jmak

Deprivation

Lloyds TSB? I was briefly involved in the merge project. Finding out that they were being forced to separate them was a proper [emoji2962] moment for me.

^^This. Every time. This

What do you call someone who doesn't know they're a werewolf? An unaware-wolf

We're looking for a replacement for SharePoint now that free storage is limited. Most users will continue with SharePoint, but we have a few users who produce very large volumes of data who also like the feature where a local copy is cached on the corner and remains in sync. They have a workflow where the system that's producing the data and the file store aren't suitable for processing/analysing it and they love SharePoint for that feature. Has anyone had any good or bad experiences?

We buy almost exclusively Dell computers, but one team bought a set of 12 HP 360° hinged model last year and we've had a 25% failure rate on the hinges so far

I had a 32" 4k at work and I passed it on to a colleague in favour of a 27" 4k as I found I was having to move my head too much and it was uncomfortable. I think it was the up and down as I now have a second screen alongside and don't have that issue. I have a 32" 4k curved screen screen at home which is somehow more comfortable. I suspect my desk at home is bigger so the monitor is further away. The 27" does have a shaper image - inevitable given its the same number of pixels in a smaller area - but the image on the 32" is very good. I think one of these would be better - but my work and home bosses both said no! https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/dell-ultrasharp-49-curved-usb-c-hub-monitor-u4924dw/apd/210-bgtx/monitors-monitor-accessories?tfcid=43590050&gacd=9685798-5560-5763017-289231472-0&dgc=ST&&msclkid=e1c52300f1661597696b4426aa7123a0&gclid=e1c52300f1661597696b4426aa7123a0&gclsrc=3p.ds

Edit: first answer below. I've never come across Applicaa before, but it looks like the answer to your prayers! Original answer: There was a workaround documented on here which allowed you to convert spreadsheet to a ctf which could be imported and quite a few people reported success. However, there's nothing supported by SIMS. The best we did was get parents to submit a form and then office staff were at least copying and pasting rather than retyping from illegible handwriting. Speed was only a small improvement. Accuracy was transformed.

The client should be the solution. You could set up multiple profiles in the browser (or use different browsers) for each account. Multiple domains is unusual for us; multiple mailboxes is the common one. The workaround we recommend is to open each mailbox in a new tab and then group the tabs together. The only reason I'm mentioning it is because we're finding more and more problems with all versions of the client, so we're often looking for workarounds.

We're pointing people towards the web client now. It isn't as fully featured as "Classic Outlook" but it's the only version that seems to consistently work as advertised.

I know Mav's post will wind some people up and it's much easier to say then to achieve. But he's spot on. I have similar conversations in my non-school setting. We're actually paying people and we could measure how much it costs us to fail to provide suitable IT kit for employees. It's still difficult to persuade people to spend the money.

Good work fella

We have it working on a subset of our devices. Method was: Apply for licences from reseller Create Entra group in M365 and apply licences Add devices to group Create and apply group policy I can check our policy settings tomorrow. There are options to set it up using the Office Deployment Toolkit or Intune. The GPO option seemed most straightforward so that's what I went with. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-apps/licensing-activation/device-based-licensing#steps-to-configure-device-based-licensing-for-microsoft-365-apps-for-enterprise

FWIW your reply made sense to me [emoji16] There was a lot in the OP - I just picked out a bit you hadn't covered

We have mostly won the battle to persuade users they don't need i7 and i9 processors by keeping i5s in stock. We mostly supply laptops and in real life, they're much happier with the longer battery life from the more efficient chip than the rarely used processing additional processing power. Our standard build matches what most people have posted: i5, 16GB, 512SSD. I do try to make sure we get a single 16GB RAM stick so that upgrades are cheaper and I have been specifying self-encrypting drives having read some articles about better performance and security for a few £s per unit.

What do the other 303 students do who aren't assigned a Chromebook? If you're managing devices that need to be available 100% of the time, I'd suggest around 10% of the deployed number. We also buy all of our devices with next day onsite repair contracts which means that the longest a loan machine should be out is one or two days.

You're definitely on the right lines. The main item missing from your list is checking updates on client machines - although you might have that covered in your checks on the servers if you're running WSUS. If you've got a managed WiFi system, look at reports on that too. If you haven't got a managed WiFi system, you should get one. My main recommendation would be to try to get some management software in so that you get all of that information on a dashboard and you only need to worry about the services flagged as exceptions. The next step would be to get a help desk system in place. When I was a one man band in a school, I failed to get people to consistently log requests, but I religiously logged all of the issues I dealt with. It helped me to organise my time and prioritise tasks. It also made it very easy to show SLT and governors all the work I'd done to keep things running smoothly. A lot of enterprise platforms for help desk and network management have free or low price offers for small teams, so there are good options out there. Lots of threads on here as a starting point. They had somehow got the impression that I wasn't doing much because things were running smoothly and the staff had gone from being extremely dissatisfied with IT provision to not having any complaints. The list of hundreds of resolved issues I could instantly produce in a report from the help desk system was an eye opener for them. And also for me - it showed me how underappreciated I was and I left soon after, but that's another story. If you get most of what you listed and some of what I mentioned sorted, it'll make a very attractive CV if your school management are too short sighted to realise how valuable you are.

22" is damn small nowadays. Could you get bigger screens if you mounted them on arms? It is desk depth the limitation?

Has anyone tried the "voice isolation" feature in Teams? We're currently using the Jabra Evolve 20 devices, which are supposed to have a noise cancelling microphone. Maybe the gen 2 devices have better technology - or maybe our office is exceptionally noisy...

Our office is quite noisy and people I'm in Teams meetings have complained that it's hard to hear me because the background noise is picked up. I've noticed it when other people in our office are on the same call as me. We've got matching Jabra headsets, although fairly low down the range. What do people recommend? I'm not too fussed about noise cancelling in the headphones, but not set against either. Personally I like keeping half an ear on what's happening around me, but I do want to stop complaints from people in speaking to.

I now regard Macs as an acceptable life choice - as per my replies earlier in this thread, they're not nearly the headache they once were, the hardware is good (apart from vulnerabilities in M2 and M3 chips) and at the bottom of the range the quality/performance/price equation is reasonable value in my opinion. Never cheap, but good quality hardware isn't. The Apple tax on upgrades is offensive - most in our estate are base model MacBook Airs. Some users have MacBook Pros and their use justifies it, but I can't see £3k machines fitting that, especially with budget limitations in schools. We bought one for our team, just to practice using Mac OS and managing it in Jamf. Maybe better value would be 2 x £2k Macs for the teachers and a MacBook Air for the IT team so that you're able to help them get better value from them. The extra money all goes on overpriced RAM and disk space. They're very efficient with memory and if you need that much storage, buy an external drive or use SharePoint/network share.

When I was about 6 or 7 years old I came home to a police car parked on the road outside our house. One of the neighbours had phoned them to complain about me cycling on the pavement. The policeman said he'd come out to make sure that the neighbours could see he'd attended, but his message to me was that he really didn't want to see me riding on the road. He couldn't tell me to ride on the pavement as strictly it was against the rules, but said if I was for any reason, then I should just try and stay away from our neighbours. Ahh the days of village policeman who could apply their judgement.

Most conversations I have about PDF editor go along the lines: Why do you need a PDF editor? - Because I need to create secure documents But, if you can use a PDF editor to make changes to a PDF... How is it secure? - Oh We then supply a Foxit licence and they promise to look into sharing documents securely on SharePoint using the guides we supply. Make sure to get managed education licensing - the saving grace is that we can reclaim and relocate licence when people leave. We were spending a fortune on Adobe licences allocated to individuals that disappeared when people left.

Both can be true. If Whatsapp isn't a school system, then they can argue that it's not in scope of a SAR. If you have an agreed process where they're permitted to use personal email for school business (banned where I work, but that's a separate issue) then their personal email is in scope. Realistically, you have no way to enforce that - they could delete it all - and your school would have failed to meet its legal obligations for processing data. It annoys me - if they volunteer to be a Governor, then they should be prepared to put in enough effort to check emails. However I would put together a system to automatically notify them via their personal email when they've been sent a message. If you use M365, giving them a school email address doesn't need to give them access after they leave. Set up Conditional Access rules so that you can delete the school's data and optionally prevent download of attachments. Set up rules to prevent forwarding.

That's the thread I found after you pointed me in the right direction - I'm not much of a Reddit user. The bad news is that it doesn't look like there's a single version of the Controlvault software that works on all the devices, so we'll probably have to help users one by one. Fortunately we only have a few hundred affected devices [emoji30]