MartinT

That could present... interesting scenarios!

We use SIMS Trusted Authentication. It's one less password to manage and for staff to lose. They appreciate it as they need quick SIMS startup in classrooms when taking registers.

Exponential-e. Zero contention, zero downtime in the last year. Excellent managed service.

Seconded on 2nd DC, you always need one to be running while servicing the other. For the same reason, each DC needs to be on a different host.

Five year groups for us via Schoolcomms and on the School Gateway app.

Thank goodness I've already applied 24068.

Obviously. We run our own Exchange server. I've been doing it since 2000. One day we'll move it all to the cloud but I'm in no hurry. It's just swapping one problem set for another.

Do you really trust your main internet and failover lines? We have an excellent connection, but I really wouldn't want to be completely reliant on it. As it is, all we would lose is internet and external e-mail. Lessons could go on as normal as could admin, planning, financials etc. I'm prepared to go cloud for certain functions, but no servers? Not in the near future.

Ouch, thanks for the warning. That will not go down well.

Our policy is that they can have their account as soon as the DBS clearance comes through. Many new staff want to get onto e-mail and Firefly during the summer break and that's ok with us generally.

Retention is a different thing, and we have already deleted data beyond the retention period.

We record all that data and we have international pupils who board. Proficiency in English is also a useful benchmark for EAL provision. I will double-check but I believe we make our own legal basis if it's in our policy to collect the data. It's certainly on our registration forms.

We use SIMS, which can look like it was designed by committee but is functionally rich and very stable. Next year, SIMS new generation will be completely hosted and browser-based, so you need to look at what is coming rather than how it looks now.

Agreed, but comparing even standard reports across different size schools is not going to be helpful. I can time running a couple of standard reports that take a long time for you just to give you a baseline?

12 cores showing as VISIBLE ONLINE here. It takes about 10s to fire up SIMS whether on the server or a fast workstation.

So if I were to go with, say, Office 365 A5, how do I price up Windows 10 Education clients, server cores, SQL and Exchange licencing? Do I still need OVS for that?

I was told earlier this week at a seminar that OVS agreements would cease. The thing that pricked up my ears was that the FTE staff count would stop, to be replaced by overall staff count. This would put the staff count up considerably (we have quite a few part-timers). I'm currently spreadsheeting my options but it looks like A3 will be the best bet for staff with A1 for students. Big question is what to do with Exchange? I'd like to keep our on-premises server but I need to study what migration to their hosting would look like in practice.

We install 365 for students but are mostly on full Office 2016 for staff.

Understood, but we're only using it to communicate issues, never to transmit documents or personal data.

Use Disk2VHD, a Microsoft utility. It's exactly what we used to virtualise our physical SIMS server. Worked a treat. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd

We use WhatsApp for SLT communications as it's secure and immediate. It's especially useful for late night or early morning incidents. If anyone can think of anything better that works across all platforms then we'll consider using it.

I would agree, proxy filtering for domain traffic and transparent for BYOD works best with Smoothwall.

2 x 1Gbps teamed. It's plenty fast enough.

That looks like the ticket - wonder why I hadn't spotted it before? Must admit Azure is a bit of a minefield!

We have all our servers as Hyper-V VMs in three Server 2016 hosts, and two more Server 2016 hosts acting as replica servers. I was hoping to use the 'Extend replica' feature in Hyper-V to further backup our VMs to Azure. When I tried to download and discover VMs using the Azure discovery tool, it told me that "Support for Hyper-V is on the roadmap and will be enabled soon." Apparently it only supports VMware! Am I missing something or is there another way of replicating a VM to Azure as a backup for disaster recovery (not to ever run it from Azure)?