forkies

We used to buy dell, but warranty didn't cover "I dropped my laptop and smashed the screen while spilling coffee over it". So we now buy cheaper HP 250 series (now G5) which comes with i5 4/8Gb ram and we purchase an ssd to slot in for all under £300. Money saved in comparison to Dells gets used for any replacement parts. So far we have saved thousands of pounds each year in unused warranty.

Hi all, I have been using smartdraw to do room plans and the school map for example. I now have to draw up multiple designs for 5 rooms in the next few months and want to look at something different then smartdraw, what do you use for this? -I want something that I can draw out the layout of the room accurately, entering actual measurements of the room, including and recesses and locations of windows. -Either draw or place furniture such as desks or benching, we have a few odd shaped pieces that would need custom drawing. -Not needed but would be nice to draw up 3D plans, but switch between 2D/3D on same documents, so I can show 3D view of finished space. I did some good 2d designs of our last media suite using smart draw but found sometimes editing little things such as placement of a window or breaking a wall connection threw the whole design off everywhere and cost hours of time correcting, at one point I actually started a fresh because it wouldn't make a really small line go straight, it was always at an angle! Info on any software you use would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tom

I have just been asked (a week before they want to start) getting Linux running for a controlled assessment. I am thinking of hosting up a load of virtual guests on a VMware server, all guests on a vlan with act so they can only see the student computers. Then installing putty on the student computers and assigning one guest per student (incremental IP) and getting them to set a new password on login. Once finished I just restore all guests back to original state and power off. Luckily I have a spare server with plenty of space and ram to host these guests on. Then I would look to setting a policy to ban putty outside controlled assessments. For future I want to look at some sort of internally hosted sandbox virtual infrastructure so all student coding and controlled assessments can be done without potentially affecting system security. Does anyone have anything like this, maybe VMware horizon? Would be interested to learn more before I get asked to do something again with no time to test!

What's the windows error? I would check dependencies, we had an issue similar to this a while back, turned out to be corrupt .net, reinstalled .net and fixed it.

We moved from our LA email to on site exchange a number radio ago and eventually managed to get a command line like application to migrate inboxes using imap but that was my Christmas holidays on a 10mb LA fibre line syncing 150 mailboxes averaging 8Gb each. Next time I would pay for the "premium" option having the LA migrate them for us, total waste of my time. Issue is a lot of staff have emails they need to keep any number of reasons.

Separate entities = separate data protection to start with. Items owned by the school cannot be used by the charity unless under a contract of some sort otherwise could be deemed mis use of funds. You really need to consult legal about that before moving forward.

That is the cheap option. We have to install ultra short throw projectors in all new rooms, not allowed to have those style projectors anymore due to h&s.

Web version works well

Under devices set the restrictions on the device to allow your staff group

The only thing I remember changing recently is that the photo license will now run April to April. So our last renewal in January 2016 actually runs until 31/03/2017. I have a feeling in the past I was waiting for a few days and rung them up and the lady who "issues" the licenses only processed them on a Thursday, which is probably why I only ever got the license sent out to me on a Friday morning?

I had an issue similar to this at a past school, after a lot of tracking down using Impero to see who was logged on at every event we isolated it to a end user, if I remember correctly they were working on some file that was "damaged" effectively causing the server to crash everytime they tried to go in the same folder as the file. Not sure as it was a long time ago (5-6 years) but definitely was issue relating to end user opening a file/folder on the server. We removed the folder using eraser or something and the issue never reoccurred. Wish I had more info but best I can remember from prior workplace.

Based on being logged in locally not having an issue I would look at file servers... Anything being redirected like the desktop? We had an issue on a few admin machines connected to an old network drive on a really old server which had a raid problem and it cause their explorer.exe to freeze up.

Hi all, I am looking for a decent KVM for my server room. Needs about 8 ports, remote over IP for single user, USB and preferably support HDMI for local. Must rack mount too. I have a USB KVM at the moment but USB only passes locally not for remote users, which only passes ps/2 which is pointless. Thanks, Tom

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310760(v=exchg.141).aspx

Please do send me the SLA.

Hi all, Please could anyone that has a prioritisation chart for IT issues please post it Also do your IT teachers use the helpdesk or just come to you directly whether it be in person or via email for issues? Finally, what is a realistic timeframe for software to be installed for student use as part of the IT course, would you usually be told at the start of the academic year, before summer holidays when they are planning or a couple of weeks before they intend to use it?

We use it, works well.

Many problems today, website going down and since we last did it there is another chrome plugin?! We never got this info so had to quickly whip round and install that too.

Signing it is just practicality... Make it part of the school policies which is therefore part of their employment contract and therefore they cannot work for the school if they don't agree.

Just wondering for those that use salamandersoft for active directory creation... When does your year6->year7 (new students) get created? Is it as soon as they are accepted in pre admissions? Is it when they are marked on roll? Just a query regarding when these accounts should be setup as technically students aren't on roll until they turn up on the first day. Any input welcome. Thanks, Tom

Why not encrypt the document then use sftp? Decrypt at other end.

Thanks for all the info so far. I think personally that the difference here (conversation trail above) is that if the school is providing devices, even if it is then purchased on a lease by the parents it is classed as a "1 to 1" scheme. Where as their own devices with no support from the school is "BYOD" which is what I am aiming for, so we do not get held up fixing, warranty or not, insured or not devices for personal use. This also removes the filtering at home issue. Ideally I would just like to give WiFi access filtered site wide and basic access to our applications via remote apps. The issue is I think our headteacher wants more of a 1 to 1 scheme so that no matter what, if a teacher wants to do something online in a lesson all students should have a device with them. This will be the main issue for us I think. We do NOT have the money to do a lease scheme for 1 to 1. Please keep posting for anyone else who has information though, it is very useful and interesting! Thanks, Tom

Hi all, Hoping everyone is enjoying the sunshine and slightly warmer weather! I have been asked to do a massive planning project for BYOD for our school. The headteacher wants to spend a year planning, ensuring we know everything that has gone wrong for other schools and how they got around it so we have a smooth start. Can any school that has gone down the BYOD route please let me know: What issues you experienced? How you dealt with these issues? What did you implement/upgrade as part of your BYOD implementation? What technical and hardware changes you made to your network? What would you do differently if you were to redo it? What did you do about students without laptops/tablets and pupil premium students? Insurance and support, did you get parents to cover it or do you provide IT hardware and software support? If you do what insurance cover do you have to cover damage you may cause? How does your school deal with misbehavior in class, as it is the students device and we would have it on segregated VLAN we couldn't use impero or similar? What policy do you have in place for BYOD, could you share it? Do you cover in your they at their own risk connecting to the network (potential virus spreading between student devices)? Am I missing something???? To give a bit of background we have around 900 students and are expanding to support around 1200. We have 6 IT rooms with 32 computers in each which we plan to reduce to around 3-4 (1 specialist media room, 2 IT rooms and a bookable room). Cisco Meraki Wireless (MR18), which we are looking at getting surveyed and enhanced for higher density. We have 1GB fibre backbone which we are looking at upgrading to 10GB and upgrading the core switches. Smoothwall filtering which we are checking licensing, we already have a guest network for Sixth Formers which we plan to expand. RemoteApps for students to access school applications remotely and on guest network, planning to upgrade this to support higher number of users. We use radius authentication for the guest network for students so they are filtered, we plan to keep this and get them to sign in every morning. GoogleApps for student email and allowing them access to drive etc. 100mb internet which we are in process of upgrading to 300mb. This is in very early stages and I am going also looking at visiting a few schools that run BYOD to see it in action and chat with network managers, if you are in the RBWM area (Maidenhead/Windsor/Ascot) and wouldn't mind me visiting please let me know! Thanks for all your help. Tom

We moved from KKS to groupcall...

Perfect, thank you for the help!