MartinT

Yes, understood, and we do get specific consent for those things.

We've been advised by our lawyers to apply Gillick competency and therefore gain consent from all our pupils (11-18), which we do via Firefly. However, being a school we come under GDPR's Public Task basis and therefore consent is not strictly required.

Schoolcomms here, which integrates well with SIMS and has a great parental app, too.

Lenovo here too, they are built to last. About £600 compared with about £1300 for the Surface Pro for SLT.

Presetting them. We have to be able to work on them and rescue them, so passwords are kept in a secure database.

You have to have an exception machine or two for mandatory USB encryption. For instance, our Kyocera copier PaperCut apps are updated from the USB socket and there is no way to get one to read a Bitlocker'd USB drive. Don't make your own machine the exception, though. It's important for staff to see that we follow the same rules as everyone else.

I don't care, they get a Windows laptop so if their Mac can't read our Bitlocker'd USB drives it's tough!

We use Room Booking System to integrate with timetabling from SIMS, but otherwise keep the two systems separate as they serve different functions.

Don't even go there......! Because our parents are old fashioned and kicked up a storm when we stopped printing them.

The person who does calendar printing uses the SOCS filtering to create an output file to send to the printing company. Meant to add: we have flags for Staff, Students, Parents etc. so filtering the output (or iCals feeds) is easy.

We use SOCS, which feeds our website, Firefly and Outlook.

That would be me

We were strongly advised by our legal counsel not to recruit a DPO, at least until or if it becomes mandatory for a school. I am the Compliance Officer (Data) which is our way of skirting around having a DPO. It requires specialist legal knowledge and no-one in the school is qualified. Good plan. You're missing one important bit: consent. From students, staff, parents and alumni. There's quite a mechanism behind it. We even have separate consent for permission to publish photos.

BitDefender in Smoothwall, Defender in W10, Sophos AV in Macs.

We have RemoteApp for staff (much safer) and use RD for ourselves.

My tuppence worth: Host machines need disk speed and RAM more than CPU power, especially when hosting SQL or Exchange servers. All of my Dell hosts have RAID-10 disks with spinning SAS drives and caching PERC controllers. Server failover is still not as reliable as a hotspare disk, which allows the server to continue on smoothly until I can swap the drive out. Dell servers and PERC controllers are, in my experience, very reliable. I buy them used to stretch the capital budget. All hosts have 128GB RAM and run Server 2016 with Hyper-V. I don't have a SAN as it's another single point of failure. Single disk server? No thanks.

He did, and the championship is pretty much evened out! Worrying that both Ferraris suffered from tyre issues. Ricciardo raced a blinder.

Use Sky Go to watch the F1?

Agreed with the above - Vettel should have been black flagged. Otherwise, an enjoyable race and good to see Ricciardo win one. Was also strangely pleased for Stroll who deserved a break from the constant bashing by his critics.

Yep - my Surface Pro 4 with dock and a 24" monitor make for a great workstation.

The i5 in the Surface Pro 4 is good enough for even heavy work (I use one). Get the SLT a 22" monitor if they need a big screen. All our SLT with Surfaces are very pleased with them. Otherwise, they can have a 14" Lenovo Thinkpad.

That was going to be my approach, too. I have two hosts on 2012 R2 and one on 2016.

I'm going to be brave and create two new DCs in my hosts, move the FSMOs, DHCP and DNS stuff over and demote the old DCs in hardware. Probably do that in Half Term.

Good tip - thanks!

I have my first Server 2016 Standard running Hyper-V and another copy of Server 2016 running as a VM. No issues so far. The big test will be installing Exchange 2016 in the VM and migrating mailboxes from our existing Exchange 2013 running on metal. Any gotchas I should know about?