jmak

For longer exposed lengths I've used this type of thing: Cabletex Spiral Binding https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cable-Tex-Spiral-Binding-BLACK-Cable/dp/B003CL6MVA/ref=zg_bs_200863031_4?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=GG7KFDN4TS62GQSPW3VT

Edit: post removed because it was such a stupid idea [emoji15]

I'd assume that uploading and synchronisation from MIS was part of the product description. Talk to them nicely and see if you can persuade them to be a bit more sensible - otherwise I'd start talking breach of contract and looking at other suppliers.

Similar to @Sheridan. The programmer we had only had a daily timer with the option for three on periods per day - no option for different times at weekends, no "boost function". I bought the Tado system for about £40 more than a decent programmer would have cost. I'm very confident it's more efficient than what we had previously. Can't guarantee it will save over a decent manual timer, but for £40 it's worth a punt.

They work fine in Reception and KS1 for us. For those users I have them set up in kiosk mode opening onto the sign in page for Purple Mash. Even for the older users, the username doesn't have to be clunky - you can set it to auto-populate the domain. Current models can run Android apps; I have one at home and use the Word for Android app (although usually only when working offline - the web app is pretty good nowadays). It's not as full featured as a full fat laptop running Windows 10 with MS Office installed, but if you're a "power user", a cheap Windows laptop won't be much fun either.

Yes and no [emoji849] You will have to pay for it at some point (although currently we're still using Smart Notebook 11.4 on Windows 10). However, direction from our SLT is that they don't want teachers to have to cope with learning new IWB software - and it's much cheaper to license Smart Notebook on a Smart IWB than a different brand. Currently there seem to be offers for Smart Suite 5 year subscriptions when you buy a new board. If you have predominantly Smart products, site licensing is relatively affordable. I keep hoping that we'll adopt Office 365 Whiteboard or Google Jamboard or even OneNote which would be free and work across all the devices we own.....

I'm not able to get there this year. Is there any chance someone could check out whether Purple Mash have any offers? Our three year subscription runs out soon and last time we signed up we did well from agreeing a subscription at Bett. Thanks [emoji57]

O365 works really well on Chromebooks [emoji3] In terms of familiarity with an OS, when I was at school Windows 3.1 was just coming out when I left. By the time I was working in a job using PCs it was Windows 95. It's a pretty big leap from 3.1 to 10 - I reckon Chrome OS is closer for users. I do agree that exposure to a range of OSs is ideal, but that might be difficult due to budget constraints.

GSuite for non-profit includes unlimited accounts at no cost(one of the few differences from basic). I will look at exporting options though.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. They actually have a data retention policy which makes sense, so I need to make sure what I implement I'm meets it. For files, I'm happy that we can do it quite easily. I will create a user called archive and anything which they are required to retain can be moved there with suitable sharing permissions. The area I was hoping Vault would deal with is email archive - especially for employees who leave and therefore have their accounts deleted. Having read more about, two things don't work with this approach; firstly you need a Vault license for each account you want to archive and secondly it doesn't work for deleted accounts. For now I'll take Google's advice and instead of deleting accounts, I'll suspend them. Then all I need to worry about is how they get rid of data they don't need to keep.

The club was originally quite small and although it was nominally a separate organisation, it was essentially run by school employees. It was therefore running on school systems. Over the years, it has grown and part of the point of setting this up is so that they are completely separate and have no reliance on school systems. Current price for GSuite for business for non-profits is £6.60/user/month. You can also buy Vault as an add on. It's £5/month/user. I presume I would only need to buy for the admin user? Would I need to archive anything apart from files and emails of people who've left? I'm assuming that any files owned by current users will remain available?

Any update on this?

In looking at prices for interactive boards. Can anyone give me a good reason why I should buy a V6265v2 at £2500 rather than an MX265 at £1900? I will include proposals for other brands, but this query is just regarding these two models. TIA

I'm setting up cloud services for our out of school club which is a registered charity which is associated, but financially entirely separate from the school. I personally prefer GSuite to O365, so I've started with that. However, it's missing a few functions that I'm used to having, specifically Team Drives and Vault. It's also limited to 30GB per user. I can get around the lack of Team Drives, but I'm worried that they're legally required to have email archives Is there a way around that, or should I bite the bullet and set up O365 with all the pain that is SharePoint? They would still have to pay for email archiving, but it's a separate service at 57p/user/month whereas with Google, they'd need the paid service at £6.60/user/month. Thanks

You know that Worcester is British in the way that Mini is a British brand? [emoji3] Doesn't make it bad, just that it's still German...

From what I read when I was choosing, the way they detect whether you're at home or not is different; Nest uses a motion detector on the thermostat to detect movement. Oir thermostat is in a room that is on average fairly unused - deliberately chosen for our old school system as it's then most likely to be at a constant temperature, but not suited to nest as it might be hours after someone comes home before the door to the room gets opened and it might even be unused for a while day while someone's at home. I also had doubts about it being able to predict our routine. With term time and non term time, plus a shift pattern meaning different days at home each week, I reckoned our household was beyond its design. I gather you can now buy a "home/away assist" add-on which uses the location of your phone in the same way as Tado. As per my previous post, not necessarily recommending Tado, but the different systems have different strengths depending on your use case. Also worth finding out exactly how they behave when they lose connection to the internet. My "Smart thermostat" is actually pretty dumb. It doesn't store any programming, so if it loses connection to the internet/remote server, it will just stay in the same state. Eg, I have it set so that even when I'm home, the heating is essentially off at night, but if the connection is lost during the day, it won't receive the instruction to turn off. Or if it loses connection during the day when I'm at home and I then go out, it would stay on; the server in Germany would know that I'm out but wouldn't be able to tell the thermostat to turn the heating off. That might be somewhere that the Nest system works better.

I use Tado which works well for me, but I'm not convinced I'd buy it now. I chose it to cope with irregular hours at home - it uses geofencing based on the location of your phone to ensure the heating isn't in when no one's home. Add you head home it turns the heating on so the house is warm when you get home. It also adjusts its start time based on what it learns about how long your house takes to warm up and the outside temperature. It does all of this very well, so why am I hesitant? You now have to sign up to a monthly subscription to get access to the Geofencing functionality.

Depends whether you want a big TV or something big enough to justify calling itself a home cinema. I sit about 4m from my screen and reckon 120" is about right. I'd barely be able to make out an 85" screen. [emoji12]

Not included for free on the free plans, but available on EES/OVS, so cost based on faculty numbers. As far as I can see and remember, it's also included on the O365 A3 and A5 plans, but finding it very difficult to get the confirmation from a Microsoft website. My only suggestion would be to ask a reseller to confirm. The cheapest way to get it is to add it to your EES subscription.

I'd be looking at something like this: https://www.personalalarms.org/product/suresafego-anywhere-alarm/

We've replaced most of our file server storage with O365. MS Teams is the intended interface, although I prefer SharePoint - a web page with shortcuts to the top level filters works better for me - and then use OneDrive Files on Demand for anything I think I'll use more than once. Check out the data privacy policies - they're explicit that no one at MS has access to your data. There's regularly speculation that there's a backdoor for the CIA or FBI, but it's always denied. My take is that I'm confident that MS are better at security than I'll ever be. Guidance from the UK government is that is secure enough. You'll find that most government data is on either MS, Google or AWS servers - plenty that's at least as confidential as what's on school systems.

I use a Draytek router - plenty of VLAN configuration options. I reckon 24 ports is about right for a switch at home (I have 11 in use) - although having run 2 points to the living room, I needed a mini switch at home as there's a high concentration of devices in one location.

Me too. First time round it was on price, but they're one of the most helpful companies I've used.

For a complete new build, I'd put in ducting. Anywhere you're planning on TV, put speaker connections on all four walls. At least some wired LAN - I get that you won't need it everywhere, but you're doing (240v) cable runs anyway, so why not stick it in?

I WON, I WON, I WON [emoji898] Sorry, I'll calm down soon... Commiserations to the unlucky - I promise to look after it [emoji41]