CHiLL

This thread is a decade old! Altodigital don't exist anymore!

I don't know if this is still something you're looking into, but I've had Net2 Pro pricing from our Microsoft licensing reseller, BSL-IT.

I am looking at enabling dinners in MCAS, as we'll be moving away from our current School Money payment and doing it all within MCAS. However, I am unsure how to input the dinners into Bromcom for parent selection in MCAS. I have the Bromcom guide, but the images aren't loading for me and I'm not sure how to enter our meal setup. We run a 3 week menu, with alternating meals. Week 1 - Monday - RED - Meat option 1, GREEN - Veggie option 1, BLUE - Fish of the day Week 1 - Tuesday - RED - Meat option 2, GREEN - Veggie option 2, BLUE - Fish of the day Week 1 - Wednesday - RED - Meat option 3, GREEN - Veggie option 3, BLUE - Fish of the day Week 1 - Thursday - RED - Meat option 4, GREEN - Veggie option 4, BLUE - Fish of the day Week 1 - Friday - RED - Meat option 5, GREEN - Veggie option 5, BLUE - Fish of the day Week 2 - Monday - RED - Meat option 6, GREEN - Veggie option 6, BLUE - Fish of the day Week 2 - Tuesday - RED - Meat option 7, GREEN - Veggie option 7, BLUE - Fish of the day Week 2 - Wednesday - RED - Meat option 3, GREEN - Veggie option 8, BLUE - Fish of the day (RED same as week 1 Wednesday) Week 2 - Thursday - RED - Meat option 9, GREEN - Veggie option 9, BLUE - Fish of the day Week 2 - Friday - RED - Meat option 10, GREEN - Veggie option 10, BLUE - Fish of the day (RED same as week 1 Friday) Week 3 - Monday - RED - Meat option 11, GREEN - Veggie option 11, BLUE - Fish of the day Week 3 - Tuesday - RED - Meat option 12, GREEN - Veggie option 12, BLUE - Fish of the day Week 3 - Wednesday - RED - Meat option 13, GREEN - Veggie option 13, BLUE - Fish of the day Week 3 - Thursday - RED - Meat option 14, GREEN - Veggie option 14, BLUE - Fish of the day Week 3 - Friday - RED - Meat option 5, GREEN - Veggie option , BLUE - Fish of the day (RED same as week 1 Friday) I am unsure if I create a separate meal for each of the individual items listed above and then link them to a day/week or something else.

Unfortunately, I didn't get anywhere with this and I'm not currently at that school (seconded elsewhere). I believe they still do exams with on-premise domain-joined laptops.

To be honest, since this is a primary we don't use it that often. It ticks most of the boxes. In my secondary, we still use Impero with an on-site server as the cloud versions are just not as good as the on-prem version. WOL is hit and miss and clients will often appear offline In Senso despite they are online, whereas it's much more reliable in the on-prem Impero. If prices were comparable and I was only dealing with on-prem devices (not remote devices), I'd probably stick with Impero.

This was a Senso error, not Impero. Adding ai.exe into the injection exclusion list fixed it and I've not had the issues since. Whether it's been fixed on their end and this fix is no longer required, I don't know.

I'm relatively new to the primary school side of education, with my whole career experience being in secondary with cashless catering and students choosing their own meals from the menus for that day. In this primary (and I assume like most primaries), parents pay for meals cashless via School Money, where they are presented with set menus "Red" (meat), "Blue" (fish) and "Green" (veggie). There is a three week rota of daily meals, which parents book in advance. We have an issue that is two fold; At the start of the academic year, the person responsible for managing the bookings opened up the whole academic year to parents to book in advance The catering company often needs to change the meals due to stock issues et al Changes to menus may also occur due to say, cultural heritage days, etc I am looking at moving away from School Money and integrating everything into Bromcom, which we started using in April. I would like to know how other schools are managing meals in primaries and if anyone could share any best practices. For example: How far in advance do you usually allow parents to book? How many weeks menus do you have? We have 3, so 15 days worth of individual meals Do you repeat the same meals every week, or 10 days, etc? How are you presenting menu options to parents? Do you list all individual meal types for the whole three week rota? Do you just list "Red", "Blue", "Green" on the app and refer parents to the school website that can be updated as needed? How are you managing communication to parents when it comes to unexpected menu changes due to stock issues? How are you managing existing booked meals that are no longer available when it comes to unexpected menu changes due to stock issues?

The primary school I inherited underwent an amalgamation in 2023 between two local primaries. However, it's left the domains in a weird state. Original Primary School 1: SchoolA (schoola.bham.sch.uk) - DFE number ABC123 Original Primary School 2: SchoolB (schoolb.bham.sch.uk) - DFE number XYZ789 New Primary School : SchoolZ (schoolz.bham.sch.uk) - DFE number XYZ789 School 1 was completely shut down and school B was rebranded as school Z, operating across both sites and keeping the DFE number. I have full access over SchoolZ and have moved the DNS and domain registrar away from EXA to Cloudflare and Nominet respectively. In our M365 tenant, I can see both SchoolZ and SchoolB listed as domains, with SchoolZ being the default domain. I am presuming that SchoolB was left as a legacy domain for email aliasing. However, we have no emails or domains using schoolb.bham.sch.uk and I cannot complete the domain ownership with Nominet as the domain doesn't truly exist, the school name doesn't exist and we have no emails for it. I have no access to schoola.bham.sch.uk and EXA confirmed that the school requested a transfer of the registrar to Nominet in 2023. The domain is now inaccessible and Nominet have clarified that the domain isn't registered. I am unsure why SchoolB was kept and listed as a domain in M365 when SchoolA wasn't. Since we've removed all of our services away from Entrust (and thus EXA), they want to charge £xx per year to be the domain registrar. Therefore, I want to ensure that everything is moved over to Nominet. I would like to keep schoolb.bham.sch.uk if I can, though Nominet are saying that we should only have one .sch.uk domain per school (therefore schoolz.bham.sch.uk). Does anyone know if there's a way that I can keep the SchoolB domain and possibly regain access to SchoolA? If not, what issues can I expect by losing access to the SchoolB domain and removing it from our M365 tenant?

I've been reading through the DFE guidelines for new network infrastructure and they recommend stackable switches with 40Gb interconnects, Cat6A cabling to endpoints and a core with two management modules, two PSUs, etc. While I agree that is all good stuff, especially for larger networks and it'll last 15 years or so...but for a primary that has ~50 staff and ~280 students, it seems overkill. I am planning on replacing our infrastructure with Ubiquity UniFi, but having those requirements puts you into the campus range of switches, which is a whole lot more expensive and frankly, outside of what I can purchase. For anyone who has recently or will be implementing a new network in a relatively small primary, what direction did you go in?

Thanks for your replies. I'm probably going to move it back to Nominet, especially considering our website and DNS are hosted separately, already away from EXA.

We have recently moved away from Entrust/EXA for our school and they want to release the school domain. I had already moved DNS from them to Cloudflare some months ago, but they want to release their registrar too. However, since Cloudflare doesn't currently support .sch.uk domains, I'm unsure who I can (or should) use moving forwards. I was under the impression that we could not own the domains independently, as they're issued by DFE or whomever controls the .sch.uk domain. Ours is specifically a .bham.sch.uk domain. Could anyone advise?

From what I can tell, the lease covers the handsets, hosted IPECS system, licenses and I think SIP and minutes. After inspecting this contract, the lease provider has confirmed that we are liable for the costs, regardless of whether the supplier has ceased trading or not and that appears to be what the signed contract shows. Obtaining a quote to settle it early for the remaining 2.5 years is an eye-watering amount of just shy of £9,000.

In this school I've recently taken over, we've been informed that our telephony provider (OneConnectivity) has entered liquidation and ceased trading, meaning our contract is now void. Some of the execs of OneConnectivity started a new company called Voxuna Technologies from the same offices in November 2025. They are the ones who informed me of these changes and want me to sign a new contract. At first, I was overjoyed with this, because our current telephony system is a hosted LG iPECS and we are in an extremely expensive contract until mid-2028. I was hoping to use this opportunity to move to a hosted 3CX system. However, after doing some digging it turns out that the hosted LG iPECS phone system, along with the handsets are leased from a third party leasing provider and this is the very expensive contract that runs until mid-2028. The leasing company have confirmed that the demise of OneConnectivity does not rid of us our obligation to the existing lease, meaning that I am stuck with this extremely expensive system. Can anyone provide recommendations on the best way I can move forward? I would very much prefer to move to 3CX, but I fear I can't entertain that until 2028. If I am stuck with this hosted LG iPECS system and handsets, I would like to look for alternative providers and suggestions would be welcomed.

We have obtained our SQL backup file from ESS upon our move to another provider. Could someone with SQL knowledge send me a DM?

I posed that question to the person asking for it and their reply was along the lines of:

I've been asked to obtain quotes for ActivInspire, because one of our SLT has seen it used with it's interactive maths tools and management are looking to push interactive learning. It's been well over a decade since I last dealt with ActivInspire and I am more familiar with SMART Notebook. Are these two still the best options for these sorts of tools in the class room? We primarily have very (very) old Genee interactive TVs, so no Promethean or SMART boards for compatibility.

I have been asked to generate an urgent report to obtain the following data: Compare attendance data for SEND students with codes E and K vs all non-SEND students for 2024-2025 academic year Compare attendance data for SEND students with codes E and K vs all non-SEND students for 2025-2026 academic year Compare fixed term suspensions for SEND E/K students vs all non-SEND students for 2024-2025 academic year Compare fixed term suspensions for SEND E/K students vs all non-SEND students for 2025-2026 academic year Of course this is last minutes and the data is needed for tomorrow afternoon (26/02/2026). I have designed a report which I believe contains the data fields that are required, however, when I attempt to run it, throws some errors, shown in the attached screenshots. I have narrowed this down to the data fields "Attendance" and any of the sub-fields, where having them selected, will cause the attached errors. I am not a report wizard and I'm stuck as to how to obtain the data that is being requested.

There are a lot of variables at play and I'm not even sure where I want to start. We are two sites, with one in a gradual closure for another two years, consolidating onto the one site, including server relocation. I'm only going to be able to get money for the site that will stay open, but I do have to keep that site operational. Site 1 Wired network: 4x TP-Link TL-SG3424P switches spread across two cabinets (2x in each, on different floors) with 1Gb links between the switches. Ground floor cabinet located in a cupboard in the main admin office. This area will be being developed and they would like it moved. Given that the site is physically small with no run to exceed 100m, I do not see why I cannot consolidate them into one central cabinet, aside from cabling costs. Wi-Fi network: Xirrus 620 APs, presumably with one acting as a controller, but I have no access to it and likely never will. Internet connectivity: 1Gb down/300Mb up, Sophos XGS Site 2: Wired network: 4x TP-Link TL-SG3424P switches spread across two cabinets, across different floors. Wi-Fi network: Ruckus (unsure what model), but it's certainly not modern, presumably also Wi-Fi 5. Internet connectivity: 1Gb down/300Mb up, Sophos XGS. Server: We are mostly Entra first, with one single local server, running 1x DC and 2x Windows VMs for local services, such as Papercut MF, Paxton, etc. This is currently located at site 2 and will need relocating to site 1. At site 1, I want to replace the switches with ones that I can configure VLANs, allow inter-VLAN routing and have 10Gb links between the other switches. I also want a Wi-Fi 6E or 7 wireless replacement, also VLAN aware. At site 2, I want to keep the existing network as is, but implement VLANs, so that I the VLANs can be the same across both sites. For example, putting staff devices on xx VLAN, regardless of which site they are on. I know that's too much information, but it's the only way I can portray what I am attempting to achieve.

Which networking equipment is the most cost effective solution these days? I've taken over a school that has managed TP-Link TL-SG3424P switches (but in an unmanaged state), with 1Gb uplinks. These need replacing, along with the ancient Xirrus Wi-Fi 5 network, which I have no admin credentials for. Everything is running on one flat VLAN. I'm seeing Ubiquity and Ruckus mentioned a lot more in recent months/years for wired networking, especially with the cost of HP/Aruba going up and on-going subscriptions. Overall cost is going to a bigger factor than it would normally be, for reasons.

I have managed to get in contact with the person who ordered a replacement previously and apparently the model of the remote is: TSA050010. I am using my contacts to see if I can source them without having to create a new account with a new supplier.

I had very much been under the impression that not a single remote existed, though I have located both an original and a compatible remote. I'm trying to figure out when and where the compatible remote was purchased from, but it was before my time and finance doesn't exactly exist to speak with. As for looking at purchasing replacement TVs, that will only be an option if a TV fails. Lets just say that finances are much tighter than the average school.

Thanks for your reply. I've attached the photos.

I have inherited a number of Genee Touch boards that have had their buttons ripped off and remotes lost. I would like to know if they have a freeze function and obtain replacement/compatible remotes. However, I do not know what model of Genee TVs these are, because the only identifying information on them is the Genee Touch branding and a serial number. There is no OSD, aside from an input select menu. I have contacted Genee, providing the serial numbers and photos of the TVs, but even they cannot identify them (how a company cannot track it's own product lines and serial numbers, I have no idea). Can anyone recommend how I can proceed?!

We got forced to Next Gen by default before Christmas. SIMS Connected did have issues this morning, we could log into SIMS ID, but Next Gen wouldn't load and thus we couldn't access SIMS Connected for SIMS.net or FMS. It appears to be working now. Regarding the dots not showing, that can happen due to either them having an issue/downtime or sometimes pressing Ctrl+F5 fixes it.

Following a post I made in a different thread, we are a small primary that has gone cloud-first. We have a local AD server, with users provisioned and synced to Entra, but all devices are cloud-only joined and don't communicate with AD/Group Policy. We also have a local Papercut MF instance, but it's been problematic with us being cloud-first. Our alternatives appear to be Papercut Hive and DirectPrint.io. Our managed print provider is pushing for DirectPrint, but I've only had experience with Papercut MF. Since DirectPrint.io appears to be relatively new to the print server industry and there's not much info about them, I am unsure whether it's worth taking the risk compared to a more established player like Papercut. If anyone is with them, could you shed any light on how it's been and if you think it's worth moving to it over Hive?