Oaktech

We use cloudstopmotion for stop motion - we use it for 3 year groups and it's about £120 a year for the storage upgrade.

This may just be us, but I've had a flurry of empty BCD stop faults in the middle of the June update - once fixed it always restarts updates at 33%. Over half the windows 11 devices we're running have experienced the issue. Information from the following link has fixed it for me every time: https://www.digitalcitizen.life/command-prompt-fix-issues-your-boot-records/

Update on this... Resetting our entire wireless estate overnight & updating it to latest firmware (it was only 1 version behind) and performing a network troubleshooter reset on the devices in question seems to have stopped it from happening. Fingers crossed.

Our MAT negotiates directly with MS on our behalf because we're fairly large. We're being charged £45 per year for M365 Faculty for between 60 and 80 licenses billed yearly.

My old school are using blender extensively and they have a dedicated high-performance suite (even though some of it is getting on a bit now) it still works for medium-weight Adobe, Unity, Blender & Autocad tasks. The spec of the devices vary as some have been upgraded over the years - 6th gen i7 or better, minimum 16-32gb ram, SSD primary storage and 1tb 7200 scratch disk. Some still have the original 2gb Nvidia 750ti but most have an an upgraded 4gb GTX1660. Blender themselves state a CPU less than 10 years old, 2gb GPU, 8gb RAM.

+1 for Libresoft

You're welcome! The only thing I would also mention is that Smart will fail to install if there are pending update actions, that's not new behaviour, but it's quite unhelpful as it often takes ages to retry. As well as the 'required' install for devices I've also made it 'available' for staff and deployed the company portal app to staff as well so if for some reason the deployment fails they can initiate it themselves from company portal.

I think it automatically removes & updates old versions. That's probably worth testing because it wasn't an issue in my scenario.

You don't need to, the content prep tool will suck it up... I made a folder called SmartNotebook, put the transformed MSI and the supporting folders in that and pointed the content prep tool at that folder. I then made a second folder at the same level called SmartNotebookIntune and made that the output of the prep tool. The prep tool will suck up as part of the package anything within the folder you start it in.

I've just done it for '22 is it different? I downloaded the full msi and the deployment designer from smart and made a transform with my customisations in it, then used Orca to apply the transform to the MSI to make a ready-transformed MSI, then used the Content prep tool https://github.com/Microsoft/Microsoft-Win32-Content-Prep-Tool to create an intunewin and then assigned the intunewin in the intune app deployment centre.

+1 for this guy. He was the only guy who'd touch the high power switchmode power supplies in QSC and PowerSoft amps back when I was doing audio engineering. He's also good with the flaky Epson UST power supplies.

I'm going to be all about the switches this summer... 8 Netgear swapped for Aruba at one school (they already have 2 Aruba switches so it's just matchy-matchy) Replacing 3 sets of 4x1Gb with 2 sets of 2x10Gb and 1 set of 4x10Gb at another - which is just a change of SFP & tails from my point of view as the contractor is doing the rest. but... 24 Unifi switches, 10Gb backbone, Cloudkey, LSZHCat6 from ancient Cat5 throughout most of the building at another. This one is going to be a b*llache as the has Head basically signed me up to be the cabler's skivvy for 4 weeks to get the price down! Which gets even more entertaining when we factor in that the MAT appointed contractor, procured independently, I had nothing to do with the selection process... Is my brother in law!

I give these out all the time - we have externals from the LA, the NHS, an external SALT agency, Peri music teachers - they all get a school address. That address only gives them what I choose to give them access to, for most externals thats nothing - they don't even get to see the student address book let alone any details? SALT gets access to an SEN folder in Sharepoint but she's signed AUP and has done all apropriate training as determined by the BM. We give them 2FA OATH tokens which are issued with a £10 deposit returnable on end of contract along with keys/fob lanyard and badge.

unless there is a very specific set or circumstances (like our oldest school ovens which have 3x 13a plugs - one for each oven and one for the hot lamp) multiple 13a plugs have one name, a widow maker. You need a 63amp socket with individual RCD above it, fed off an apropriate breaker in the nearest board. This all is the realm of a proper sparky. The sort that doesn't get out of bed for small power and lights! Once that is installed you can get various IP rated rubber ducky power breakouts to give you your choice of 32/16/13 sockets with internal RCBO breaker wiring.

This sounds like it's time for a cloud-first strategy...

You could do worse than look at the offerings from TechSoft https://www.techsoft.co.uk/products/laser-cutting

+1 for Google Docs

Bold of you to assume the switches were new enough to have STP.

At my last secondary we only split off by building for 2 blocks - one block was an ALP and they had all manner of behaviour issues which frequently caused network loops, the other had a high proportion of Macs. Otherwise it was split off: Wireless Guest Wireless Printers Macs Management Voip WAN link interconnect Digital Signage Everything else. My current primaries the only VLans are Printers, Voip, Management Everything else

As long as you aren't managing apps, it's a piece of cake. If you try to start manging apps it's PITA because each update has to be approved manually or the device won't get it, there is no 'pre-approve subsequent verions of this app' function like there is in the Google MDM.

We've done almost exactly this, this week - we didn't host in teams, the presentation was opened directly in the 365 PowerPoint webapp from Sharepoint and it worked like a charm with 32 kids on it. Couple of behaviour management issues with kids messing around with each other's slides, but nothing technical went wrong.

We are on-prem smoothwall with both On-Prem AD and Azure AD authentication and it's pretty good - the only thing I'd say is that the cloud filtering is really slow to update group membership, between 2 and 8 hours generally

I'd call the supplier and explain... Some of the termination boxes just have connectors inside and the tails can be extended just with new plug in tails, sometimes they need to be spliced in. If you touch them and something goes wrong the rectification fee from the supplier will be atronomical so it's better to let them do it themselves even if there is a fee.

I looked at InTune for this and the app management is prohibitively awkward, having to whitelist specific versions of apps, and each subsequent update...

My MSP uses Fortigate, for firewalling and loves them for that, but their filtering is barely fit for purpose and is not multi tenant scalable so uses netsweeper on top.