Jamman960

We don't use iSams(I wish!) but use Fee's billing in Sims instead. We carry out the bill run during the last week of term/first week of the hols - we don't rollover until the usual time. I haven't had much involvement for many years but I'm pretty sure they just bill each year group as is for the year above ie Y2 fee's get applied to the current Y1 etc then they don't bill year 8 in our case as they've all left. Probably worth contacting iSams support for advice, billing now is fairly normal but you certainly shouldn't have to rollover this early (our registrar goes nuts whenever I suggest we rollover early!)

We use iSmash, they send out a courier and return fairly quickly. It takes a week or so to sort out a larger batch. You can also drop them into your nearest store if you prefer The quality of the repairs has been great compared to some horrors I've seen from others (loose home buttons, unresponsive touch screens) We get a 10% discount via business account, all repairs are carried out then invoiced to the school. James

It worked surprisingly well until someone managed to pull the socket off the wall which must have disturbed it 😂

Oh dear, at least they attempted to use a coupler, I found a cable that had been twisted togeather and taped with electrical tape once

I wonder if they'll kill off legacy compatibility, there has been a huge shift in the last few years from getting things to work no matter what towards being a security risk once out of support or development.

We've placed a few extra signinapp terminals around the school for staff to use and also encourage use of the companion app, I've just enabled auto sign in as its now pretty reliable. Getting them all to sign in reliably wasn't too bad but getting them to sign out has been impossible.

I was about to say no as its not been possible in the past, the justification was always that in certain situations you need to be able to use airplane mode etc etc but I just checked JamF school and found it, according to the intune docs its also there - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/configuration/device-restrictions-ios I'd be careful though as turning the wifi off and on again helps in many situations. Pupils losing their passwords then trying too many times is a real PITA, our usb network dongle helps for many situations but there's always the kids that have tried 7+ times and have disabled it... sure it was an accident

Haha, never get to play april 1st pranks here as its never during term time, even this year they all finished yesterday Also fairly local here, closer to home than work - would definitely be up for a kent NM's meeting at some point!

We use Freebpx, took a bit of setting up initially but now just runs quietly in the background. If I were to do it again now I might look at 3cx but FeePBX does what we need at the moment. So glad to be away from our previous digital system, we previously paid around £12k/yr in leases, support, ISDN lines & calls Now the only ongoing cost is the SIP trunks, calls are all included

Salary is £36,000-£42,000 according to their website, sounds like an interesting role

I originally created an account using a fake name etc but I lost access, none of the DOB's I might have used worked and they wanted ID documents... Now I've got the schools facebook page under my personal account and our marketing manager handles the updates/general management of the page via her personal account. As far as I can see there's no way for anyone to see that the account is in any way linked to me, I'm not friends with any of the other admins.

Stas detects logins via the ad server audit logs so if the Macs are authenticating to AD they might still get picked up

We're currently using 3 freshdesk instances, IT(paid), Accounts, Maintenance(free) although I plan to bring them all into the same instance with different groups

FYI when using the Gov.uk link and entering the school's name or postcode the input is case sensitive so requires capitals in the school's name or a space in the postcode to be recognised. I've setup a page on our own website with links to the how-to document, the Gov.uk link as well as an embedded MS form to submit the details to us. A QR code linking to this page is going to be stuck onto each of the self-test kit boxes.

If the wonde solution integrates with Gov.uk and pushes the results upstream without our end users having to first give results to gov.uk and then us it may actually be worthwhile but I suspect they'd still need to submit results to gov.uk first and then inform the school. I've just setup a microsoft form to handle it so far, I might take a quick look at wonde's solution though.

5k is a lot but probably what it’s worth. I managed to get hold of 2initials.school which works well - someone’s sitting on the .co.uk version of ours and hasn’t responded to my emails I think people are more accepting of the newer tlds and I’m coming across fewer forms that refuse .school

if you upload it to microsoft stream and set the language it'll transcribe it for you.

I've recently changed from Network Manager to IT Infrastructure Manager, covering anything with IT involvement essentially

No sounds like an awful idea, test nerves seem to play a big part in the actual test, if you’re not confident enough to get over it and drive safely under pressure you shouldn’t be on the road. I guess this has some parallels with GCSE’s and A levels, you risk lowering standards and watering down the qualification, even if in practice this isn’t the case it’ll be damn hard to prove otherwise against perception.

We've used STM Dux cases from the start, I looked at a few other options recently but keep going back to STM

Is the interview with someone on a remote system? if so you should be able to connect to that without setting your end up If needs be run the device from a 3/4g connection to bypass firewall

Without exchange licenses pupils won't have a calendar within Teams, its not the end of the world. We went through lockdown without it but have now implemented mailboxes for all so that they can follow their timetables without us having to give them complex instructions.

That'd explain why the admin center has been running like treacle all afternoon...

We use radius with great success, I initially tried the app but it was very hit and miss. Our radius accounting is done via our wireless controller(ruckus) which points to the Sophos for accounting and NPS server for authentication, I imagine both ways are just as effective. James

You can also trigger a sound via mdm... great for finding iPads that have been “lost” inside the pupils bag/locker! ♂️