CHiLL

Have you looked at using Windows Server's SMTP server feature? I have it configured on one of our servers, though both it and the Office 365 relay are both configured with TLS. I haven't tried it with the on-site relay without TLS.

I allow Windows Updates over our VPN (though we have a 200Mb connection). Chances are that when your staff are connected via the VPN, it's outside of the normal hours so won't impact performance during the day. Also Windows Updates generally aren't that large (unless the device hasn't updated for a while), so clients won't have that much to download.

For the few staff we've had complain about this, we recommend using OneDrive instead, as they have 1TB of storage there as an employee. Otherwise I recommend them to purchase M3 BitLocker Loader for Mac.

I lost a few fence panels and posts, but other than that it was alright. Now I have the fun job of calling around fencing companies who are inundated with calls and they can make up their own pricing in the circumstances. It looks like it'll be several weeks until someone is available to actually do the repair works. Annoyingly I live in a corner property and it's the boundary fence that's gone, meaning you can just wander from the road into my garden. Even more annoyingly, because the land is shared between myself and the maisonette above me...I have conflicting information about sharing costs. One document I got with the property states that all boundary lines are shared and the deeds specifically outline my area. The damaged fence is 80% in my section according to that, therefore 80% my responsibility.

I remember when I saw the trailer for it - it looked so good and had a very Bioshock feel. However when it launced, it was plagued with bugs because they rushed the release. That just caused reviewers rate it poorly and put people off buying it. I'm hoping that they've all been ironed out now. However I have noticed that I'm suffering from a frame rate issue/tearing issue. I have a 1080Ti and I'm hooked up to my 4K TV (which is the same setup I've just been playing Gears 5 at 4K on max settings at 60FPS). I have set the in-game setting to max and specified 30-60FPS for smoothness and VSync is enabled. However it just seems to stutter and tear with the framerate locked at around 30-40FPS. I'm guessing it's just not very well optimised.

Finished Gears 5 over the weekend and enjoyed it. Now I've started We Happy Few, however I'm playing it through Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which I got 3 months for £1 back in November...and it expires on Sunday. I don't think I'm going to have time to finish this game.

I'll be considering whether or not to move back to Merseyside/surrounding areas in a couple of years and I keep my eye out, just to see the lay of the land. One thing I've noticed is that there are fewer jobs that pop up. I presume that it's because it's a less populated area, especially compared to Birmingham where I am now. Less population = less schools = less job opportunities. It may be worth looking at the employment section of Edugeek. @elsiegee40 used to post job adverts frequently in there, however she's taken a break from it. Check out her stickied post regarding where she'd see the adverts: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/educational-jobs/212177-taking-break-nightly-job-postings-edugeek.html. They'd be the sites I'd be scouring through if I decide to move back.

I don't know if it's related, but I thought I'd chip in anyway...I had an issue yesterday where I couldn't use Insert > Icons for admin staff. All other staff and students could use it, but admin staff couldn't. Turns out it was an issue with our IE settings (GPO preferences). We had to have certain IE settings such as TLS different for admin staff due to Birmingham City Council/Link2ICT's archaic HR Portal. I disabled the IE policy, so admin staff were getting the same as regular staff and what do you know...it worked. Since we don't need the TLS settings any more, I've left them as disabled.

I don't have any HP 250 G1s, but I know our HP 250 G4 had issues with it's Broadcom WLAN card. Despite having the current drivers, it simply wouldn't work on Windows 10 1903/1909, despite working on 1709. I suspect you may be in the same boat that we were in - it's the driver that is the problem. I even bought a brand new Intel AC M.2 WiFi card to replace the Broadcom, but that had it's own problems. So we ended up buying a micro USB dongle WiFi adapter for it and it's been fine since.

I've been playing Gears 5 on the PC, hooked up to my TV in glorious 4K ultra settings. It looks amazing. I'm currently stuck at the end of Act II on the boss, it's winding me up.

From my experience, you don't even need to do that, you can just run the driver setup files manually. Once SMART is installed, my script then runs the following: "%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\SMART Technologies\SMART Product Drivers\Drivers\x64\DriverInstaller64.exe" -i "%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\SMART Technologies\SMART Product Drivers\Drivers\x64\\" "%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\SMART Technologies\SMART Product Drivers\Drivers\x64\STI2303X64.exe" -i "%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\SMART Technologies\SMART Product Drivers\Drivers\x64\\" The drivers are all installed and it works correctly.

I share a pretty small office with my network manager, it's approximately 5x3m. This is our workbench area and also our store area for commonly used items. We also have a server room, which also doubles as a store room for the larger or less commonly used items. The office is pretty central to the school and opens onto the corridor, which gets very loud when kids are around. Heating wise, it's not great. The radiator cannot be controlled other than being ON or OFF, meaning the office is boiling when it's on or freezing when it's off. We do have a window, but it's only a horizonally opening window that's about 1x0.5m and it opens mayble a few inches? It's awful in the summer because we have to have that open and the door to create a draft. However our office is also opposite doors that lead onto the yard, so it can get cold pretty quickly when the door is open. My previous school had a nice large, airconditioned, quiet/secluded office. The school before that included an office moves; the first office just off three open plan IT suties and was two rooms joined, a store cupboard with benching installed and some false walls. Probably about 10x4m, housing 4 of us. We then moved into a nicer office, which was about 10x4m, housing 5 of us...and that was just an office...no storage, there were a couple of store rooms around the school. My first school, where I did my apprenticeship was litterally in the basement that students weren't allowed in because it was too dangerous. The ceiling was probably about 7ft and there were a lot of gas pipes and stuff. It was an enourmous office though, it was an L share with probably a 6x8m area with an extra 3x10m length. That room had everything and it was so islolated from everywhere else.

Our site is mainly SB680 with a small number of SB480 and SB580 boards. We've been using Windows 10 since 2016 and SMART Notebook 11.4 until summer 2019. Currently we have deployed Windows 10 1909 and SMART Notebook 19.1 and all of our boards appear to be working correctly. SMART Notebook Basic 19.1 is actually pretty good for a free product, it does most of what 11.4 does...bar a couple of things. One thing that has been brought up is the transparant background is not included in the free version, you need to license it for that...which has upset our maths staff because they use it a lot. One thing to note is that SMART Notebook Basic requires the user to register for a free SMART account (preferrably using their work email) and it does have Office 365 SSO capabilities. Without registering for and also signing in, SMART Basic only runs on a 45 day free trial. After that it nags you to sign in. However you only need to sign in if you wish to use Notebook. If you want to simply use the touch/draw on the board - that works without signing in.

A note about drivers - we have found that when Windows auto-installs Intel LAN drivers, they aren't feature-full...they're pretty basic and don't include the WOL capabilities. We had to deploy out (and include them in the SCCM Task Sequence) the specific drivers obtained from Intel/device manufacturer website. Then the option for WOL was there.

Darn it! I thought it didn't seem right, but I went full steam ahead writing it three times throughout the post! Oh well, I've edited it now.

I like to separate VMs for their own roles and not mix them up if possible. We have; 2x DCs Staff file server Student file server Backup server MIS server Print server SCCM server (SCCM also manages WSUS/SUP) Biometrics server for cashless catering 2x servers for AD FS 2x servers for RDS/Gateway Web server for HAP VPN server for Always-On VPN We do have a 'management server', which is the only server that has multiple roles. It controls Azure AD sync, Impero and SalamanderAD. The reason I like to separate servers out is so I have minimal disruption if something goes wrong with that server or I need to restart it.

A Wonderful Day in the Neighbourhood - 8/10 It was a very nice film. Although I know almost nothing about Mr Rogers due to his lack of presence in UK culture, the acting is so good that I had a good idea. Hanks is at the peak of his performance portraying Mr Rogers and it was a joy to watch. Matthew Rhys plays an awarded but cynical magazine journalist who is tasked to profile Mr Robinson as a hero, but is unsure whether Mr Rogers is real or just a persona. I thought Rhys' performance was really good and he is actually the main character/protagonist of the film and does all the emotional heavy lifting of the film...and he does it really well in my opinion.

ATP is only included in the Office 365 Enterprise E5, Office 365 Education A5, and Microsoft 365 Business plans. For anyone on the following plans, ATP is an additional subscription: Exchange Online Plan 1 Exchange Online Plan 2 Exchange Online Kiosk Exchange Online Protection Office 365 Business Essentials Office 365 Business Premium Office 365 Enterprise E1 Office 365 Enterprise E3 Office 365 Enterprise F1 Office 365 A1 Office 365 A3 I suspect like most schools, you'll be on the Office 365 A1 plan, which ATP isn't included with.

We don't have any issues with Impero's WOL and Windows 10. It's worked fine for us in all version from our first Windows 10 deployment of 1607 back in 2016 to 1909 that we're on now. The only issues I've come up against are that WOL isn't enabled on the client, whether it's disabled in the BIOS or the network card has it turned off in Windows.

We've looked into it in the past but the cost of hosting is too much for education, espcially in this level of cuts we've been experiencing. We have calculated that the combined size of our full backup files is approximately 5TB and that's just live data. We'd also like to archive our end of year backups for 5 years, which are 3TB each. So we'd need something like up to 20TB and that doesn't come cheap.

I wouldn't go for anything other than a Casio LED projector these days. We've been slowly replacing all projectors with Casio LED ones and we've had some in for over 5 years, without any issues. It's makes life so much easier as you can just mount and forget about it, maybe clean a filter every now and then. I don't have to worry about having/ordering replacements and dealing with original/remanufactured bulbs and all the hassel that comes with it. The only thing I've had to worry about with these Casio projectors is ordering replacement remotes, because like with all types of remotes, staff lose them.

The Personal History of David Copperfield - 8/10 I really enjoyed this film. Some great performances and I felt I could I have spent much more time with those characters. Only downside for me was that it felt a little rushed.

I raised my own call with Office 365's support last week and they got back to me today. They simply directed me to the volume licensing support team because we have a volume license/OVS agreement. I've now raised a ticket with that team. I thought about it when I was there, but I thought the likeliness of someone there actually clued up on education licensing was slim, so I didn't waste my time.

Netflix have announced they are making an anime The Witcher film. No release schedule annouced though. It will be made by the studio that made 'The Legend of Korra'. https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/22/the-witcher-anime-movie-netflix/

Not that I know of, though we don't use Notify anymore for Lockdown. When we did use it, we just quickly wrote LOCKDOWN in both the caption and message, set the message type to Critical. We currently use Impero to Broadcast to all screens. The broadcast is from the server, where we have two images saved - a red image with LOCKDOWN in black text and a green image with CLEAR in black text. When the broadcast is initiated, we have the LOCKDOWN image displayed. When the all-clear is given, we quickly switch to the CLEAR message. It's not ideal, but we find that a better solution than NetSupport (given we only have Notify on our teacher/office computers).