Synkrox

Entra / Universal Print / Papercut MF here. All fine, I think?! We are hybrid AD so users are synced to on prem. But jobs come in through the Universal Print cloud path.

Blueiris

We have staff devices so evacuations is a doddle with signinapp evacuations . Teachers do evacuation register on their phones and all staff can watch the circles fill up or leave notes for students that might be stuck somewhere. The links with MiS registers is great too and makes it as accurate as possible.

Nah. Noone is stealing these 😅

We have on prem papercut picking up jobs from a MS Universal Printer that is pushed to intuned devices. papercut on MFDs runs as normal and talks to our on prem papercut as normal. The only caveat is if you want different finishing - stapling for example - you need to create individual printers for this as universal print has almost no options to set. You get quite a chunk of universal print usage thrown in with edu license so we don't buy anything on top.

Clipchamp or canva here. Canva having proper licensed music is a big bonus and cuts down the "can you download this song from youtube" requests 🤢

Crusader AV | IT & Audio Visual Solutions For All Organisations They make the "unbreakable" headphones which Hills used to do - I've been buying them for years.

Interesting read, thanks. The "Electric Dreams" paragraph sums my feelings quite nicely.

Same reasons as folks above but also..... It's not the sunshine and roses the tech industry and paid "EdTech" shills would have you believe. Just having these things turned on is a massive distraction to learning and another thing teachers don't need vying for attention in the classroom. And if they don't help with learning in the classroom, why would the school spend time and money trying to facilitate this? I'm not blaming the kids by the way.... Grown up professional adults can be seen doomscrolling and doing other crap on their devices when they should be paying attention.

We've had a few lenovo laptops where the mouse has vanished over the last week - which I think is down to an update. A power off and quick reset sorted it. (in our case holding power button down for about 20 seconds). Regular reboot might have worked but I just do this out of habit.

I share this sentiment. Get them to do some training. Here's a really good guide to setting it up properly. BromcomMCASClubsandTrips.pdf

Genuine question - Why is Bromcom a faff or any less of a faff than another system? If you are saying 100 kids are potentially going to a club session, how will that list be any different in another system. Bromcom already allows club groups and then to allow enrollment on specific sessions. It sounds like it's not being used properly. We have kids in clubs (either we add them or they self register) - payment processed at time of booking (if required) - and the club register (which is automamtically created) is done either on laptop or teacher app in seconds. Tempted to agree with the sentiment above, this smell like pushing admin onto IT. "I'm a mechanic, not a driver"

No accounts, shared only mode, wipes at logout. We use allowlist only and give access to school resources only. No access to the wider internet. Our take on it is that if they are able to login to a laptop then they can do so to get proper internet, if they can't then they can use the iPads. We have Britannica School so they can still do their own research at age appropriate levels. Works really well, creates a safe device for children to explore rather than expecting them to dig through pages of AI slop and dodgy adverts in the name of "research"

PerfectWiki here. Links with teams - we have 2 Wikis - One for everyone with staff guides and policies (not just IT) and one for the Ops teams, with guides for our reference and more techy stuff. Finance / Data manager etc all use it too. The AI agent is actually really good for answering staff questions directly from our policies and guides.

I don't use support much for the reasons you describe. I've had tickets open over a year for actual bugs. I feel like they are struggling under their own weight. Not just in end user support but backend stuff (which, to be fair, does seem like there's some movement on now) But the most unforgivable crime is their documentation and knowledgebase. Utterly, utterly awful. Pixelated screenshots and hastily jotted notes. They slapped an AI Agent on the community and even that can't help as half the questions go unanswered and relies on the good will of others to answer (often very simple) questions If they want their helpdesk calls to go down, then maybe they should invest some time making the information available and readily searchable /findable.