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Your HR team should be able to tell you how long you need to keep the staff data in Sims. Student data in Sims should be kept for dob +25 years unless it is SEN/medical which is longer I believe. Home areas do not constitute personal data so can be kept as long as needed, we keep ours for 7 years, if it is key staff ie am ex head teacher then it is kept longer. You are best to refer to your DPO, legal team or the IRMS toolkit.

We have first 4 digits of surname, first initial and three numbers counting up. This was based off our old LA system when we moved away I wrote a script to continue it. So Tom Smith would be smitt001 or if that existed smitt002 etc. This is students only. We put their year group in office field and organise them in ous and groups by year.

We don't release updates that are "optional" unless we need to, our Sims support unit are saying we must apply these too.

I will check, I believe she is updating all marks.

Yes we do AV multiple times a day too. The issue is I can do the updates on the attendance machine but it effects different teachers randomly so I could apply to a teachers laptop but there is no guarantee that the issue would even happen on that machine, or that if it doesn't happen that it is fixed. I am going to tell staff the Close All Windows route and ask the Attendance officer to keep an eye for the mean time. Just frustrating as currently we don't have time to quality check updates on test machines and I know if we deploy everything out it will cause more issues.

Hi all, We have had an issue reported to us multiple times from various staff, generally 3-10 times a week. Our attendance officer is updating the marks in the morning (by 9.30am) with codes from the voice messages from parents. What is happening, is when the teacher opens the register (even last lesson at 2.15pm) sometimes the codes are not appearing so they are then marking as absent. I have spoken with our Capita support unit who are requesting ALL windows updates to date are installed on all machines, we currently only deploy updates that are critical and security updates on a 3 week delay. The other response they have come back with at the moment is to ensure staff are using the "Window > Close All" in Sims.NET before taking the next register to "ensure that the most up to date information is displayed". I have been telling staff to use the "close" button to close the register but it seems Capita suggest closing all the windows in Sims.NET to ensure the data is correct which seems crazy to me, surely closing the register window and going back in should work? Apparently this is a "common query" for Capita and that is the fix. Has anybody else experienced similar? Thanks, Tom

Hi all, Just wondering what updates you deploy and how long you wait before deploying to your whole site/staged deployment times. At the moment we only deploy critical updates and security updates, this is done on a three stage deployment, first to a test group of machines, then a wider group after a week, then after 3 weeks total to the whole site. Reason I ask, we have been requested by our Capita support unit that all updates to date are deployed to our machines before they will consider other options for a Sims.NET issue, which I somewhat understand but at the same time I have always known IT teams to not deploy all updates, at least not straight away. What are your thoughts? Thanks, Tom

Does anyone know why the cost of Unifi AP-AC-EDU has increased so much? I quoted for some new wireless in a new building about 5 months ago and the pricing was £135 per AP. Now it seems they have been increasing pricing, the latest price is £320 per unit and that is a price increase from £265 apparently. The AC-PRO is still at £105 per AP same as it was when I quoted so it seems on the EDU has increased. Really disappointing as I was really impressed with these and was going to deploy across the whole site when our current wireless is due for renewal. I cannot justify it now as I cannot afford to put them everywhere needed for the speakers to be heard. Looks like I will be just going with the AP-AC-PRO instead.

Apparently you can just call 999 and say “this is a telephone system test call” they confirm and you hang up. I have been told to do this later this week once our phone system is migrated to SIP from ISDN.

Sorry, should have used a different word! We have had similar in the past were a member of staff has the recordings on a digital recorder, in the process of moving them from the recorder to the laptop they “delete” the files. GDPR states we should have reasonable backup systems in place to ensure constant access to data etc so for example this happened before a backup could take place or due to a technical issue preventing backups of that specific data taking place. Still referring to just coursework which is final grade dependant and has to be submitted to an exam board, we would in theory have to make the students resit the recordings (according to my exams officer) which could be detrimental to the final grades.

Trying to put together a list of risks for DPA2018 risk register. If a school were to lose coursework, saved electronically, only copies would this be a reportable to ICO? What if it were audio recordings such as language orals or music compositions? My thought process would be that it could cause harm (emotional) and by potential loss of exam grades which may result in loss of finance in future for the individual. What are your thoughts on this, am I reading too much into this? What do you think the ICO stance would be if someone reported it (ie a student/parent)?

Just an update for anyone interested. I managed to get the Virgin Media surveyor out when I was home (lucky I had been home letting the dogs out when he showed up) and I showed him the route I wanted them to take, by digging up from their duct in the main alleyway down another alleyway up to our back fence, the surveyor agreed and marked it up. I had a update phone call a few weeks later saying they had referred this to the construction team who had agreed to do the works (for free) and they were just waiting for a permit from the local council to dig it up. Fast forward about 5 weeks and the construction team turned up without notice and dug up the alleyway, put in a duct over to the back fence as agreed. A couple of teams did various works and it was all finished in a few days. I dug a nice trench in the back garden over the bank holiday weekend, stretching about 20 meters up to the house (keeping the 300mm deep for data services) and popped in my own duct so Virgin could jump into this up to the house. The next week another team turned up to pull in the cable, they again came without notice so luckily I was able to pop home and show them where to bring the cable in, they did not have information about the new duct and no access to the garden so were going to leave. I showed them the new duct and my duct and they pulled the cable in and left a coil for the installation engineer. I then had a call booking my installation, and today was the day. The engineer came about 1pm, installed the cable and after 3 years of trying to get Virgin, I now have broadband from them! I have done a speed test and am getting a nice 410MB download and 21MB upload on it, not bad if I say so myself. I am sure this will get throttled down a bit but it is a vast improvement on the 20MB down and 2MB up we are receiving with BT. So, anyone who is in a similar position, just get the surveyor to come out when you are in, talk them through how they can get to your property and hopefully they will get it approved even if it takes a 2.5 months. Thanks, Tom

We have been doing the exact same thing recently. But logging into each laptop as the user. A side note. We did have one member of staff who despite a successful sync, lost work, this was because they had filled their quota on the server and added over the quota while offline. So now we are having to backup everyone’s files while “offline” because they are scared of loosing data, simple job made 10x longer...

In Group Policy management, expand the domain, under WMI filtering you want to create one call it “Windows 10” and enter query [select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where Version like "10.%" and ProductType=1] which should only return Windows 10 client os. Then under each GP object, just clicking on it in the tree, you should see the WMI drop down at the bottom. Select it there for your windows 10 gpos. I would recommend you then filter the existing gpos to not apply to windows 10.

My understanding is, it needs to be clear informed consent, this is the option to say Yes or No, without default option. You cannot ask someone to consent to all options grouped otherwise they cannot decline an individual consent item. Such as they may want to decline consent for Biometrics, you have to allow them to decline, if it is grouped they cannot.

Checked the loft again?

Why not run two cat 6 cables, then you can have 20gb on lag.

SchoolLook is shutdown now

I’m running STP on my unifi switches I recently installed 6 of them varied 8, 24 and 48 port. Running STP, our other switches are a mix of HP/Aruba and Netgear. I am actually replacing some netgears with unifi switch range due to issues with Netgear not liking STP recently.

I am not going to go over what others have said about in house as I assume you have already tried this route and hence why you are looking for an external audit. I am not close so cannot recommend a company however I would recommend having a chat with your Business Manager who may be able to chat with other BMs at local schools and have one of their IT Managers come over and have a look at the setup, hardware and general configuration and give some advise at little cost if any. The reason I would do this, is they would be in a similar position with any local authority restrictions, budget wise of the local area and most importantly they are not a company who are going to try and sell you kit which you don’t require or is over specified and overpriced in their recommendations.

We run our own, I bought a short domain and host yourls on it, works like a dream, easy to use too! For a few quid a year on the domain its worth it.

Has this when it was clashing with another service, had to set exceptions to not scan the whole of program files initially to stop it using all the cpu, then work out what it was scanning. Turned out to be a new Xporter service iirc at the time, scan was the scan on access so wasn’t scheduled.

Poe power, I calculated the load of the devices I was going to run off of it. Using existing measurements off switches and then data specs from the other vendors website.

Just on a side note. If you are going with the 48 port Poe you might want to measure the depth of the cab, a friend of mine didn’t and ended up having to replace the cabinet and get the fibre reterminated as the cab wasn’t deep enough.

We got a remote connector license for our students, sure this was covered on another thread a while back. Worked out lots cheaper for us for student remote access.