SYNACK

In most of my schools they are using windows 8.1 hybrid tablets which can do everything a laptop can do, stuff a tablet can do and also use flash. To be fair we don't use many metro apps as these are impossible to manage but the tablets are still really useful and integrate in a snap. iPads have snuck in at one school due to an Appelite who held high esteem on the PTA and got them brought, they have been no end of hassle, rubbish wireless - in comparison - and a never-ending battle with Apples filthy products and departments to keep the whole mess running for more than a week or so at a time before the VPP token/service gives out, Aplple profile manager goes nuts or the OSX server decides to corrupt the MDM profiles. Apples VPP support is non-existant, it took a month to get a reply by which stage we had fixed it another way. Apple themselves are rubbish to even get the VPP stuff through, that took another month with Apple NZ to set up an account let alone having to scan in a order form for their 'all digital' purchasing. I can't say I have dealt with many things worse than iPads or less reliable than Apple Servers iPad management. The one exception would be a Chinese IWB manufacturer who yelled at their local vendor for putting English speaking people on to them asking about their shocking software - XP ONLY drivers in the Win 7 era - and were equally inpolite to us. Back on topic Another school I have dealt with did get a stack of android tablets but literally just hired someone to manage them and monitor their use at a low rate of pay, not sure exactly how that worked out for them but I did note that they were all in a box in one room to be stolen about a month later so I'm guessing maybe not so well. I'm sure they are manageable with the right tools and for stuff like ebook readers I have recommended them. Universality wise I do go back to the little Atom W8 tablets though. I find mine infinitely more powerful, useful and versatile than an iPad along with better battery life, lighter weight and more responsive touch screen. All from a device that costs less than a lesser speced iPad.

Then you know that all the insane hassle of ipads is not worth it, its like herding cats :-S

Can I request an external mic on the stream capturing device that can be put in front of the presenters to make it a little easier to make out this year if that has not already been sorted?

Its more like Apple with their hardware brand, it should be like iOS or if it must like OSX where the cost is minimal as you payed a bunch for the device to start with.

Hi, we are trying to add comment moderation on Office 365 Sharepoint blogs and for some reason the Approvers group/permission simply does not exist, any ideas?

No we don't allow the DLNA advertisement of little Johnny's extra-curricular human biology homework to all the other devices on the subnet. VLAN hopping should not be a concern unless you have trunked interfaces offered out in the wild where tagged frames will actually be accepted. A guest VLAN should be native for the whole segment after it hits the WAP/Controller - depending on the system used.

rent a proper water blaster for a day? I'd lend you mine but lead time and shipping are prohibitive

Don't trust the server app, it is a POS and will fail or succeed silently in some cases. Best to plug the mac and a client into a separate small switch and test if it is still firing off DHCP. I had all sorts of issues with profile manager which would 'successfully' fail at initialising. Cured by a stack of reboots on the server even though there was never an error message or log I could find that explained itself. I would test it off network as above through a bunch of reboots to make sure the problem does not re-occour and maybe look at the remote access settings on the box in case it has been compromised. Basicly, don't trust the GUI, it lies and if someone switched it on then off again it may well have stuck in the on state. Remember these are the same people who logged passwords in plain text to the hard drive and didn't bother checking them for a week or so(10.6 I think), I would not trust their code at all. The only trustable way to know is to dig around the config.plist files and/or just a manual check against a separate test network - ie. it and a client on a switch. I guess there are a couple of other possibilities... IP Spoofing or just defaults if your mac is setup on something like 192.168.0.1 a user brought in WAP could easily cause that havoc - check the MAC address on reoccurrence if it happened again to prove it.

I have a VE-200 and it is great but does have a few issues, these may be better now with newer computers but... Sometimes on old PCs it would not mount properly or would run at USB1.1 speeds - not an issue with the device rather the rubbish system bios You can also chuck floppy drive images on it to mount which is cool but be careful, on mine it forced the HD into readonly mode and I needed a separate caddy to remove them again Don't run them through a USB hub as when certain installers run - Windows XP (was a while ago) - it re-enumerated the usb controllers severing the link to the install cd and erroring EFI can be a pain in the rear, poorly implemented EFI like that on the ASUS transformerbook T100 can only see one of the devices at a time - mimicked BDROM or HDD. Importantly the 200 at least did have a mode that set it as both a HDD and BDROM so you could boot clonezilla or Windows PE and take the image back to the hard drive. If looking at the encrypted ones I'd have a look at the reviews, I seem to remember when it first came out that there was a problem with the durability of the keypad cutting short the life of the unit. Overall I like my VE200 and use it a bit when I don't have a nice fast PXE server to use instead. They are good little tools that mean you can chuck hundreds of diagnostic things on a single unit and not have to worry about burning, storing and lugging around a stack of DVDs everywhere.

Um, wasn't that free before but pay for now. Are they not just punishing people who have brought their hardware? Glad the Mimio stuff is still free for now activated by the hardware.

Meet Office Mix | Office Blogs Looks interesting, requires PowerPoint 2013 to make stuff but not to consume, have forwarded it to a bunch of our more technical teachers to have a play with, could be useful. https://mix.office.com/

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Again I recommend you make new admin accounts for the teachers to use only when prompted for credentials, running as an admin all the time is stupid and dangerous even with UAC watching your back. Better to add a separate admin user account for each teacher so that when they are prompted for elevation they can use that rather than just dispensing with security in its entirety by running as local admin all the time.

Buy homeplugs or a longer Ethernet cable, anything else will just complicate matters.

Do you really want teachers installing stuff on laptops, that is the quickest path to hell. If you really want then I would make a group of team leaders in the school some additional accounts on the network usernamea and then use group policy to add this group to the administrators group on just the laptops with the restricted groups bit of group policy under computer security. They should not be logged on as admins for general use as that just adds more issues and really if you want them to keep working reliably you don't want them attempting to install ever little thing a banner ad says is a good idea anyway. At least if they have to go to a team leaser and ask it slows down the - my computer is slow... no its always had imesh and 86 toolbars on it - idiocy a little.

There is a stupidly small 60 something kb windows update that hit one of our machines and caused a similar issue, go into windows update and check if any show up as fails in the log. I simply hid that update so the system did not install it and that stopped the problem crashes. Don't know what the qa department at MS has been smoking lately though.

We went SharePoint heavy first for staff and class collaboration. It is all kind of hacked together though as there are no real tools for education build in, its all business focused.

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I liked them as an improvised psychological torture device (learning aid) for the less polite members of staff. There again I was still in high school when those were being put in and I had the displeasure of supporting them.

You are not looking for dfs, you want branchcache along with rodc both specifically designed for this scenario.

There are a couple of apps in the app marketplace for SharePoint which do helpdesk. Don't think they are terribly feature rich but may get the job done.

Yes, they are all tied to a local user on the mac server which is tied to an apple id in profile manager mdm. We can add or remove apps as we choose. There is one batch setup before management so those have individual accounts per ipad with all their previously brought apps then we vpp them to push out any new stuff we get so the new stuff at least is managable.

It won't include removable media in the library, have the same issue with my ASUS tablet and a media card with Windows 8.

Yes, apps are pushed per user and since all ours need the same apps it works fine, we always buy the actual amount of licences needed for the physical iPad though that way we are covered. This is via managed distribution.

You can but I wouldn't put a credit card on one though - free-for-all comes to mind. We do ours in batches with a zero credit AppleID for every 15 or so with the VPP tied in through Profile manager, that way we can buy enough licences for all of them and assign only as many as we need with that arrangement. It is a compromise between Apples nutbar our way or the highway one device per student model and one that is remotely workable. We did need to supervise the iPads via configurator beforehand to allow the silent app push though. Also when working with the Apple server stuff, if it does not work first time reboot it a bunch of times, it may not throw any error messages but there is usually some unhandled nonsense going on in the background silently messing up the software.