MartinT

To be honest, I thought it better than the dire Philip Pullman effort (His Dark Materials), where the acting of all except the lead girl was so wooden that distant shots of the airships were a welcome relief.

Exponential-e for our 1Gbps leased line, Southern Communications for our failover 70Mbps VDSL.

No, we allow chat but have disabled Skype calling which really irritated teachers.

Ah I see, we use Smoothwall's reverse proxy for e-mail, RemoteApp, Firefly, LANsweeper etc. and it all works very reliably. I use RD a lot at home for sorting things out remotely. You do need a wildcard certificate, ideally, for allowing all these https services through.

I'm not entirely clear on why you are mixing port forwards with reverse proxy. Are you using Smoothwall's reverse proxy, and is your external address of the form... https://remote.domain/rdweb ...leading to the IP address of the RD gateway server?

Apart from some members of staff, I would say we never got full engagement with Firefly. We don't have parent access either. It's been used as a glorified file repository, which Teams and SharePoint easily replace, and only a few staff use assignments, which Class Teams fully replace. Those staff have quickly moved over to Teams and OneNote of their own volition. That leaves the VLE pages, which I am yet to decide on how to move to SharePoint. Firefly is way too expensive and I get the idea that development has slowed down considerably. When we pay for Microsoft 365, which we need, why should we pay for Firefly too when all of its functions are well served by the MS suite already? That's been my justification and it has been accepted by everyone so far.

We've rolled out Teams since August. The take-up and acceptance has been impressive - there are 250 Teams as of yesterday. A mixture of Class and Staff Teams. Since we are phasing out Firefly, and decommissioning our file server, I have spent every day migrating data into Teams or SharePoint. We're very nearly done, with the bottom of the barrel rubbish left to sort through and move or delete, as appropriate. As classroom tools, Teams and OneNote are superb and all the students have Teams installed on their laptops and phones. Streams is good for our video content, too.

That's been my policy for years. We have an unfiltered Exponential-e leased line and a Smoothwall server. It's a lot easier to fault-find, especially as our leased line service has been outstanding over the last 5 years.

The IT Teams should be very insistent that network/client security is a priority regardless of whether the SLT are interested or not. Don't be passive and wait, put a migration plan together and request that they sign it off or offer an alternative. Don't take no for an answer and if they insist on deferring then ask them to direct you to that effect in writing. I guarantee that they will not want to put their neck on the block and will accept the plan.

I've just started using my new Surface Pro 7 i7 16GB 256GB. This thing is a beast, never mind the spec comparisons that suggest a mild improvement. Compared with my previous Pro 5 i7 it seriously moves through work with lightning opening of apps. Used with my dock and 24" monitor at work it's a great workhorse. I have yet to see how battery life will pan out when I'm next at a seminar.

That's a lot better than the older clunky updater.

No W7 clients here for a long time. Our 2008 R2 file server will be decommissioned at Christmas and we have been migrating files to SharePoint & Teams since August. It's a long old slog but a great opportunity to sort & delete wherever possible.

That's a shame, as I was targeting Fortigate once our Smoothwall multi-year payment expires. However, Smoothwall have improved the broken roaming so I'm not inclined to rush into a decision just yet. Disentangling from one to the other would be a non-trivial project.

Did you set the correct domain in AD, if you have a choice? We have two domains and need to select the correct one for external use. I thought the onmicrosoft.com accounts are only created for master admin accounts not in your AD?

If you perform 1, 2 & 3 and then create a new AD account, provided it's in a sync OU it should sync up and become available. You can then login directly or use the OneDrive tab in the Admin console to restore all the files and give it admin rights.

Pulling signature data from AD keeps it structured. Doing it at the time of sending is better as job titles in the sent items are a snapshot of the info at that time. If a job title changes, it'll change some way along the thread.

No, I was really referring to keeping e-mails from becoming bloaty in size.

If anyone wants to see what Exclaimer can do, PM me your address and I'll send you a message, complete with e-sig.

Yes, it happens - usually when it's been through a shit phone e-mail client. Most of the time it's well preseved but it depends on how cleanly HTML e-mail is handled. I forgot to mention: optimising the logo so that it's properly sized and doesn't require scaling down is the way to keep it small and efficient.

You need WSUS Automated Maintenance by AJ Tek, it's excellent and keeps WSUS properly up to date and shrunk. We run WSUS in a VM and it works the way it always should have done.

Exclaimer Signature Manager is what we use in our Exchange server. We have the school logo, name, position, telephone and the website as well as some small icons to our social media. It works very well. Professional branding is important these days.

I use 4G at home dedicated to streaming music, it gives me a reliable 35M connection. Our wired broadband is only 20M.

I've just received the go-ahead to uprate to 1Gbps. Yay!

I've just been quoted £508/mo (inc VAT) for an upgrade from 300Mbps to 1Gbps. This is quite a lot less than we were paying before on a 36 month contract (2 1/2 years in). Since we are moving heavily to cloud storage and services now is the time to get the line uprated, so I'll kick off the approval process shortly.

You want all your eggs in the cloud basket. You can't have that and a slow connection or else you'll get no end of complaints that it was a bad move.