Bob_the_Goon

Thanks Olliedawg. What is used to sync the balance updates between the two systems? Is it a direct API between Vericool and ParentPay or is there some middleware used between the two i.e. Pebble TRAC or Wonde or something similar?

Many thanks for your replies. Can I ask which Payment provider you are using alongside Vericool? How do these integrate and how well do they integrate? Any incompatibilities? Cheers!

Morning everyone, I just wanted to reach out to see if anyone is using the SwiftQ system from Vericool? We are currently reviewing this as an option. Has anyone had any good or bad experiences with it? Cheers, Bob

Morning everyone. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Hi everyone, Does anyone have experience of using the Vericool cashless catering service (SwiftQ) with Arbor MIS and Arbor Payments? Are there any limitations? How does the integration work? Direct API or via something like Wonde? Cheers, BobTheGoon

Are you guys seeing a lot of emails being marked as Junk which previously wouldn't have been i.e. emails between school domains? We've seen this a lot recently and seems to be getting worse. If so, have these issues improved for you?

Hi @localzuk. When you say that you host all the servers centrally, are these in a data centre, Azure or are they in the Trust central office building? Perhaps a mixture of the three?

Thanks for the responses so far. I can't argue with your opinions, however as this isn't purely my decision, I would like to explore all avenues, which is why I was asking for possible support routes. If any Edugeeker's use such companies/services, it would be interesting to hear who they have chosen to go with. Bob

Hello all, Do any of you have hardware support contracts with other third parties? I'm thinking coverage of devices such as switches and servers that may have already dropped out of the usual manufacturer warranties. So if a switch was to die, you could call company X and they would visit the site to either fix the issue or perform a swap of the hardware with a like for like model. I've heard of a company called Comms-Care which comes recommended. Are there any others? Kind regards, Bob

Hi folks, I'm sorry to mention the "B" word here, however I was wondering if any schools have began to think about a post-Brexit business continuity plan for their schools. Essentially, if we leave the EU with or without a deal, what might directly affect the day-to-day running of the school? I'm going to start contacting my IT related suppliers and third party companies to see if they expect their services to be affected if/when we leave the EU. I'll report back anything that I find out. I don't want this thread to descend into a political debate, I'm just interested to hear about what discussions are going on in your school about this.

That's really interesting. So if you need to restore from a backup on Azure would you need to use Cloudberry to restore it to the NAS and then use Veeam to restore from there? Does Veeam keep those particular backup files in its catalog or do you need to perform some kind of recataloging before you perform the restore?

Hi @localzuk Do you still backup with Veeam onto a NAS device? From here do you use Cloudberry Ultimate to backup the NAS to the Azure Cool Blob storage? If so, how does the NAS present itself to Cloudberry? Is it presented as an SMB share from which Cloudberry uploads to the cloud?

@localzuk do you use Unifi for any of your access layer switches in your middle school or is it fully HP?

Some of the Edge switches have L3 routing capabilities however this is just plain static routing.

Thanks @m25man. I'm thinking about keeping Cisco for the core layer and saving money on the access/distribution layer. To be honest even the larger Cisco environments I've worked in still did all of the routing at the core layer even though the access layer switches were capable of doing it.