jmak

With today's school census now done and dusted [emoji51] thoughts move on to workforce census. We use SIMS as our MIS, but don't use it for personnel management as we outsource most functions to a third party. Therefore completing the workforce census usually means manually entering data reported from the third party system. I can't see any reason we *need* to use SIMS. Can anyone point me towards a general set of guidance or requirements? The guidance from our LA is a set of SIMS notes.

So, Surface Pro 4 to Surface Pro to Surface Pro 6. Looks like they're taking the Apple approach to naming conventions too.

Disclaimer: ours are set up with hold print for all users as a global setting, so I haven't tried this. I think you can set this in the driver. We have several "virtual printers", eg reception_colour and reception_mono, which actually point to the same machine, but have different settings. They are deployed by group policy. I think you could set up a printer for students only and omit the authenticated print requirement from the settings in the driver configuration that you deploy to them.

Asked from a position of ignorance: Would that cause problems if you wanted to use "Teams for Education" eg to distribute files or homework tasks? I had am idea that each "Team" has its own library.

Edu sits above Pro in the hierarchy. You can install it on either.

Office 365 online and various services are free (to educational organisations). The installable applications are free for staff and pupils to install on 5 devices that they own. If you want to install on institution owned devices, you need to buy a licence. The options are as simple as you would expect (if you've ever tried to sort out M$ licensing before!).

Hi Your current GP only affects "quality" or "security" updates. The October update is one of Microsoft's semi-annual "feature updates". With the Edu edition, you are able to choose whether to be on the "semi-annual (targeted) channel" (hint: only people who enjoy being hated by their users or are struggling to find things to do should choose this option) or the "semi-annual channel". You set this in Group Policy. Having set the policy, you can then choose how long to defer its installation for up to 365 days. My view is that it should always be set to maximum deferment - if you decide you really want the feature update to install, you can always go in and reduce it to trigger the install. See here for details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/waas-configure-wufb#configure-devices-for-current-branch-cb-or-current-branch-for-business-cbb Note that cb translates to "semi-annual (targeted)"and CBB translates to "semi-annual".

I hope they release per device activation in the UK at the same time. Cover teachers and students on classroom/shared computers will run out of activations pretty quickly.

I think I might be seeing this - you've given a far more detailed description than what I have, but there are bits that make me suspicious. I'll check next week and let you know.

The hybrid shutdown/fast boot feature can mess up policy deployment too. Explanation here: https://www.petri.com/how-to-disable-windows-10-fast-startup-and-why-you-might-want-to Potential solution here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-10/171184-disable-fast-startup-power-management-option-via-gpo.html

The other thing about this scenario that seems fantasy to me is that anything useful will happen in a room with 120 students in it.... Perhaps lessons have changed since I was a teenager.

Starting from the point that you've been told to spec laptops and ignoring the other options: If it's a new room, could you have power sockets in the floor to allow you to charge the laptops at the desks? Or look for laptops with a USB C power input (we have some HP Chromebooks, so I know it's not unique to Apple) and buy a shed load of portable chargers.... I'm not sure why the SBM wants laptops, but I can see that on a multi-purpose room, you wouldn't want a desktop PC on every desk.

Large organisations all seem to end up with incremental numbers in email address IME. You can minimise duplicates by having longer user names (eg firstname + initial + surname@domain [email protected]). There's always a trade of between complexity and duplicates.

I'm interested - I like the speed, the skill and the technology - but don't very often find the races engaging enough to watch all the way through. I find the "official" YouTube highlights enough - usually about 10 minutes long. Definitely not worth paying a subscription for.

Azure AD Connect should let you do Google SSO for free. Still experimenting at the minute, but it's a feature you manage through Azure rather than on your DC or with any extra Google systems.

Any reason you need 12.2? Last time I installed on Windows, I used 12.1 - at the end of last term I used 12.9 and it seems to work perfectly with SB580s, SB680s and 6065 flat panels. Edit: is it normal for the version after 12.9 to be 12.10? I read 12.1 and 12.10 as the same...

I've just installed it on our newly imaged 1803 machines over the last week. No reports of it uninstalling yet! I've somehow mislaid my admin install packager, so had to do it manually [emoji17] I also manually installed the latest drivers before installing smart notebook. Don't know if that makes any difference, but it works...

Both sound highly likely to me. It's Amazon's basic business model - undercut everyone and control the entire market. Annoying that they do so by avoiding tax in many different, but legal ways. Rumor has it that they're not the most generous employer to work for either. Just imagine, if they paid a decent amount of tax, there might even be enough in the pot for schools to replace the broken stuff.

I've had this reported today too. (In case you were feeling lonely/special). My suggestion was to use Chrome (Actually my first suggestion was that the internet must be broken from being full)

This definitely sounds like a scenario where you'd benefit from using some kind of synchronisation so that you only have to provision one set of accounts and users only have to remember one set of credentials. You can either create accounts in AD (can be achieved with Azure AD Connect) and use them to provision the Google accounts or create accounts in Google and have them provision AD accounts (Google Cloud Directory Sync). Both are free for education users. A couple of links to get you started: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7497916?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/106368

I've used this for years: https://www.solarwinds.com/free-tools/active-directory-admin-tools-bundle Lots of information on the forum - it's where found out about it and got support on using it.

Blocking USB with GPO seems fairly straightforward and reliable. The issue for us is cameras/SD cards. It seems quite difficult to block one and not the other - plus of course, there's no reason a member of staff couldn't just store all those confidential files on an SD card.... If anyone knows of a policy that could restrict to read only of file type jpg, that would be great!

Bit scared to jinx it, but I followed the Microsoft instructions to create the policy and I use a unc path pointing to netlogon. No problems so far....

To catch people stealing from you! Makes sense. Sorry I couldn't help.

What is it that you want to achieve? Who are you sharing the file with? It sounds like what Google Classroom was designed to help with - each pupil gets their own copy of a file to work on. But I may be getting the wrong end of the stick [emoji846]