TechMonkey

Newline are nice boards at a good price. I've installed a couple. The only complaint so far is the supplied pen is a bit naff. Samsung apparently are trying to push into the sector so offering cut prices for their boards, so ask around. Clevertouch seem to be nice boards.

Aren't some of those questions unduly vague or repetitive? Provide the policy as well as tell me what it says, and give me anything else.

Surely it will still be audited as having been sent, even if recalled? I would presume it would just be marked somehow as recalled.

I very much doubt any but the top 0.5% top private schools would be able to afford that and most of them don't have 300 staff. Universities I can see and large Colleges maybe. Once MS have recouped a fair chunk of change I can see the cost coming down, but probably slowly.

Not sure I'd wear the expert badge, but happy to take a stab if further minds needed.

Just to be contrary, I think the guy who put that is a bit delusional. Did everyone really think we could just fill 30,000TB of space carefree? His organisation seems to have fallen for the "no need to manage your data" illusion and now paying the price.

We looked at it last year. Wasn't very feature rich and didn't seem to tie in with a lot of things. It was also expensive, most expensive of the 4 options we looked at. Lots of promises of things to come or suggestions the data was taken out and put into a third party solution. Yes it was web based.

Ok that is the range I am getting, people were talking about getting around £2.80 earlier in the thread which would have been much nicer.

Apologies for the Necro, but I'm looking at the options for Creative Cloud and I'm getting no quotes near the £2-£3 range. Have the prices increased, am I just not ordering enough or am I ordering the wrong thing? Quotes say Creative Cloud for Enterprise and we are ordering under 600 named seats. Many thanks

Yes, that would make a lovely prize

I'd make a list of what you want, or what you don't want, and use that as a yard stick. I have been through this process a couple of times and every system is made up of compromises, you have to decide which ones you are happy, or least not happy, with. Currently I am stuck with Ubiquiti firewalls, and they are horrible. I'm sure they can do a whole heap of stuff, but I haven't had any training on them and anything I have tried to do is horrifically complicated. Want to block a port on multiple network groups? Oh you will have to create an individual rule to do that for each network, why would you want one rule to cover multiple things! I am used to Smoothwall firewall, which although rudimental, I could make it do everything I wanted and knew it worked. Group services, ports, IPs, and block something across all of them, some of them or something with an exception. Some of the big firewall names will happily admit that their filtering is an added bonus, not something that they actively develop or adjust filter lists, which in an Education setting I think is really important. They certainly won't be content aware. I hear a lot of good things about Sophos and how it is worth jumping ship to them over Smoothwall, and then hear you have to buy a third party system to make the logs worthwhile! Ultimately, I think the best option is Smoothwall for filtering, and something industry standard for firewall, but is it worth the cost and having two separate systems? That is again a compromise you have to decide upon.

Google needed for Intune? I've never heard that one, but MS do some odd things on occasion. I would have thought some product manager would have caught that. Could it be that the tablet needs access to google.com to test connectivity? Otherwise there is an M365 category in Smoothwall that would be a good idea to set to bypass HTTPS inspection. There is also an Android Connectivity Checks category that may help if that is the issue.

I have it as an actual policy in itself. Settings are: - Assignments > All users - Cloud apps or actions > User actions > Register security information - Conditions > Locations > Include Any, Exclude trusted locations (or populate the list yourself with your on-premises public IP address) - Conditions > Client apps > Browser and Mobile apps and desktop clients - Access controls > Block access Source: Our very own Katy (https://katystech.blog/azure/azure-conditional-access-and-mfa). I can't remember where I got the setup from originally but Katy's is the same as mine so a good example.

That is why you set it to only allow MFA setup to be allowed on site, the same site that you set it to be ignored from. Some thought has gone into this.

Great but not perfect. We have a load here and they tend to just work, until they decide they don't want to talk to anyone and then need a reboot. Can run hot and can have issues if plugged in behind screens. As others have said, EOL so we are ensuring any new screens have it built in.

I'm usually a proponent of conditional formatting to allow on site to bypass 2FA but in this case I think I would ignore it just out of spite!! About to go into 2024 and staff think connecting to a wi-fi point once is a faff!!

I was going to suggest just buying an enclosure and putting a screen in it, but that doesn't look like it works out any cheaper than those TVs. Even the Samsung weather resistant* screens are £4.5k. (*Must not be left in weather)

You could set it up as a Kiosk, with only the single piece of software allowed to run and everything else locked down. Not sure how the software will like that though.

Just checking, when you say CCTV, do you mean a single camera or multiple cameras as part of a system? The issue you will hit is that the majority of these will be consumer units and you will hit limitations, have issues on a corporate network or following corporate compliance. So your options start at home systems like Blink, Eufy, Arlo, Ring, Nest or Arlo. Not saying I recommend any of those for proper use, but they would fill the quick and dirty Wi-Fi camera to keep an eye. Then there is a massive gulf up to something like Verkada.

& this is the issue. & a very academic response by the SLT, effectively there is no process and that is the process. Deal with it. They are new. Every room they don't know of, every person they have never met. Kind of the definition of being new. It would be good of the school to show them round, introduce them to key staff or departments so they get to know people and the layout of the school. How else are they going to learn? Sounds like they were just dropped in a classroom and told to get on with it. To counter this though, we try and offer inductions where new staff are put in a class and various departments go and present and get them sorted. Just makes sense, but that is normally a full day. I'd have no problem going to a new user as long as it was organised, not just expected to sort it out randomly. Otherwise, your situation happens where a user ends up working for a week without being seen.

You can try Easy4U. They provide a portal and can show whatever devices you need. They provide insurance as well which is good and spare devices for returns. Just some things to ruminate on. - If you go the portal route, everyone will say they can but I would avoid the companies that are acting as third party. I have found in the past that it makes a complicated triangle of companies (manufacturer, supplier and portal). - Check with the supplier how long their quotes last. You can get in a weird position where the portal has to go off line and then be prepared again to open with new prices every month. - As easy as it sounds having a portal only open certain times of the year is a pain. you will always get joiners or someone suddenly needing one. This may be different for you if every pupil has to have the same device. - Check with the finance company if the finance is down to the parents or reliant on the School. We had one company say it was all the parents but then slipped into the conversation at the last moment that the school would be the intermediary of the funds. Any losses or non-payments could potentially fall on the school. Do give a yell if you want to chat more.

My understanding is this not currently possible. There are some requests for it on official MS platforms but it hasn't been added yet. Personally, I think it should be an individual choice, I would find it annoying for my emails to be delayed especially when I'm dealing with something time sensitive. But I understand the desire.

I'd partly disagree with you. You will (hopefully) have a rolling replacement program or at least an idea of when items come out of warranty or are becoming EOL. So you can potentially have a 10 year plan, where anything greater than 3 is forecasting on spend, for things like laptop or PC replacements, switch upgrades, Wi-Fi replacements, copier replacements. This allows Finance to have a better idea of when big spends might happen and might shape other decisions. Obviously as they come within the range of 3-5 years they may be 'adjusted' (such and such devices are great so can last another couple of years) and the management/finance team may do some horse trading around other projects. Ok, you are not going to have hard numbers, but you can have a guesstimate based on cost last time plus a bit, and you make it abundantly clear that these are not confirmed figures. Even if you don't have firm figures everyone at least has an idea when big purchases are coming. Limiting yourself to only 3 years limits the school's ability to forward plan.

Roughly the same but VeryPC all in ones. I know some on here have gone 16Gb but, like you, have found it to be overkill except on machines that need it. I need to find out if AMD have sorted their Trusted Computing certificate so we can Autopilot them. I had a massive issue with a batch of AMD laptops that would not work properly until I found an obscure article that had found the certificate wasn't available yet. Until that is sorted, I'm not willing to get any, no matter the difference in price. EDIT: Just had a hunt around and it looks like the AMD issue may have been solved with a firmware update (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/autopilot/known-issues). When I get a second I'll try and test.

Device with need for local drives at all times - SCCM Anything else - Intune, Autopilot, Fresh install.