Jamman960

What are you looking for from an ISP? I've had recent quotes from both along with a few others and they've come back as the most expensive by a fair way. If you only need connectivity without the hosted firewall/filtering etc I'd look elsewhere as well as those. I've used Cerberus networks for nearly 10 years without any trouble, they've just quoted us for a leased line and have come down to match the lowest quotes I've had. Otherwise I've had quotes from TalkTalk Business, hSo - both offered brilliant pricing. James

I'm sure I read recently that they were offering reductions for people who only had voice services on their lines, would be nice if they are doing it both ways

I've been looking at Signinapp - its not as fully functional as inventory etc but it covers most bases on the visitor and staff side of things, its app based so saves the extra costs involved in inventory's hardware(I also like the fact that the data is in the cloud rather than on a unit in reception) it hasn't got anything to deal with pupils by default but I've played around with creating an additional visitor type similar to staff for pupils but it never quite fit in properly, I had to use guided access to prevent access to the student portion from reception iPads etc James

I don't really see the issue with drinking coffee/hot drinks while driving, yes there's a risk but so long as you put it down in a suitable cup holder while you're not drinking & don't drink while maneuvering etc the risks are minimal I only really started doing it when I was driving all over the country between sites doing 1k+ miles a week

Had this a while back, ended up waiting for it to fix itself :/ My techie tried calling their support but typically they had no clue about anything that wasn't consumer based Edit: just tested from here and its working fine.

We've got worldpay phone/ip terminals, I initially had them connected up directly to a phone line to minimise security requirements then when we had issues they ended up being on the LAN - we get a lengthy questionnaire about PCI compliance each year, if we don't comply there's a £20/mo non-compliance fee. We mainly used them for collecting fee's but now that we can't charge the card fee's back we're getting rid of them in favor of online payments via wisepay and bank transfers. They also offer a web based card terminal. We've not had to issue any public IP's - they're just like any other wireless device, they create a secure connection back to the bank and go from there.

We use timely calendar for Wordpress on our website, we originally synced this with google but have ended up creating the draft calendar in exchange/outlook then importing via the csv plugin(also accepts ics files) in order to import it with categories/tags attached

Glad they’ve finally sorted the storage, Our eyfs staff and a few students tend to fill the 5gb with photos leaving no space for backups... not being able to purchase additional storage made using managed ids far more trouble than necessary

We use SchoolPost for general parent comms and Mailchimp for newsletters etc - I previously used PHPList but mailchimp is so much better. Since introducing our secretary to mailchimp I've not had to touch it at all vs converting and sending our newsletter myself every week for years beforehand! SchoolPost has recently announced a partnership with iSams for closer integration - we use it with Sims.net and its pretty flawless from handling pre-admissions groups, user defined groups as well as the usual year/reg/class groupings James

Should be interesting, Apple insider suggests there may be new entry level iPads with pencil compatibility. Hopefully they can keep the pricing at or below the current level and not pull any of their capacity stunts like they did with the air 2’s

Meant to reply to this a while back - we're using Freepbx on a Sangoma 60 Appliance. Your issues sound very odd as if something is stopping asterisk/Freepbx from reloading properly. We never need to reboot our PBX for anything with the exception of major OS upgrades. making changes is a case of pressing save then reloading the config which takes about 5-10 seconds and doesn't interrupt calls - I heard a buzz via a handset while reloading but that was it.

We had 2 kyocera’s before replacing all of our MFDs with toshiba’s and they were both worse than any others we had, I partly put that down to a poor service company *cough*wood We now have 5 Tosh’s and rarely need a service call compared to at least weekly between the 2 Kyoceras.

How many phones are you wanting in the new building? If only a couple there are a few diy options, setting up a freepbx box with an analog card then having Voip phones in the new build for instance

It’s a shame all these devices don’t log overall uptime or downtime themselves, our uptimes tend to get trashed by updates

Why we publish form lists: it enables staff to identify what form group a pupil is in quickly, they are used by staff often to check pupils have been accounted for or to find spellings(?) - thinking about this many of our in-classroom uses are better covered by Sims Impact of others seeing it: on the whole there is no impact however the list confirms the listed pupils attend the school and give an idea of age. If we were to have a celebrity's child on roll(we're an independent school) this info could be passed on to interested parties, in the case of looked after children or in some cases parents with court orders against them we'd actively not want to reveal the child's presence. Right now neither of these scenarios affect us so I'm leaning towards stripping back the info presented to reduce its usefulness for non school employee's, maybe having two versions of the list generated - one for day to day use(checking pupils in/out) and another for display with less info presented if really needed.

I did a data protection walk last week and found a few more examples: Pictures of pupils faces in balloons with their full dob & name underneath as part of a display (going to suggest year of birth is removed) Photo board in kitchen(well hidden) with food allergy/requirements listed (ok? - access is controlled and its in the pupils interest to ensure we don't accidentally give them something they're allergic to) Pupil house point/merit charts (going to suggest pupil names are shortened to first name only as its only used within the class) SEND/EAL register in staffroom(strictly no pupils)

Where do we stand with having pupil lists pinned up in classrooms/offices either as an entire form list or a shorter list detailing club assignments or music lesson timetables? in the past most of these only included first initial and surnames under form headings but some more recent lists tend to contain full names I'm sure we can't continue with publishing full names but would limiting it to a combination of initials/first or surnames be sufficient under GDPR?

I've had a demo of GDPR.co.uk and GDPR.School, I'm leaning towards GDPR.school as it holds the data in directly readable form whereas GDPR.co.uk provides a lot of templates that you then fill in and re-upload making it harder to use the data I did like the fact that it includes a staff training module which GDPR.School doesn't

I once brought a windows phone... having already had one before! I thought it had to have improved but I was sooo wrong

Ha sounds about right, i usually ended up sorting out the nursery pupil breakdown on one of them as sims never identified the part time ones... our registrar seems to be handling the whole thing this year

I’ve always classed anyone not there all week as part time on Slasc, I’ve somehow got out of it this year, did check to make sure it had been remembered though!

I read an article the other day which specified a level for shredder compliance. Just had a quick look and can’t seem to find a recommendation that isn’t on a shredder sales site... P-3 rings a Bell although the first site I’ve found today suggests p-4 and above

It all sounds great but lets face - it its all worthless, I'll give you £200 for the lot and collect by lunch tomorrow? I'm awful - I've never had any equipment quite that good to get rid of but tend to store things because I couldn't bare to see it go for scrap/minimal value let alone have some recycler collect it for free. I've still got a box of 40gb ide drives somewhere... just incase!

We're beginning to use Trilby TV, its pretty easy and allows anyone to upload video's etc for approval

Bit late but We’ve been using Schoolpost for a while, it works very well