Roberto

Yes this was a class control issue when I was in education (not that we had a satisfactory solution for it!). It’s not an IT issue just because it is happening to keyboards. If the students were smashing the lights up they’d tell the teacher to get a grip on the class, not just expect the custodial team to invent vandalism-proof lights. Same thing.

“have the tracker on the Staff members phones” Hopefully you mean a school phone that’s issued to the staff going on the trip for a day, not literally the person’s individual, personal device. I’d tell you ‘no chance’ if it were my personal device for sure. I suspect that this will be difficult, both Apple and Google rightly consider live location data as private data and as such intentionally don’t make it easy to just share to the world. This wired article has a few ideas that might work if you invited parents to a Facebook messenger or WhatsApp group then share location with the group. https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-share-your-location-android-ios/

Kept Apple One, O365 family, Disney+, Prime (but won't pay for ad-free), Paramount. Cancelled the Athletic but renewed again when they offered me 12 months for £12 for the year, reading it much less now so not even sure i'd renew at that rate at the moment. Dropped Readly, xbox game pass, the fancy '4k all the salad' Netflix (but found out afterwards that the basic netflix comes with my partner's phone contract as an addin, so we just use that instead.) Reviewed a few things and moved a few around to make sure we got the best value we can without changing what subs we had in total too much in the end.

I always look at projects like this or "prospective new whatever-Phone design" with a bit of a cynical eye. Where they're projects by people working on something as a uni piece I would obviously cut them all the slack in the world, but the obvious answer to "XP 2024" is that Windows 11 23H2 is "Windows XP 2024". I disagree with some of the Windows 11 design choices, but the fact is we all expect our OSes to do 'more' so this kind of complexity is inevitable. For example, you might or might not like the Microsoft store, but I think a 'store' overall is a good idea. If nothing else, it's analgous to being able to download and install software in Linux via the likes of apt, and that was often cited as a huge advantage for Linux over Windows and MacOS. Both of which responded with the Mac App Store and Microsoft Store.

One of our reasons for buying into Copilot was to have a sanctioned alternative to ChatGPT, because people are going to use it anyway whether the business / school / DPO / etc like it or not.

Depends how you define ‘cheap’. I talked about this earlier in the thread but as I said there, I can easily break down and justify the daily price per person for 300 people without them opening any app besides Teams. But the sticker shock of the limits is huge and I think they may have misjudged it’s usefulness in some customer bases at that price.

Business Continuity is the process of keeping the doors open and the lights on, so to speak, in the face of adversity. Disaster recovery is the process of recovering back to normal operations after said adversity. You kinda need both, but if you think about risk management in terms of probability and impact, it's more likely you'll get hit by issues that cause relatively minor disruption and therefore might need more frequent "business continuity" planning to guard against vs the least likely but more impactful scenario of a plan crashing on top of the school overnight. Clearly they're related, and the common jargon to talk about these days is "BCDR". If anyone's not clear on the difference, then, for example, you get hit by ransomware (God Forbid): What you do to try and keep the school running during the immediate event is Business Continuity. This might include how you deliver teaching, how you might literally keep the lights on by paying the bills through an emergency process while the finance system is offline, etc. What you do to restore your IT services to normal every day running once the immediate crisis is over is Disaster Recovery.

Autopilot to build laptops when they're added to your network or rebuilt Intune to manage user and device settings and distribute applications Autopatch to manage, well, patching. Entra ID (what used to be called Azure AD) to manage identity / login All in the cloud. All fairly simple to set up. All have their infrastructure managed by Microsoft so you don't have to worry about keeping servers up to date and online. Use the 'new server' money for something else more important.

I did some work with a group who had written a custom ‘on prem’ MIS system for a college (@norphy yes that one. Well sort of.) and considered making a vastly improved and rearchitected version for sale but there was no market for it. Not enough people want this to make it viable and you don’t want to be out there relying on custom code by yourselves.

I’m not going to say a MSP can’t work, but I would say that MSPs need to have very specific, very tightly defined SLAs, be managed by an extremely knowledgeable contact, etc, and ultimately are going to be acting in their en best interests and not those of the schools, staff, and students they’re supporting, which is a huge difference between them and directly employed staff that cannot be understated. I do feel strongly that services like IT are ripe for centralised management and streamlining in a MAT, but ultimately you still want staff who are properly invested in success of the schools and that means well trained, properly compensated and directly employed.

Ah. You were talking about best practice earlier so I assumed we were talking about best practice, not what can be got away with. And if the hardware can't be maintained any more because it's obsolecent, I'd suggest that using it for anything important is not best practice.

Yep. I now have the fastest connection our supplier can do. But not because I want it but rather because they foolishly rang up and spoke to my partner about renewing the contract. She's very difficult to negotiate with for that kind of thing and we now get their fastest connection for marginally less money than we were paying for their mid-range connection. Bet they'll ask for me next time as I am not as strict as her to deal with!

I have the meross smart plug and that seems find talking to airkit over eero, one combo which legend (well edgelords on reddit) suggests ought to be troublesome.

If you're relying on 7 year old hardware you're already past best practice imo.

They don't stop running, just won't be updated. I have a 12 year old Macbook air that still does what it does just fine. Same as an old Windows computer that doesn't meet the TPM requirements for Windows 11; 10 still runs, just won't be updated past a certain point.

Unless they're assuming that secondaries are in a better position than primaries to determine how much of the 1Gbps bearer they will need at any given time; it's no secret they can vary in size and requirements based on a few factors.

I think it can help with writing (or at least refining) formulas to get a task done. Primarily it's good at helping you find trends in data, pick out key trends to highlight or detail to focus when building a pivot table.

The £23/person/month limit isn't too onerous for business at least. Now that it's in GA I can say I've been involved in deploying copilot the past 6 months or so and it has several use cases where it can easily return more than £1/person/day of value for a business. Imagine a Teams meeting with several attendees and copilot reducing an hour long meeting to 30 mins, or a 30 mins meeting to a 15-min meeting or an email. If your organisation works out of the Microsoft cloud using modern tools, it effectively gives each copilot user a personal assistant. Want to summarise your emails after a week off? Ask copilot. Want to know what the action items were for everyone in the last meeting? Copilot was taking minutes, it has that ready for you. And no-one had to take the minutes themselves and end up being less engaged in the meeting itself. Got neurodivergent users who struggle with attention in meetings or with starting a document with a blank sheet? Copilot has both of those people's back for them (and I've seen hard evidence of this from other copilot customers, this isn't just me parrotting Microsoft fluff). The Excel, Powerpoint and Word tools are fantastic. I'm actually less convinced about the Outlook tools but then I'm already comfortable with writing flowery language in emails and when I'm rude in an email it's usually because I intended to be. I don't think its essential though, if I'm being honest, and given the constraints I'd certainly struggle to see education get sufficient value from it.

For home use? Probably Office 365 subscription online tbh. Especially if you can get a family pack if this is a close family unit.

Is it worth asking the people who run the channel, if they have a contact you can message? Schools are presumably part of their target audience so they may have thought about this. Or will have another route you can take to get access to the material.

Everyone is moving to VOIP these days instead of a traditional PSTN phone if you want a landline. Surprised that plus net don’t have something as they’re part of BT and BT are moving their customers to VOIP. Don’t get me started on how bad that migration was for my elderly in-laws btw, it was shocking, and I hate to think what it must be like for other elderly non-techies who don’t have someone like me to call when it doesn’t work an BT won’t help…

I have to say I quite like the eero mesh. Use it at home myself with 5 Mesh APs, and it works really well.

Are those the only two choices? If it's going to be over the same BT openreach lines no matter who you choose then what else is important to you? I'd be thinking about things like customer service, availability, etc. https://www.uswitch.com/broadband/guides/which-broadband-provider-is-best-for-customer-service/. Also about your needs - how many people and devices - a couple with a tablet each and maybe a couple of TVs might have different needs from a family with 2 or 3 kids, all of you on the go, multiple TVs, consoles, computers all going at once. I've got 350 Mbs Virgin Media cable and to be honest, I think that's fast enough for my partner and I (and we have a fair amount of 'smart home' ballast, a bewildering array of devices that I use for WFH on top of the normal personal devices, and it doesn't struggle in the slightest when we have family visiting either who might bring mobile, tablet, laptop of their own. But you may have different needs of course. Is your house large enough that a WiFi Mesh might be a good idea? If so, do any of the providers you're looking at have an especially good or especially bad story if you might need that capability?

The only thing ping tests is whether or not ping is working, which is very basic and provides no real information about whether or not your target device is actually available for the service it is supposed to be performing. I hate to be rude but ping monitoring isn't really that useful in 2023.

That’s huge, if I remember rightly didn’t you have all kinds of issues with it before? Glad to hear it’s sorted!