TechMonkey

That is pretty awesome!

They won't conflict, you will just get annoyed when you call the wrong one, or if you find one is better than the other. My partner has Google Home speakers and I get annoyed by them having come from using Alexa. I have one Alexa so far in the house just to keep me sane and there are no issues.

If you can hold fire for a couple of months, then I would suggest getting your self to BETT and you can have a hands on with many of the suppliers, talk to their people and arrange demos. I'm pretty sure if you pre-arrange with the likes of SMART they have meeting rooms where you can have slightly calmer demos.

The issue here is that I have no confidence we will be told what happened, and even if the stars aligned and we did get some kind of reason, that it would be truthful or factual. After the whole, a breach is not a breach as we don't see it like that, debacle then they could have had their servers completely compromised, physically stolen, live streams of the attackers showing the servers and data and I would still expect a response of everything is OK.

Used to be really useful. Now not so much. I do like that you can filter by what you have a license for, but I have had the same experience as you with either documentation out of date or it doesn't update even after a few days.

@Alastairb25 - Found it /forums/general-chat/236314-dfe-digital-standards-updated-january-2024-a.html#post2022787

There has been lots of chat about these on here, and a few updates. Someone on here did have a template that had all the entries that you could mark against. ANME have one on their site. My understanding is that they are guidelines, minimum standards and to help schools look ahead. So, if you are starting a project and it does not even meet the guidance in these documents, you would need a very good reason why not. They are not saying you have to meet them now, like in the case of WiFi, but you should be aiming for it and have a plan, so you can get the financial investment lined up. It would show your management that you are: 1) looking out wider than your 4 walls and taking Government advice on board 2) planning to move forward 3) self evaluating Also, someone at some point is going to stumble across these standards and raise them in a meeting or bring them to you and ask where you are at with them. Having a plan, or reasoning why they are not met, would give you a gold star as well as not being caught on the hop and looking reactionary rather than proactive.

The issue here is "most likely". If you only want a list of jobs and have the time to roll your own system and support it then Lists is probably great. But I would lay money that if you tried to make MS lists do all that FreshDesk or FreshService do it would get messy very quickly. Not knocking Lists, it has its place, but trying to say it can compete with a dedicated helpdesk is misleading.

Oh I don't doubt it. But I think it is a very different proposition from laptops and servers needing to be replaced, to a software that manages and controls a water filtration and pumping system with automated switching and monitoring (i'm making up terms here but you get the idea). No less frustrating to the person trying to get it all updated but it is an order of magnitude more complicated when the hardware is stuck being managed by that piece of software that the manufacturer won't update, or maybe is no longer in business, especially if that software then integrates with other systems that have been hand crafted to talk in an eldritch language long since forgotten by mere mortals. As I said, the only thing I can relate it to is the stories I heard in the banking sector where all the big players were trying to meet modern expectations, while running a backend not updated since the 80s, as well as trying to keep various systems tacked on due to mergers. You had contractors that had been out of work for a decade suddenly rehired due to no one in the current employment pool understanding the tech or coding language, let alone understand the interactions. It was a huge mess, and completely security compromised, as the systems were never envisaged to be publicly accessible. Obviously (to us) the answer is ongoing investment, not just when the doo doo hits the whirly device, and to not be giving out dividends when the infrastructure is teetering and investment is much more important, or even have the government manage nationally important and critical infrastructure, like water management, distribution and treatment. But that is straying towards the P word, so I will stop there.

I would say worse, as apart from maybe some old laser cutters or bell systems we don't have that many legacy systems that are essentially to the day to day running of the school. Water companies will have a fair amount of industrial automated systems that only run on old OS versions or using ancient codebases. Bit like the banking sector, and I bet the same is happening, that old systems are being cludged to interact with new systems, probably to help cut costs to manage centrally and this is where security has been compromised.

To be fair, MFA enforced with no access via app or token would be pretty secure.

I'd say less than a week is no time to properly evaluate a program for security and compatibility. Especially something linked to programming. Beyond that, I'd probably push it out using InTune, which will be happy with a Powershell command.

You will have a line that says something like v=DMARC1; p=reject; pct=100; rua=mailto:[email protected]; You will need to remove, or edit, the rua=mailto:[email protected] bit

Looks like AutoTask do service requests. https://ww1.autotask.net/help/Content/4_Admin/5ExtensionsIntegrations/CPPortalTaskfire/PortalSetup/RequestTypes.htm That is all ours is, then the system and workflow the request to the right people to do the right tasks.

Also, they are marketed as content filters, as they filter web content, but not based on the content. The majority are categorisation or URL filters only.

A quick Google for "SCCM usb dongle" brings up this article https://larsstaal.com/2019/09/17/how-to-use-the-same-usb-nic-dongle-for-multiple-devices-with-sccm/ which is what I think I did, it has been a while. It also brings up this reddit post discussing the issue https://www.reddit.com/r/SCCM/comments/nlh4um/advice_for_imaging_with_ethernet_dongles/ which discusses pass-through dongles. Boils down to either set MECM to ignore the MAC address or don't buy cheap dongles.

Can I ask what you are counting as adult focused or adult content though. You keep saying craiyon is an adult site or contains adult content, but others aren't seeing it. So, could it be what you are considering adult content, others of us aren't as concerned about? Can you describe, or post screenshots, suitably censored if needed? Are we talking nudity? Adult themes (gambling, guns, violence)? I've looked at recent and inspirations and not seen anything that would make me double take. Searching for "boobs" on the search page gets a little closer to the bone, but I would hope your filtering catches easy searches like that as it is in the URL.

Craiyon isn't one of these services like YouTube ads, that shows content you have searched for, is it? Maybe the user that found lots of adult content had been slightly overly vigorous in their checking for adult content or in their background research? I too haven't seen any adult content on there but haven't spent too long on the site.

OnShape has been popping up a lot, and our DT department are evaluating it. Free to education and completely online.

Not yet, been close. The issue is the licensing seems very convoluted if you go beyond the basic. Also, it is all very expensive, even on Edu licenses. I wanted to look at making some bots that could ask or answer questions based on the SharePoint library it was in. So, a pupil could ask physics questions in the Physics doc area, staff could ask policy questions in the HR area, etc. But this ended up being around £1100 per year, for the creator and then a license all users needed to access the bots. This was on top of any copilot actual licenses, which was around £25 per person per month. It all kind of ground to a halt after that. I am getting a ChatGTP account to transcribe voicemails to email, so may have a play around with that a bit more. But currently, bigger battles to fight to drag staff kicking and screaming into the 20th Century.

It's on my list to research this as well, so sorry no definitive answers for you. Currently rough idea in my head is: - set them up as kiosks so a reboot will clear them, with work being saved elsewhere. Alternative is get some card readers so we can hand out exam passes that will sign the correct exam user in. (all theoretical at the moment) - Internet would be locked down to the necessary M365 urls and specific resources needed. - Apps assigned to the exam user and all other apps blocked. Setup and return to normal is a concern of mine, knowing how I have had to hand craft reg keys at short notice before to get an exam prepared that I wasn't informed of or was informed incorrectly of. The exam users with cards should solve this, in conjunction with Smoothwall to block only what is needed. I've not heard the hide the time requirement before so I will have to find out what that is about.

I feel whoever is on the phone should do a little more checking than just accept at face value a phone call. The MIS would show that Mrs X should not get reports, so maybe the person answering the phone should critically think that the female voice coming from the phone number of Mr X, asking for a copy of the report sent to Mrs X's email is not a good idea?

Any Edge extensions installed? Specifically, to do with your PBX or softphone? I've had this before when a link got interpreted as a phone number by and extension and it caused issues.

Totally get where you are coming from but this is just a case of they are a non-techncial team, willing to adopt technical methods but they also have a busy kitchen to run and events schedule. So, anything I can do to help them carry out their tasks is a bonus. There would be no difference between Trilby or XIBO (I've used XIBO in the past and yes it is lovely but not friendly for other users to use) and this Canva web pages would be a good solution for either to allow users to update their own content

If I am understanding correctly, what is being said and the technology I am suggesting, this is a proper content filter, like Smoothwall or Openendium, and what KCSIE is saying should be moved to. URL checking is not enough.