PotNoodleTech

Sound like you could start of the troubleshooting based on "is it the internet that's an issue" or "is it the local network that's an issue" Plenty of different ways you could test that.

https://classroom.google.com/ All you need. Much easier to set up and much easier for teachers/pupils to use compared to MS free offerings.

If your business manager is commenting on your old kit time to jump on and get some new kit!

Thanks! It's good to know we are top 1% at %something%

Use a redundant disk config e.g. Raid 10 / Raid 5 / Raid 6 (or one of synologys own versions) and buy an extra disk or two to keep in stock, if a disk dies you can pop an new one in and auto rebuild the array no need to restore the box from scratch.

Wow is it really only 1% of schools? Do you have a link to the stats on that? Cheers.

Good luck. Most of us are getting rid of 4:3 monitors now. They're pretty much just WEEE

But what's the reactor going to power? Frikkin laser beams no doubt. Oh well. I guess I'll go out with a smile on my face shouting "one miiiiiiiiiiilion dolllaaaaaarrrrsssss" as loud as I can

It's a backwards step - but you'll only realise that a year or two in. Several schools around here have done that, spouted about how awesome it is, regretted it, ended up going back to PCs so effectively spent triple to quadruple (factoring in to damage and loss) what they would have if they'd just refreshed their existing PCs. You'll have to prize the teacher PCs out of my cold dead hands as they are fit and forget every 5-7 years with low cost and high reliability.

Havent had the big Epson laser long enough to tell you but the image quality on the bulb one is better, better colour balance etc. Have not had to replace bulb on main hall Epson and that's 5 years + old now.

Clearly given the multiple pages of the thread on here, all schools were impacted the only ones we know about were the ones that noticed / had parents ring in a report it etc. What they mean is "The vast majority of schools [did not notice that they were] impacted"

TBH any ipads that are old enough to not be getting IOS updates any more are not going to be manageable by any of the MDMs. Sadly ipads that are 5+ years old just need to be WEE recycled or preferably donated. They still work great as standalones for individual people at home for example.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to start from scratch and get exactly what you need. New Domain. Mostly cloud systems. IT team in house. Everything migrated over to new system one school at a time, hey presto 12 schools all up to date and working nicely. Clearly the above is a gross simplification but I think it's what you should be aiming for. It's too easy to think it's gonna be tough for the schools lets try and do it half-arsed to minimise disruption but at the end of the day if you want to move forward over the next 10 years you need to start from a solid good modern foundation and not look back.

Did you have some sponsorship from lenovo then? I tell you what it's amazing how some different colour and materials and a few LEDs can make a room look totally awesome.

Out of interest did you and the site team do the room asthetics DIY style or did you get someone in? It looks fab.

Have they? Have they really? What do you call this then: "There is no evidence of a malicious attack or data breach."

Better check it's stored encrypted on each camera then or one camera stolen = data loss

I'd be doing a stocks and shares ISA if it was me as not only to you get the regular dividends once twice or 4 times a year depending on the companies, you stand a chance of benefiting from a pure increase in price (value of your investment) over the years so it' a double win if you pick good companies and get a bit lucky. I did a test last year with just £1k and made approx £75 in dividends and sold the stocks for +20% so way more than the 4% interest I may have got from a bank. You can also apparently do up to something like £40-50k in premium bonds which is also tax fee I believe this is as well as any ISAs you have.

Sometimes the word serverless is not the best way of doing something. Sometimes doing it for the sake of it is not the best way of doing it. I guess it depends how much you trust these far eastern manufacturers cloud systems.....I dont trust any of them it's been proven time and time again that manufacturers secretly leak as much data back home as possible I mean even giganto companies like sony have been caught out more than once and if they try it on imagine what all the smaller companies try on too!

I assume HR are going to send alerts to payroll if the user clocks out late too so they can be paid overtime accurately?

Just bare in mind that you don't need to mirror your entire backup set, you can get away with just one daily one weekly one monthly one yearly for the emergency/offsite copies - so you won't need big trays full of disks for those. RE: servers you need to ask yourself if i am setting this whole school up in a leisure center up the road, will I need that virtual server? Generally the answer is if you have a server running you will likely need it in an emergency too. There isn't much I can think of here that I wouldn't want to be spinning up, all the app servers phones, printers, etc could be used in a seperate building.

Some serious money invested there! Fair play.

Can't see why you'd want to keep FMS? It's literally from the 90s which is why it has a windows 3.1 interface. Upgrade to something more modern then dump SIMS?

Keep it on prem for as long as you can physically battle with the to keep it. Sorry but there's no comparison, SIMS connected is a 1990s MIS botched into a cloud hosted virtual desktop instance - ESS think that qualifies as a "cloud mis" but it doesnt. It's old slow clunky even the mouse is lagged. Uploading and downloading are a potch as you've got to upload and download everything to the intermediate storage on the virtual server rather than straight into SIMS in the browser. Bromcom and Arbor are next gen cloud based MIS's that work natively in your browser and are 20 years ahead of SIMS. If your thinking of moving to ESS cloud - don't. Just move to another MIS.

Ta I'll stick with deleting the shortcuts and sims folder for now at least that should stop people accidentally doing anything silly. It's chrome browser and input lag from now on baby!!!