smarties11

Hi All, I'm looking for some printing stats from secondary schools. If you have something like PaperCut and have these statistics, I'd be really interested to know... The number of pages your School printed between September 2023 and August 2024 - all printing, across all printers and photocopiers within your School The number of students on roll We've had our eye off the ball with print volumes since COVID (stopped monitoring and recharging due to COVID 'catch up') and they just seem to be escalating; we've a new Reprographics contract in place now and are starting to bring that back into line, and now our focus is turning to the rest of the School's printing estate; with a view to going down a managed print & virtual queue route. We already have PaperCut. I'm looking to get data from as many Secondary Schools as possible so I can see where we fit, as an average..... Thank you 🙂

+1 for this; we have used Wasabi delivered by AutoData for a few years now. We use Altaro rather than Veeam but it's completely seamless with native support in the Altaro UI. I've done numerous test restores over the years and had no issues.

This seems a bit backwards to me. Surely you have to "be aware of it" more on a physical machine? Hardware failures are much more likely to happen on a consumer / business desktop. Your virtual infrastructure presumably has better levels of redundancy and resilience - dual PSUs, UPS, RAID / storage spaces direct, and hopefully some form of HA / clustering. For a service as critical as a phone system, it should be on your most resilient platform. We run ours on our Hyper-V cluster so it auto migrates in the event of a host failure and when we apply patch Tuesday updates.

Introduce your Tech department to OnShape. It's completely cloud based and free for education; a lot more accessible for students too as they can easily use it at home without installing any software. Running in the browser means it works with tablets, chromebooks etc too.

Thanks; yes, we've submitted a framework quote request and will see what comes back. Are you able to say which supplier and brand of MFD these costs relate to?

Hi, Yes, framework quote has gone in through CPC now so will see what that yields; however I'd still be interested to hear the price per click being paid by other Schools whether that be a framework quote or otherwise as my experience of frameworks so far (on IT hardware) is that I've always been able to achieve a better price myself through negotiation etc. @gszech - reliability and support on RISO has been a mixed bag. The machine supplied brand new has been very reliable with little issues; but they also supplied a refurbished machine and that one has been just terrible. The engineers are good, they turn up quickly and they repair; but where RISO have let us down is having someone to talk to, to discuss the ongoing issues. We had a not very good account manager and then no account manager for months; having said that the new account manager is very good and seems very genuine too - but the cynic in me says we are approaching renewal...

Hi All, We are just starting the process of procuring new photocopiers. We currently have three RISO machines - one with full booklet making and folding and two with small duplexer and stapler. We've got a renewal quote from RISO, and two quotes from local companies. Also going to look at the frameworks. I was wondering if anyone would mind sharing their price per page copy charges for A4 colour and B&W, which company you are using and which brand copier? Obviously there's a lot of factors to consider particularly where we are already RISO and staff are used to the 120ppm output. Thanks!

I've migrated our SIMS from SQL 2012 to SQL 2022 in the last few days. There is a link to the documentation in the release notes for the SIMS Summer 24 release, which is the first version to support SQL 2022. It's pretty straightforward, and ESS provide a migration tool which does all the heavy lifting for you. Essentially you install SQL 2022 and then use the migration tool which backs up your SIMS database and then attaches it to your new instance. If you log a case with ESS they will provide you with the documentation and the tool - but if you're struggling, PM me here your email and I'll send it across.

Is there any update on this? I migrated our DB over to SQL 2022 yesterday as it is now supported, but the DB is still in 2012 compatibility mode. The migration document doesn't mention whether we should now raise that to 2016 or 2022. Any ideas?

We've had better results with MsiExec.exe /passive /X{731F6BAA-A986-45A4-8936-7C3AAAAA760B} /qn For us, without the /passive, the installer doesn't actually remove (it remains in add/remove programs and the key is still present at HKLM/Software/WOW64Node/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Uninstall) The /qn makes it run silently and with no UI HTH

Hi All, We're having our Food & Nutrition classroom refurbished over the summer. The teacher will have a teacher demonstration station at the front of the class and I have suggested it might be a good idea to have a good quality visualiser / camera set up over her station linked to her 75" smartboard so that students can see what is going on without crowding round. It's likely to be used to demonstrate food preparation/chopping and cooking on a hob. I was just wondering if anyone had done similar and could recommend a particular camera or visualiser? It needs to be easy to manoeuvre into position to get the right angle, and as it will be used near a hob to show cooking in saucepans, we need to consider IP rating and perhaps anti-fog lenses etc. Thanks!

Thank you! Yes, we are Net-Ctrl customers and they installed our existing deployment :-) Great company!

Hi, We're looking to expand our Ruckus coverage into a couple of rooms which were recently converted. Full WiFi replacement is on the roadmap within the next couple of years so wanted to save costs here rather than buying new APs. Does anyone have any Ruckus R510 APs available that they are ripping out / no longer require? Would consider other similarly specced APs. Happy to pay, if your accounts department invoice us we can pay by BACS. Just thought I'd try a trusted source here first before hitting eBay! Thanks!

We have both of these 'auto download' options ticked, they have been set this way since we first started using SOLUS. But auto download shouldn't mean auto deploy? This has never happened before?

I imported the new fileset at the same time too. ESS have responded to say that the fix is to deploy Consolidated Workstation Patch 2 from SOLUS. I think that the patch includes a DB patch, but because SOLUS is sending out the client updates automatically, the DB patch isn't in place. Massive failing by ESS here!

Yep, same here - users are being prompted when opening SIMS and in some cases the SOLUS client has both re-deployed the previous release and then the CWP immediately after using the normal process flow where it gives the user the option to 'deploy now' whilst it's counting down from two minutes. We have not deployed the patch in SOLUS, its status is 'downloaded' and there is no evidence of it on the deployment history. So it seems that ESS can now decide when we get the patches deployed?! Seems odd when this patch is only required for early years Schools. Additionally, this Consolidated Workstation Patch 2 has messed up the census for us - census returns can now not be created or edited. Logged with ESS but for now have disabled SOLUS and done a manual reinstall of SIMS on the census admin PC to roll it back.

Haven't got any advice for you I'm afraid, but we see the same problem here. Thankfully we don't have too many staff with newer Androids and those that have for now we have given them a captive portal password on our visitor SSID. It's only my list of things to investigate. This is the one thing that Apple have right IMHO - our apple users simply enter a username and password, hit 'trust' on the cert and job done. No messing around with setting do not validate and making sure username is in the identity field etc. I still hate Apple though 🤣

Hi All, Has anyone noticed that recently, Microsoft have appeared to cap the amount of items that are returned in an Address List? For example, we have individual 'teachers of' distributions lists for all students set up (managed by Salamander). We have these in an address list that staff can choose so they don't clog up the GAL or any other lists. Previously all 800-odd of these would be shown in Outlook (desktop) when you chose the address list. Now, it only returns about half of them, stopping at L in the alphabet. You can access those beyond L, but only by using the search - and the search doesn't match any part of the display name, it's a 'starting with' search so in our use case you have to prefix "teachers of" and then student name for the search to return anything. We're going to remove the prefix to address this in the short term. In Outlook (New) or the web version, the behaviour is different in the sense that no items at all are returned. You have to use the search in all cases (and again with the prefix). I just wondered if anyone else had come across this and whether there was a setting buried somewhere to change this behaviour? Thanks :-)

Just a quick message to say thanks to everyone for their replies - I've only just had time to come back to this thread but the information is appreciated. Looks like we'll have to bite the bullet with Pro licenses for those requiring access to the data, if that's what our SLT require. Thanks again!

Possible that they were given a premium trial account when they first accessed the dashboard? It's the default workflow if you don't have a license at all. Also possible that it has changed, as the information I read online lead me to believe that publishing via Teams or SharePoint worked as a view only without a license.

Hi All, I was wondering if anyone could help me with Power BI licensing? A member of staff here has produced various dashboard in Power BI, which they would like to now share with staff. This had been working fine, however now the staff premium licenses have run out, it is asking them to upgrade their license. I did some research online, and what I was reading suggested that if the dashboards are published via Teams or SharePoint, then users assigned a 'viewer only' role would be able to see the dashboard without a pro or premium license. However, in testing this doesn't work - they are still asked to upgrade. Then, I read that the dashboards need to be published into a workspace configured in PPU (premium per user) mode - we did this, but again, users are still prompted to upgrade. We're now thinking, based on another article, that the workspace needs to be in premium capacity mode - however this is very expensive. So.... Is there a way to publish the Power BI dashboards, for staff to consume data (but not edit) in a viewer only role, without them having a pro license? At the moment it seems our only options are to buy Pro licenses for staff, or to purchase premium capacity. EDIT: Just to add, we are licensed on the A3 plan. Thanks :-)

Thanks Gary! Do you have a link to you pricing model?

No problem! What are you using for your VC rollups btw? I use the script from vcredist.com and deploy by SCCM but if there's a better way let me know! We don't install Avid Link Desktop. Just Sibelius itself, the fonts and the VC Redists. Then the license server on one of our servers to handle the licensing and checking in/out.

@Stevecee - just wondering how you got on with this? We have a student who is visually impaired and will be using an iPad for their mocks in January - so wanting to get it right ready for the public exams next summer.

Yes, I could definitely do this to be fair - the paid plans on Freshdesk do allow custom fields which we could add for paper stock, binding etc. The Papercut solution is a lot more user friendly though when requesting job options and then gives the job operator a print room overview showing what is waiting for printing, what is awaiting further info, completed jobs, ability to sort by job type (colour/B&W, lamination etc so you can group jobs together).