Roberto

When you say ‘domain’, you mean AD domain I guess? Entra ID can support multiple domains sync to the same O365/EntraID tenant, albeit with some caveats. We have over 200 domains on our main tenant at the moment.

It's boring but that's probably what you want in terms of electrics - essentially a static "laptop trolley" that only occasionally has laptops plugged in.

I think that product is not up to your task. If you look, there's only one 'full power' charging port there, and that only delivers 65w. Some laptops need more, and you certainly won't be running more than one laptop off that and getting a useful result. This is quite common for this sort of device; they are designed for individual use and expect you will have your laptop in the "full power" port and your phone and other sundries in the other. They mention this in the summary tbf (I added the emphasis): I'd look to a reputable supplier and discuss your needs with them - I'd be very careful buying off-brand stuff from Amazon for commercial use. Heck, I wouldn't even buy that particular product for personal use.

It certainly is for me. Copilot for M365 is a supplimental licence for your base M365 licence, like Teams Premium.

I mean, what does your policy say about that now? Surely it’s acknowledged that intruders could cause a fire if they wanted to!

Yes. Considering the nature of the problem, if it’s important enough to do at all, it should be important enough to address properly. We use https://www.everbridge.com/ where I work, but I assume it would be massively overkill and expensive for edu. Equally they may offer a public sector option that I don’t know about. A cynic might show their senior leadership this solution, then it’s cost and complexity, to make a point about what’s achievable with the budget and resources available to them.

Bookings of what? Doesn't your ticketing solution support a calendar/scheduling function?

If I was doing on-prem virtual servers on a budget, I'd look to relatively powerful but basic servers running HyperV, and using replicas to improve availability. That isn't perfect but may be adequate. And it's much cheaper than messing with more complex setups

Oldest kit? Not sure of the years but a wedge of Itanium servers and a few AS/400s

To echo Chaplic somewhat, my template for migration to 'the cloud' would be to look at SaaS where possible - for example we take it for granted these days that running email via O365 or GApps is a perfectly normal thing to do, and it absolutely costs less than running your own Exchange cluster scoped to provide similar functionality in AWS or Azure. So for example rather than have print servers as Azure VMs, I run printx. Rather than having more SQL servers in Azure than necessary, we use Azure SQL. If you host external DNS then there's cloud services for that. If you have lots of old files in a legacy file store then use Azure Files rather than hosting a server just to host a file share, etc. This practice is *usually* cheaper in terms of the purchase price of the service vs. equivilent cloud server capacity, and when you consider that Azure Files, say, doesn't need the same kind of management or monitoring overhead of your time that a server would (and your time is also a cost of course!) then the cost advantages start to become apparent imo. If you haven't come across the terms before a document like this which discusses SaaS vs PaaS vs IaaS is quite instructive - https://www.ibm.com/topics/iaas-paas-saas. Generally IaaS offers the most flexibility but requires the most effort and (usually but not always) the most cost.

There is with their enterprise product. I’ve integrated Zoom with both Okta and EntraID, and it can do SSO and provisioning either way. And it will support provisioning accounts into the free licence tier within your enterprise instance, so for example all our staff have the free tier except for those we uplift to the higher paid licence tiers. I have a vague memory of a csv import for accounts but I can’t remember if that really exists or what it looks like.

I've always been able to type faster than I can write since I first picked up a computer keyboard at 12, at least with my writing remaining readable. That might be as much to do with my terrible handwriting as it is any claim to anything special about my typing.

Congratulations Heinz, you ruined monster much and mayo.

I think you're calling it a MIS system based on your perception as a parent of what a MIS system does. You probably need to start by asking several schools what they think their MIS system does. And for all that people here love a well-deserved moan about all the products out there, they're all insanely complex because they're dealing with what is quite often an insanely complex problem.

Where's that jurassic park meme, about being so excited about the 'could we' to think about the 'should we' of something, when you need it

If you're doing all this by yourself then I'd suggest moving away from "person manully checks xyz logs" daily type model and look into some kind of decent alerting in place so you can focus your limited resources on the exceptions instead of spending valuable time only to see nothing of note happened. That isn't to say you shouldn't review logs periodically of course but this model is all too easily disrupted if it's relying on someone to remember to check a set of logs each morning and for everyone else to not distract them with busywork while they're checking... so it's not really suitable as a primary method of being confident that your backups have worked or that Exchange Online isn't doing something odd, etc. Most backup systems can email you a different type of email if backups fail vs. if they're successful, for example. Office 365 itself doesn't really have logs because it's made up of a bunch of disparate services but some of the services have extensive logging - so you'd want alerts from Entra ID about serious attempts to breach a username. You can also get emailed alerts about service issues from O365. If you have a service desk ticketing system in place then maybe it supports accepting requests via email, in which case you're not too far away from combining the ability of a service to send an alert by email with your helpdesk system's ability to accept an email and place it in your list of open tickets...

Used to fit those HP 5406 & 5412 switches when I worked in edu. They were absolute champions. Not sure where they are in their lifecycle now but very good, reliable bits of kit in my opinion.

I don't know about sued, but frankly anyone who does this should be admonished for not carrying out a proper tender process and due dilligence with public funds. I'm not trying to defend any one vendor here, I just think that public funds should be spent properly, and part of this includes running proper bid processes for major LOB applications, major capital purchases, major infrastructure/building works. As I've said before, it appalls me that this appears to still be a foreign concept to some schools in 2024. As for Bromcom - I am not sure I agree with their actions and posture - forcing organisations to humiliate themselves publically is a bad look if nothing else... but for the rest of it, if schools carried out proper, robust bid processes then vendors wouldn't have to take legal action and public money wouldn't be wasted defending bad practice.

As Pete alludes to, what is the actual problem being solved. These are two very different problems. If I was stealing valuable equipment and found an AirTag (keep in mind an AirTag would alert me that it was following me round the building if I had legitimately borrowed a portable PA system or suchlike) then I’d just ditch the AirTag on premises before proceeding to steal the valuable equipment. If you’re lucky I wouldn’t amuse myself by sticking the AirTag to the inside of your car’s wheel well…

Agree with this - we were briefed to “follow plan C” with all our tendering procedures when I worked at a college that was building and equipping a new campus, which is probably about 15 years ago now. We were clearly advised to follow the then gold standard OJEU procurement process and/or to use frameworks that were compliant with it. I’d imagine that OJEU is no longer current in the UK since Brexit and I am in no position to advise anyone on what to do now - except to say that if we were aware of the need to follow procurement processes 15 years ago, why are people acting aghast at the need now? Clearly the sector has been heading in this direction for some time and regardless of personal opinions of any vendor’s any of us might have, both schools, suppliers and ultimately the public benefit from open, honest tendering processes for spending public money.

It's hard to know what to say to this - they could ask you anything technical they want. To be honest, I think this kind of thing has somewhat gone the way of the dodo, but I certainly did it in the past and for senior roles I was far more interested in how you think about things more than which obscure technnical details you could remember under pressure. If they're good interviewers then the 'practical' questions may be difficult but I would expect it to be fair - they're trying to find someone to help them, not to drive potential candidates off. Pay attention to the job description, etc. I'd expect that to form the syllabus for their questions. In terms of the test: remember the basics - don't let pressure to do well make you look for obscure issues and overlook obvious ones. Pay attention to what they say - they might be checking your ability to listen to people rattle off a spiel of issues and conceal a vital symptom or piece of info in the middle. Is the iPad a research tool or what you'll be using to write your notes/observations/answers?

Not in edu any more, not doing anything with childrens' data any more, but in my current role we would absolutely do due dilligence on this for our user population. I've actually turned a few vendors down because the user data were asking for wasn't justified by the stated aim of the service.

We've had pretty good experience with WUfB to be fair, along with driver and UEFI updates working well (presumably that's what people mean when they say BIOS because UEFI has now been the standard for over 10 years I think) - the UEFI update process has been quite robust I've found, more than BIOS updates used to be. Took a bit of tweaking to get 'our config our way' in WUfB but we're pleased with it now and it vastly simplifies deployment and updates for us.

I love that he was asking for an updated version. He could absolutely start a flame war at a star wars expo. Daddy's boy for sure :-D

The one thing I’d say is don’t focus on migrating servers to Azure, instead focus on migrating services to Azure. I know that sounds like I’m nitpicking, but it’s important for both managing costs and reducing complexity (and therefore security risks). What do I mean? Consider a file server - could it be replaced by Azure Storage? Could a database server be replaced (or at least scaled back) by migrating at least some of your server-hosted databases to Azure SQL? Web servers with Azure App services, etc? Print server (as you mentioned this) by universal print? I have no idea if any of that will be useful but the point is to work in a cost effective and efficient manner with the cloud, stop thinking ’servers’ and start thinking ‘service’