Roberto

I do actually agree with your overall point to be clear, but I've seen targetted phishing emails used as a form of reconnaissance so I genuinely think that there's a sliding scale here.

I can think of at least one pre-school educational provider that has suffered a potentially very serious attack in the past few weeks. Of course Phishing emails could be the precursor to a more serious attack...

To answer your two questions and one statement in order: Yes. I can't remember the last time I didn't use this facility. Because it does work. That would be true if it really didn't work.

Brevosend domains are related to Brevo (Brevo | Email Marketing Software, Automation & CRM) which includes email marketing/CRM as one of its services, so the use of that domain isn't intrinsically a red flag imo. Now if you normally get emails from a vendor from SendGrid, say, and suddenly one comes from a different email provider it would be wise to ask why, so its not a reason to trust the sender here either. The breathless urgency in the tone of the email certainly raises my spidey senses as to it being dodgy. It reads like a spammer... but it may just be a concerned idiot, so to speak.

Yep. We tend to block all "unlicenced" use of AI precisely because of concerns like this.

Yep. Surveys are somewhat subjective (though my feelings about a service should be important to the service owner. But these kind of stats are a good objective measurement of how the team are performing and should be front and centre. I think our SD uses similar metrics, SLO/SLA vs. actual availability, and quite importantly, first time fix percentage for calls - the amount of time someone contacts the SD and gets a fix back straight away vs. having to wait while their issue gets escalated and bounced around various teams.

Never used ebuyer for large buys either personally or professionally. Simply for me, they were harder to deal with than, say, Scan. Prices were never quite as good. Deals were never quite on the things I actually wanted. Website login was literally a problem for me there at one point, for no good reason I could discern. I'm sad they're gone but on reflection I'm not sure I'm surprised they're gone.,

This is it. We need "200 on site in $random_country by the day after tomorrow at the latest" far more than we need to be able to tweak every aspect of the device. We do have one or two people who are running massive models that might benefit from this but even there I'd probably rather they had a standard laptop with a connection to the biggest Windows 365 desktop with all the salad that we could buy, because we could really do with not losing those models or worse having them leaked if someone left their laptop on the proverbial top deck of a bus.

I think they're great for personal use but I think the concept is flawed for business/enterprise use, including schools. Robustness and a good support network that can absolutely have a replacement unit on site tomorrow are much more valuable than some perceived value from "upgradability" - which I'm absolutely here for when it comes to my own use but I wouldn't countenance for an enterprise environment.

Where is that syncing to? Entra ID connect can be thought of as a multi-stage sync process Objects in AD > sync to > Entra ID Connect database (called a metaverse) Eligible Objects in the Metaverse have any necessary transformations applied to fields, then > sync to > Entra ID. It’s been a few years since I last touched this myself but from memory, you need to enable the hybrid join part of Entra ID Connect and make sure your computer OU is included in the OUs for the sync job.

Computers absolutely can sync to Entra ID via Entra ID connect. So if yours are not, it may be that whoever last updated the Entra ID connect settings did not configure the sync to include the OU that contains your workstation accounts in AD, or they did something else to filter out computers from the sync. Maybe use the MS guides to hybrid join https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/devices/how-to-hybrid-join to give you some pointers but don't change anything unless and until you're sure you know what to change and you've grabbed a backup of your Entra ID Connect config.

Hello from the corporate world. We do provide laptops for our staff but that’s more to do with our hot-desking in the office & work wherever you like policy. With regards to email on phones, we provide corporate phones globally for anyone who needs one and these are obviously managed devices. If you don’t qualify for a company phone, or you don’t want to carry two phones, then you can use your personal device if you wish but we require you to install our “light touch” Intune ‘byod’ policy.

Filming season 3 of Fallout.

Very true. If I were going to this much bother I’d build my own document library with my own policy docs, access to online resources, and just use that.

I'd ask myself what value it achieves over Copilot or similar, where the likes of Microsoft and Google both offer AI tools that I'd suggest more easily integrate with your schools tools and workflows. I'd also be concerned about governance - what does it do with your data.

git is a code repository, a place where code can be stored and worked on by potentially lots of people at once, with their various activities managed. git repositories can contain the code for practically anything. Microsoft own github, and use it for both code and documentation. My employer uses primarily Azure DevOps (ADO) which is a wrapper around git repositories plus other developer friendly tools. We store all sorts of things in there.

For IT security, ethical hacking, or anything else like devops, coder, whatever, you're not taking home telephone number salaries any time soon obviously. So for the security role (or for that matter, coding, devops, literally anything else) you might want to look at starting with some reading and training around the area so you might start with the security + training for security or the various Microsoft or Google or AWS or Apple online training and documentation for devops stuff or coding. Or providers like Udemy have loads of courses. For entry-level security roles there might be jobs in a SOC. For coding or devops engineer type roles there might be junior engineer roles on established teams out there. You probably need a bit of direction in your career rather than just "make money fast". We all like that bit but it probably won't be that fast so you need to figure out what you might enjoy doing so the journey from entry level to rockstar professional isn't too painful.

If you're looking at starting from "nothing" as a pure coder (and you're not, you already have an understanding of how systems talk to one another) then have you considered looking at something more like devops, where you're writing code to support infrastructure deployments and the suchlike, which may not be quite such a huge reset.

Slightly different audience but where I am now, we just don't bother with mapping OneDrive or SharePoint to any drive letters. We did consider it as part of our migration from Office 2016 to Office 365 a few years ago but decided we'd rather teach people how to use OneDrive natively and keep the money. Tbf, that's probably easier with professionals than students.

You've not actually spoken about service desk method/model for the software which seems curious? For example, do you follow the ITIL service desk model? Do you make use of SLAs? Presumably something that's web-based so it can be used on anything with a browser, but did you want an app for service desk team to allow them to better deal with tickets 'on the go'. I quite like Service Now but not sure what their educational presence and pricing is like.

It depends right. I wouldn't expect to see a projector fitted where I work now, short of taking over a legacy office where they're already fitted and working perfectly... but I would defy any reseller to tell me this projector was a worse choice for a space than a ropy HiSense 70" display.

Ooh Microsoft could replace its place on the keyboard with another Copilot hotkey; sure people would complain but it's the price of progress.

Try using the diagnostics Microsoft have published to see what happens with a broken vs. working mailbox. Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer

This whole saga is ridiculous. I'd tell them to sling their hooks with this one if I could. So - you don't need an AD that's joined to AAD for this do you? If it's only a few people in finance, set them up with just the bare minimum they need for that, with separate accounts and passwords for those individuals. Sure it might not be the smoothest experience in the world but it's not terrible and I think my sympathy for them would be somewhat limited in your position... I would do this all in Azure VMs, with remote desktop access to a Remote Desktop system for the users to deliver acceptable performance by keeping the SAGE resources, AD and user endpoints for Sage together and avoid what looks like an extremely high cost to set up on-prem resources (and don't forget, support and upgrades for the on-prem stuff for as long as you need it to run Sage).

Yes, I'd be asking the DfE about this. From a technical point of view, "back everything up, hand it to whoever is taking over" is easy enough. Perhaps this might be ok for pupils' work areas. But I'd be far more concerned about data protection issues here - if the school that is the data controller ceases to exist and this isn't a simple case of a MAT that is already the data controller simply changing what sites it offers services from, then you may well not be able to transfer any personal information you hold about students to the new school - your agreement with the pupil/their parents probably didn't include "transfer personal data to random schools" and the new school will have no agreement in place with the pupil/parents to hold that data or do anything with it until they've established their own relationship.