Roberto

When you say “AD Sync”, you do mean AD Connect, right?

Without knowing what you and Microsoft have been talking about, current set up (e.g. are you migrating from on premise Exchange) it’s hard to say much, but broadly speaking. You have an O365 tenant. Let’s say it’s called tenant.sch.uk. You have an AD domain. Let’s say that’s called ad.tenant.sch.uk At this point, you need to have your public domain (e.g. Tenant.sch.uk) configured in O365 as a validated domain. prior to that, your O365 tenant will use the tenant name + onmicrosoft.com as your default name, e.g. tenant.sch.uk would have tenant.onmicrosoft.com. This address will stick with your o365 tenant and is nothing to worry about. At this point, you need to have your public domain (e.g. school.sch.uk) configured in O365 as a validated domain You’ve linked the two with AD connec and turned on Password Hash Sync, all good so far. You’ve hopefully got a unique identifier shared between the two for each user account, which should be immutableid on the o365 side and objectGUID or (going from memory, cba to look it up) ms-ds-consistencyguid in AD. This should ensure that all your accounts in AD and O365 are properly linked. If this isn’t the case I’d expect to see either a complete set of duplicate accounts in O365 or a lot of errors in AD Connect. At this point you should be able to create a mailbox in O365 based on your accounts in AD. If you don’t have an exchange hybrid setup, you may have fun associating the AD user with the cloud mailbox but it’s doable. So what exactly do you see in AD Connect? And what do you see in O365 for each user, exactly? What have Microsoft suggested you do?

Unusual Events in event log at this time? On client computer, Exchange server and domain controllers? Does this happen on a regular basis? Hat happens if an OWA session is open at the time the connection drops, what does the outlook connection tool say is happening...

Depends what you mean by Apple Devices. MacOS support in Intune is very spartan; you can set a compliance policy and push Office and that’s about your lot. iOS support however is extremely comprehensive. Designing the Intune deployment for my employer’s fleet of corporate iOS devices is a large part of my current set of jobs and, especially if you use DEP, you have very precise control over any iPhone or iPad that connects to your service, and can do some very interesting stuff by protecting data with DLP, conditional access, and so-on.

We did (I’m not there now!). This was approx 75 macs running Logic Pro X + GarageBand in music rooms, and Final Cut Pro and Adobe premiere in film rooms. Can’t remember the cost but it while it wasn’t cheap, didn’t seem unreasonable to me.

I’m not sure why you’re sinking so much effort into MS office if you’re a google apps school? This is practically begging to have a overly complex and fragile setup that guarantees you’ll See the worst of both products. For Lesson delivery at least you should be surely able to use gapps? This will mean you’re only juggling two platforms for just those who have no choice.

When I worked for Luton SFC one of my final projects was to get a project rolling with Toucan Computers which was almost exactly what you are doing. We ended up with a solution based around DEP and JAMF that seems to have worked really well.

Type-asset tag-business division E.g my laptop in the central business unit might be Lap-1234-central

Set up Licence groups in Azure AD. There's even a gui for this. Add and remove members from the groups with a script. Or a gui if you prefer. Why stress?

I get the impression they have a hybrid config, and that’s only supported with an on premise exchange server, precisely for jobs like this.

Why not do the heavy lifting for proxy address with an exchange email address policy?

That makes literally no sense whatsoever.

Wry much depends on why you need. I’m running a Lenovo X390 laptop with a Thunderbolt / USB C dock with 2 screens for work and I love veg it. It’s quite powerful, but I’m running some heavy dev stuff and building reports in excel, power BI and the like side by side so it’s money well spent.

Surely this is unenforceable anyway. Mr Nefarious P. Villain will ‘forget’ to do this whenever he is trying to do something wrong. Honest people will honestly forget... or have a real need to be urgently contactable (family member seriously ill, for example).

Had a demo when I was still in education and really liked it. Found that netsupport was equally likeable and more capable in areas we needed so got that instead but senso is a decent choice.

Not sure if this has changed but at one point you needed to buy education reserved instances through a reseller. Reserved instances are cheaper than PAYG.

Old college had website in Azure, Domain Controller and ADFS as Azure VMs, backups sent to Azure with Microsoft, and stuff like that. Current employer we are putting as much as we can in Azure, both VMs and various apps as a service.

Office 365 is probably the correct course of action here. You can migrate E2010 --> O365 without too much hassle and the specs to run an on-prem E2019 bridgehead/cas server with no mail DBs afterwards to keep things squared away aren't too much of an issue.

I for one think that speaks to the quality of your managers back then ;-) Seriously folks, I worked there too and it is a good place to work. The infrastructure manager there now is the old engineer that was working for me when I left, and it’s a top team.

That's because in true BT fashion, it took 6 people to do the logo: One to write the letter "B". One to write the letter "T". One to draw the circle. One to schedule the first three to arrive in the wrong order, resulting in ( ) T P being the logo prototype for three quarters of the time spent on the logo, One to copy the results down wrongly and blame the customer. One to find the original customer request, fix it in 5 seconds but refuse to admit any responsibility on BT's part despite all evidence to the contrary.

Yes, we run voice for several thousand users worldwide over SfB/Teams, but we use headsets.

It can do but the benefit of IAM tools is that you don’t need to care about that, it worries about all that so you don’t have to.

The thing with new house buying and offers of bits and pieces is that it’s difficult to value those. How much is a fitted dishwasher worth? Is it worth a deal that sounds good out of the gate but adds 2 years to the mortgage for example? I’d personally say £20k was a lot to walk away from. We thought hard about accepting an offer at 10k under for our last property and ultimately said yes... but this was to buy a £450k house where that was a smaller percentage of the final pric and we had a lot of cash/deposit to put down if we moved fast.

What on earth is that 1x1TB drive for? I wouldn’t use a single stand-alone drive for anything these days tbh. RAID 10 would work as others say, but I really would suggest planning storage before buying the server, this feels like it’s being done the wrong way round.

Fine turn of phrase you have there!