines. If you have some familiarity with python and time for vibe coding check out my code https://github.com/browolf/Subject-Access-Requests-from-Microsoft-Copilot-365 The digital officer is using acrobat pro to redact pdf documents from cpoms and SEN with redaction lists

how do i stop staff from seeing other staff's personal data? Edit: I think it's 1 slt who already had those permissions in SIMS and didnt realize it

What is the support like?

I'm looking for a supplier of kyocera copiers to quote for a lease.

I us The M365 copilot app in win11 signed in with my 365 account then paste the code into vs code to test. I also have a chatgpt account the school paid for because previously copilot was really rubbish at coding and persistence but it's got massively better in the last 6 months so probably dont need this one as much.

According to an exam inspector that randomly turned up today, the future online exams will be marked by ai and written by ai. I'm not sure if the exam boards will be saving much money though as they will be spending it on ai compute instead I imagine.

We looked into moving once but it's an incredibly complicated endeavor with a big school. In the end they decided to get Synergy which reads and writes to sims but the Ui is a million times better. https://www.schoolsynergy.co.uk/

I don't think you need agents for something like this. That's overcomplicating it. You need to run the script locally to see what happens. If there's an error paste it in the chat and it tells you what to fix. Often it's easier to just ask to get the full updated script again. First I made a proof of concept in chatgpt - that it was possible to redact pdfs using python - with this prompt write a python script to redact text in pdf files. Redacted text will be replaced with the text <redacted> the script will ask for an input then redact that input in all the pdf files in the same folder. The script will show the names of the files in which the text was redacted and how many times. The script will keep asking for inputs or (q)uit You can see that process here; https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0c137f-2ebc-8386-aece-e27035353d6e Then I switched to copilot because I thought I would need to paste screenshots and you don't need to redact data with copilot because it's held within the 365 tenant enclosure. In copilot I started with the python file and the prompt "read this file comment ok after" then the real prompt New script with the same principle and style as this script script that redacts all the pdf, xlsx or docx files in a folder from a text file of redaction words or phrases this ui only has 2 columns first column asks for the text file the 2nd file is the output 1. list of files then what redactions are made to each file backups occur as before when the text file is loaded it needs to be sorted in the order, phrases then words, phrases may include numbers split so really the sort is items per line ask me any questions before giving me the code answered questions got code tested code, go through a bunch of errors and iterations however by the end I decided to drop docx and xls and focus on pdf started a new chat with the file and the prompt "redacted words are added to a txt file called redacts.txtwhen the program loads it looks for redacts.txt and asks to redact files using this file straight off. This process needs to run in a thread so that output can still be generated" go through another load of iterations until it operates how you like it.

I just got this book on Audible Jamie Bartlett - How to talk to Ai (and how not to) - He's done various podcasts about tech and if you wanted an intro he was just on the Bottleneck podcast taking about various things and Ai with Rory Sutherland. Never a dull moment when RS is involved.

I vibe coded a tool to redact PDFs - it's way faster than Acrobat Pro - I have converted it to an exe file so the data officer can use it. https://github.com/browolf/Subject-Access-Requests-from-Microsoft-Copilot-365/blob/main/PDF Redactor/pdf_redactorV3.py

Now you mention it ediscovery premium does deduplication. By default it's at 65% similarity but I haven't used it enough to know if it can be higher. I vibe coded our own processing for emails but redacting documents is still a massive pita and we are looking at products to do that

I don't think that is an option. You could potentially do that later, depending on how you are processing the exports

being a big school, email retention and sars is a big problem. I did one that produced 4000 emails to begin with. We have no retention policy and even have deleted retention set to 2 yrs for a reason no one can remember. I found a trust email policy in google that deleted all email older than 6 months on the basis anything important should be filed elsewhere. I'd really like a policy like that 😂

if you get a microsoft a5 with out video conferencing for faculty license costs around £110, you get ediscovery premium which has a more features personally i find review sets useful to see what the keyql has produced before having to export it Microsoft Purview eDiscovery legacy solutions | Microsoft Learn

How much per device was it?

Pennine education still good? Thinking of getting away from LCC

does "direct access" count as a vpn?

<# =========================================================================== Script Name : Install-Smoothwall.ps1 Purpose : Installs the Smoothwall Safeguarding Client via GPO Startup Description : - Designed to run as a Computer Startup Script via Group Policy. - Automatically detects the single MSI file located in the same directory as this script. - Reads ORGID, SERIALID, and optional ENABLEAZUREAD values from sw-config.txt in the same directory. - Executes msiexec silently (/qn /norestart). - Generates: • Wrapper log : C:\ProgramData\Logs\SW\ • MSI verbose log (/L*v) - Returns the native MSI exit code to Windows. Requirements : - This script, the MSI installer, and sw-config.txt must reside in the same folder (typically a UNC deployment share). - Only ONE .msi file must exist in the folder. - Computer account must have read access to the share. - Runs under SYSTEM context. Exit Codes : 0 = Success 3010 = Success (reboot required) 1603 = Fatal MSI error 1 = Script validation failure (missing MSI/config/etc.) =========================================================================== #> $LogDir = "C:\ProgramData\Logs\SW" $TimeStamp = Get-Date -Format "yyyy-MM-dd_HH-mm-ss" $LogFile = Join-Path $LogDir "Smoothwall-$TimeStamp.log" $MsiLog = Join-Path $LogDir "Smoothwall-MSI-$TimeStamp.log" $ScriptDir = $PSScriptRoot $ConfigPath = Join-Path $ScriptDir "sw-config.txt" # Ensure log directory exists if (!(Test-Path $LogDir)) { New-Item -Path $LogDir -ItemType Directory -Force | Out-Null } Add-Content -Path $LogFile -Value "===== $(Get-Date) : Installation Started =====" # Detect MSI in script folder $MsiFiles = Get-ChildItem -Path $ScriptDir -Filter *.msi -File if ($MsiFiles.Count -eq 0) { Add-Content -Path $LogFile -Value "ERROR: No MSI file found in $ScriptDir" exit 1 } if ($MsiFiles.Count -gt 1) { Add-Content -Path $LogFile -Value "ERROR: Multiple MSI files found in $ScriptDir" exit 1 } $MsiPath = $MsiFiles[0].FullName Add-Content -Path $LogFile -Value "MSI detected: $MsiPath" # Validate config exists if (!(Test-Path $ConfigPath)) { Add-Content -Path $LogFile -Value "ERROR: Config not found: $ConfigPath" exit 1 } # Read config $Params = @{} Get-Content $ConfigPath | Where-Object { $_ -match "=" } | ForEach-Object { $Parts = $_ -split "=", 2 if ($Parts.Count -eq 2) { $Params[$Parts[0].Trim()] = $Parts[1].Trim() } } # Validate required values if (-not $Params["ORGID"] -or -not $Params["SERIALID"]) { Add-Content -Path $LogFile -Value "ERROR: ORGID or SERIALID missing in config." exit 1 } if (-not $Params["ENABLEAZUREAD"]) { $Params["ENABLEAZUREAD"] = "#0" } # Build MSI arguments $Arguments = @( "/i `"$MsiPath`"" "ORGID=$($Params["ORGID"])" "SERIALID=$($Params["SERIALID"])" "ENABLEAZUREAD=$($Params["ENABLEAZUREAD"])" "/qn" "/norestart" "/L*v `"$MsiLog`"" ) -join " " # Run installer $Process = Start-Process -FilePath "msiexec.exe" ` -ArgumentList $Arguments ` -Wait ` -PassThru $ExitCode = $Process.ExitCode Add-Content -Path $LogFile -Value "Exit Code: $ExitCode" Add-Content -Path $LogFile -Value "===== $(Get-Date) : Installation Finished =====" Add-Content -Path $LogFile -Value "" exit $ExitCode

I made this toolkit in python. There's also the instructions on how to get the data out of purview using keyql browolf/Subject-Access-Requests-from-Microsoft-Copilot-365: Describes how to reliably extract and redact data from Microsoft Purview

so in the end. SWGFL said their discount price is only available for SW schools. I guess that is the same deal that Lancashire originally had. Also because we already had a quote from a different vendor, Phoenix could not give us a quote. However then it transpired because we are in an academy trust we can get an academy pricing quote which isn't quite as good as the Education Authority price but was still half the cost of the original quote. We have gone forward with that through Phoenix

I have downloads music and videos redirected to the old pupil server but no storage limit - we're using so little of the san now that it doesn't matter...oh apparently it takes up 42GB - might have a looksee with fileseek 😅

We just got this because the ico cybersecurity audit we had requires some kind of patch management. Actually pretty reasonable about 950 for 220 devices. We're only putting it on servers and staff machines Easy enough to deploy. I made a better powershell install script that logs events Roboshadow/install.ps1 at main · lsahighITsupport/Roboshadow