Oaktech

Teams is not working properly for us - unable to set up audio calls. Bromcom seems sluggish. Outlook seems slow to send - messages are sitting in client outbox for minutes. BM says Power BI is giving errors for everything before eventually working 3rd of 4th go. Finance are also unable to log into banking to check incoming payments or run BACS.

People ask me why I have very little tech in my house... One of my colleagues couldn't turn the lights on in her house this morning because the app that controls them was down, and is still down, we assume due to a knock-on from crowdstrike.

We've been doing it since we all came back from Covid as part of a pilot. The fields have been updated a couple of times, most recently a couple of weeks ago, but yeah, as far as I know it becomes manadatory from September. Ultimately, whilst you can facilitate the connection the decision to decline or accept is probably above your paygrade and needs to be subject to a DPIA.

Did it myself - for 3 schools. Sharepoint Migration Tool makes this an absolute doddle.

I moved it on to a friend of a friend who is still using XP in a studio for legacy midi reasons.

I've got an A3 Live now most other soundcards just sound either really fake, or a bit 'crunchy' to me. I've got a couple of friends who podcast, but they're creative types and just want to talk for an hour and not be bothered with the technical details, so I use it for producing their podcasts! I was very, very sad when my X-Fi Fatality card with the drive bay IO wouldn't work on Windows 10.

We had a similar situation at my secondary school and the solution from Legal was that a a 3rd party appointed by the teacher's union should do it. Under the supervision of both a representative from school legal and the union, the 3rd party technician identified and listed the contents of the stick and suggested a separation of personal and school files and folders. The school legal and the teacher, via the union and after some back and forth about ownership of planning, eventually, confirmed they were happy with the separation of items. Under supervision from school legal and the union again the 3rd party copied off only the personal information onto a new stick of identical specification and gave that to the teacher via the union with a receipt. The original stick was given back to the school and destroyed in the usual WEEE stream. Cost the school a fair bit.

Our only mercury lamps are in the school halls, but they're big 'ol units with specialised lenses which will be horrifically expensive to replace. I've mentioned it to BMs and Heads to get the ball rolling to budget for replacements/alternatives.

PCMCIA was where it was at. Waaaaaay back in the day part of my remit was staff training across the 5 sites the company I worked for had. To do that I had a PDA (Ooooh, there's another fad right there) - LG Phenom and then an HP Jornada - that *only* had a PCMCIA slot so the ethernet card went in it, the dialup modem went in it, the compact flash adapter went in it, I even had a PCMCIA VGA adapter that was great for doing powerpoints on the move!

Eep...! My parents still have about half a dozen of them around the house!

Another +1 for Sway.

We've had multiple requests for that from several organizations. We've said that'll we'll whitelist individual addresses for safeguarding reasons but everything else goes to quarantine.

Couple of things - Can you test and see if running as admin allows you to copy paste?. Try restarting the print spooler. Try clearing the office cache (this persists between installs). Try ticking (or unticking) file - options - advanced - general - ignore other applications that use DDE.

If I lived closer I'd be 100% your man...

Bit of a first for me... We've got twins in our Foundation Year that are fresh into the country from another country where there is little to no support for child development issues and they have not been assessed like they would have done if they'd been born here. We suspect they are both autistic, they are largely non verbal and the words they do have are not in English, they are not toilet trained, they are prone to bite and cannot be out of sight of each other for more than a minute or so without screaming to point of vomiting and/or urinating. They've just been dumped on us as the only school with spaces that the parent can get to by bus before school starts. I come into the frame because they are completely obsessed with our smart interactive panels. We have disabled the screen interactivity to try and dissuade them, but they have now moved on to pressing the menu buttons to make the screen do something that they can touch. The classroom staff are at their wits end and are at the point of having to physically restrain or remove them from the class while the teacher gives input to the rest of the class using the board to stop them from running up and just pressing the buttons in a frenzy. They have asked if there is a way of disabling the screen hard buttons. I can always open the board up and unplug the button board, but Smart have confirmed that this will void our warranty, or we can pay £400 and Smart will come and disable them for us, and the same again to reinstate when the twins leave/move up. We've even tried to distract them with one of those switch/latch boards but that doesn't hold them. Can anyone find/know of a stick over the top lockable cover that would work to protect the controls? We've found things like thermostat covers but these are really too big. The dimensions are 140mm x 60mm. Even then I'm not sure how I can attach them to be child proof without drilling holes in the board fascia! I just have to be seen to try something so it can all be added to the rapidly mounting file of evidence about how unsuitable our mainstream setting is for them.

We have a budgeted plan in place now at all 3 of my schools to replace almost everything remaining by end of September this year, with a small contingency for devices and requirements that crawl out of the woodwork between then and 2025. It does still mean a small drop in creature comforts because we currently have TAs and MDSA supervisors who have their own laptops simply because we have spare castoff 4/5/6th gen devices. They will have to stop having laptops unless our Trust allows the use of a LTSC edition to tide them over until the next scheduled round of replacements of teacher devices in 2027/8.

I don't live with my Mum but I'm named on her insurance for everything - cars & motorbikes - so I can take them to MOTs, servicing and to shows. Best thing to do would be to speak to your insurer.

Their status page says incident acknowledged and that it is responding slowly, which is what i'm seeing - every action I've tried to perform this morning since 8:05 has succeeded, but it's taking between 30 seconds and a minute to do everything.

I did some work for a mate last holidays doing what I estimate was a similar size and complexity job. I've got chainsaw and strimmer certificates and appropriate equipment and he doesn't because he's a 'proper' horticulturalist who is more at home trimming roses and soft fruit bushes with scissors. He was basically guilted into doing a favour for a friend of his parents! All the other local companies who were approached wanted the wrong side of 4k and he charged just under 3k. Things are generally quite expensive here on the south coast, but it did take us all week and cost at least £400 in consumables and £1000 in waste disposal fees for both green waste and general waste so someone doing it for £1650 seems very reasonable.

Then ignore me, it's not the same issue!

Is the account they are signing in to office with the same as they are signing into the PC with, or at least does the email address match? I've seen this before we went fully intune where the user had an on-prem account which still had an old .sch.uk email address attached to it where the account they were signing in to office with was a new .org address and it seemed to be getting it's knickers in a twist over the difference, with it trying to sign in with account attached to windows in preference to the account that had been submitted in office.

We're a trust with, I think, now 40 schools - 2 secondary and the remainder primary ranging from 2500 pupils down to 90. We have a trust central team of 4 - Head of ICT who is mainly finanacial and strategic, a systems manager who deals with trust owned software, a deputy IT manager with responsibility for devices & infrastructure and a senior engineer who oversees projects and acts as a 3rd line for all schools. We then have around 15 technicians or systems managers who are owned variously by the Trust and individual schools. Most in-school technicians work with at least 2 schools, a few work with up to 6 schools, but those schools are tiny. I 'own' 3 schools, but I also help out as required. Edit to add... Our 2 secondaries are fairly close to each other and each have an NM and a technician plus a 3rd technician shared between them who has an AV specialism.

Sounds like a bottleneck somewhere - could it be at the firewall/nat device?

We've had Toob put in fairly recently and they went overhead from a pole. My mate who lives in the new development round the corner where everything is underground they did it with an automated mole that went in in a inspection chamber and popped up about 50m later by the front wall of his property.

Roland Stika are great - but we've got a PixMax 721PE and because it's big it's more than paid for itself in vinyl cuts for other schools in our trust. You can drive it with any software capable of cutting - like Inkscape, but the SignCut Pro software it comes with is subscription at about £100 a year for 2 seats, but is excellent.