Oaktech

The deal breaker for us is the lack of APK support. Practically everything the ICT or Science curriculum demands wants a app.

We're using a self hosted OSTicket. Runs fine on a desktop PC with a moderate spec.

OSTicket self hosted is currently doing it for me... Microsoft Lists may be the way forward as we are looking to host less and less on site.

At home, it would be merely an inconvenience for about 2 weeks, we normally cook on electric, but I have a camping gas stove with grill and several large blue bottles and both a large battery backup set, and a petrol generator capable of keeping fridges and freezers working and several large cans of fuel. If the worst came to the worst I have a stream in my garden I could collect and filter water from. At work we have about 2 hours worth of battery backup to keep telephone systems up long enough to contact parents. After that we'd be out. We're fully cloud based.

You'll be pretty much on your own... I did it after a cleaner filled one of our screens with pink spray during Covid and InVentry wanted £1500 at the time to replace it. Initially I just had the HDD out and put it in another machine with a ELO 17" 4:3 touchscreen left over from an old catering system on it and their support didn't notice remotely. Unfortunately we had a lot of complaints that you had to poke the ELO really hard to get it to do stuff, so I bought a W11 compatible 'industrial' touchscreen PC from one of the Chinese B2B portals for £300 - they even customised the UEFI image with our school logo! I had an issue with a student with a duplicate admission number (thanks Bromcom)and whilst sorting that out they noticed the hardware had changed & threw their toys out of the pram. Since then InVentry have sent me an email with a link in it to download new software when it is released, they won't update it themselves and I have to fight with them and prove every time that it cannot be a hardware issue before they'll do any support. Partially as a result of this as well as escalating costs, inflexible sales & support channels and the inability to sync 2 MIS into a single Inventry system we're moving to SignIn App in October this year.

Unfortunately I can't, the pricing has come down from my Trust in a briefing but they are sufficiently sure about it that they are handing it out to business managers to budget on.

Couple of things occur to me... Is the cabling/switching OK. Low power standby drops to 10/100 and some switches don't appreciate the re negotiation without a restart of the client Have you tried the downloaded driver from HP? We had similar issues with our USFF elitedesk devices and in the end the driver from HP fixed it - there was a 'green ethernet' setting that had to be turned off for it to resume reliably.

Xibo in docker on two sites... Rock solid, but not a huge fan of using it, maintaining the content seems to be beyond everyone except IT despite training. Yodeck free on the other. No complaints about usage, much more intuitive, the head maintains the content without input from IT. My only comment is that I've been through 3 pis and 5 SD cards in 5 years. It seems to eat them.

I've been quoted 96p first year for an individual device but there is suggestion, not confirmed by MS yet, that it may be as low as 75p per device if bought in blocks of 50 devices, rising comensurately year on year.

It's OK. Just OK, nothing more. Support for us has been OK but our trust has quite a big contract so I wonder if we get better support because we're worth more? Everything else about the product is so-so, it usually works, but it's pretty sluggish doing so. One of my sites has been forced by trust policy from onsite Impero to it and they just don't bother using it because, and I quote, 'we know how good it could be, and it isn't, so why fight with it'. We don't rely on it for filtering, only classroom management.

You could do a lot worse than look at the Riello Sentinel (2.7Kw) or Sentinel Dual 3.6Kw up). https://www.riello-ups.co.uk/features/1-on-line-ups This is a refreshed product range building on the Powertecnique Saxon range.

That's interesting - we haven't noticeably had this issue since windows 7 - when we moved to 10 the problems stopped. The major difference in config at that time was that we stopped using ESET in favour of SCCM Endpoint Protection. We haven't seen anything like it on 11/Intune/Managed Defender.

We've been eset, sophos endpoint protection for SCCM and now Windows defender. Defender has so far been the best for several reasons... Unobtrusive to the user, configurable, good value even when we were paying for it, excellent vlaue now it's bundled with our E1 licensing.

We use Smoothwall - a smoothwall appliance as a child node in each school and then a parent appliance at the Trust HQ Policies are made on the parent and pushed to the child devices. Reporting Smoothwall Cloud portal. Means that we are ISP agnostic and in control of every aspect of our filtering.

So, I've run this past one of my secondary colleagues... Here's what they do. At the start of term MFA is enforced, no grace period. After 10 working days run a report to show accounts that have not been logged into/set up. Block them. Email to form tutors instructing those who haven't signed up to get on and do it or to visit IT office at break or lunch. If it's staff - email to line manager with the same instructions. Ignoring 2 reminders means the IT team hunt them down with a laptop and make them do it there and then. Run the same report at the end of every half term - block and repeat the process on the first day back to mop up new starters. Apparently the worst offenders are 1:1 TAs, Cache health/childcare students and the ALP kids.

We gave up too... We did have a sort of solution with Set ACL preventing read access to certain areas of the allusers program list for students, but it wasn't super reliable so we gave up.

Why? Just curious I've never been able to actually disable it, but I have been able to adminstratively lock it down to a blank search provider.

School logo with the child's year group number behind it here. As far as we know, nobody went as far as @Norphy's students, but there was enough moaning both from Students and parents that we gave up and designed something else. Which, for the record, was something I told SLT would happen. Sometimes they have a touching, if misplaced faith in the 'better nature' of students.

English, it's not a language, it's 5 languages in a trench coat and it'll follow other languages down an alleyway and rob them of their grammar.

Hmmm... There is a suggestion that it can only be started by the system account, because that's what disabled it. You can try the NSudo tool which allows you to run commands as various built in users. It will report as a trojan because that's how it gains the respective permissions. https://github.com/azraelrabbit/NSudo-1 I use the Major Geeks download. You can also try PSEXEC - it's less flexible, but arguably safer https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/psexec psexec \\localhost -s sc config WinDefend start= auto obj= "NT Authority\LocalService"

We're actually seeing it be quicker to nuke from orbit rather than in place upgrade anyway. If a device manages to do the OTA upgrade, great, but if it fails then we don't run a manual inplace we remove it from Entra and and build it with a stick and a WICD profile. A build from stick on a 9th/10th gen i3 takes less than 30 minutes from hitting f12 to being ready for first login including installing all our apps, an inplace upgrade takes at least 45 minutes.

Right click on taskbar is another policy User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar And have a look at various policies under there particularly "Remove access to the context menus for the taskbar"

sc config WinDefend start= auto sc start WinDefend Give that a go from an elevated prompt. As far as I'm aware it works on Pro skus upwards.

https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/student-discounts/ https://education.lenovo.com/?IPromoID=LEN794458 When we've gone through the process in the last 6 months, Stone or Currys Business have come in up to 20% cheaper. In their defence whilst the Trust has been placing orders in the tens of thousands it's been fairly large volumes of low margin tablets. We got much better discounts when we bought a couple of IT suites' worth of PCs a year ago and even better discounts & free upgrades from sata to sas when we bought servers.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/03/broadband-isps-report-uk-connectivity-problems-with-vulnerable-draytek-routers.html https://www.resetera.com/threads/psa-issue-with-draytek-routers-in-the-uk.1142901/ This looks like an attack on unpatched devices utilising the 10/10 CVE that was released last year. Or it may be a whole new issue. Reports seem to be mainly centred around the UK and Vietnam. Not an issue for me, but it might be for others!