TechMonkey

Depends on the Budget. ZIOXI have some interesting solutions, but I doubt they are cheap.

Ours is up, I can make a booking but no imported lessons from MIS

I think there are various ways to do it but in Exchange Admin, go to Groups, find that group, Settings and there is delivery management.

Ok, so don't bother trying reverting to internal accounts. They are locked to SSO, so you can't use them!!

I'm going to turn SSO off and give key members of staff old school logins. I never realised people were so keen on booking rooms!!

Are the Android bits of the TV locked down? Are there any odd apps installed?

Shift the staff and parents to using the SOCS portal to access the Team sheets? If my memory serves me well, the Outlook option was more for emailing the parents of a single team to let them know something was changing, team is going to be late or further details, not as a mass mailer. I also seem to remember there being an internal mailer option, Outlook was one of 2 options, so that may be an option. SOCS support maybe able to give options. None of our Team sheets are set up so I can't test.

Could you have blocked them from using the Forms App at all?

Can you extract the drive from the laptop? If so, get it in a caddy and profit. Always easier to get it in a caddy and work on.

I think this is the guide I used after searching windows ca san attribute.

I've had to battle with this multiple times and someday I will write it down. It is something like when you generate the certificate browsers now expect SAN name to match, and CAs don't have this by default

Yes, as long as you distribute your CA Root certificate to all devices as a trusted publisher. Can be done with GPO or Intune. Personally I would move away from that though and get an external cert if possible as any device will trust it then, even if it is a wildcard cert so it can be used in multiple places. Does depend on you having an externally resolvable FQDN though.

Supposedly her voice was too old.

My favourite tribute so far

Without knowing the full story it is hard to comment. An outstanding, live safeguarding issue shouldn't be weeks or months, it should be hours or days at worse. Though whatever the ticket there should be a response with in a couple of days.

My budget spreadsheet is pretty fluid, I add tabs and calcs depending on the projects or as needed, but happy to share a blank copy. Drop me a PM and I'll email it over. Main page is just a list of annual costs, what company and what for. Then some annual things, like hardware replacements, training, and consumables. Finally a tab for projects that I have either gotten quoted or a rough estimate. These often come out of CAPEX so may not be part of my budget, but I put them in for completeness. I've also got some tabs that I am meant to enter things as they are purchased to track against my budget but I am pretty bad about keeping that up to date.

Mix up the sandwiches by making some interesting fillings. Browse the sandwich filler aisle at the supermarket and then make your own. Bit of time at the weekend and you make them for a tenth of the cost. Make wraps for something different. Extras from the night before is a good one, that is how I get through the summer holidays mostly. And the extension of that is a batch cook at the weekend. Do a few of those and you can have a mix of meals for the month. Homemade noodle pots are a good one if you can get boiling water at work. Noodles, frozen peas, mushrooms, spring onion, tofu (other protein alternatives are available) and anything else you want in a tub, chuck in a lump of miso then just add hot water at lunch and you are sorted. Not as good as one that has been simmered for a bit but still pretty damned tasty. quite a few recipes out there to keep it interesting. If you are feeling lazy I did used to get cheap and cheerful frozen meals, the Asda range used to be pretty good. I'm pretty sure terrible for me and I don't think I could use them now without ballooning to a perfect IT pyramid shape, but to add variety it might work. They did get a bit samey and as you found, they aren't the most flavoursome.

This is interesting as my first thought would be that not having one, or worse having a disconnected one, would prevent pay out in the case of a strike. Otherwise why would places have them at all.

MS will not guarantee any data recovery and has this spelled out in a document. Backup companies, such as Barracuda, have made a big thing of this, pushed the hard sell and, IMO, stirred up lots of horror stories due to MS spelling this out. But, you do have multiple levels of recycle bin for 90 days and files can be versioned so mistakes can be sorted. As with most backup and recovery solutions you have to look at your organisations situation, risk assess it and work out what you need. It is the IT equivalent of insurance, you pay the money you are comfortable paying and hope you never have to use it. Having a recovery system would be a lot more convenient to restore specific things if the worst happened, such as bad internal actor, but they can be very expensive. Barracuda do seem to have a good reputation on here and the system looks nice. In my experience though, all the M365 backups seem quite expensive and I have only had 2 occasions where it would have been used but wasn't essential. 1 was a situation where someone was after an email from a 6 month+ leaver but it was no big issue. The other was solved using MS tools but would have been simpler to have a simple place to go to and restore.

My concern in the current economic situation is how long would it take to replace devices, considering there are lead times of 18 months from some suppliers!!

All the pen tests I have had done have had a box shipped out or dropped off and plugged in. The tester can remote on to that and act as if they are on site. Only time I have had to turn off things for a pen test was a user Phishing test and had to allow their mail host to be not caught.

How ex a teacher are we talking? Just left? Can they not still access their stuff? Before Easter? Why do you still have their documents? In between those (or even if you have not deleted their documents), as others have said, treat them as anyone else putting a SAR in. There is obviously an issue there that has made them resort to a SAR so you need to follow procedure to a Tee.

Ok, being a bit more positive today I will say that when staff laptops works, it is great. My previous place was desktop only. We had everything set just right and it just worked. Not going to say it was perfect (what set up is?!) but we could do updates at scheduled times, do installs, staff didn't have to do anything and it ticked along nicely. Coming to a place with laptops that hadn't been thought about properly was a massive shock to the system and we have been chasing tails to make it work, but we are getting there. One thing I will note, and this will be a bold statement, if staff are claiming the device is too heavy to lug around between classrooms then the wrong device has been chosen. Teaching staff do not need workhorses, they need something that can be moved around, but is robust. Originally staff were given Lenovo Yogas, though I think that was a necessity of COVID. We are now starting to roll out Dell Latitudes as they are a lot more robust. We have had one member of staff spill a pint of orange juice on one with no ill effects. Overall I think either a mixed approach or a dock approach will work best. Smaller devices are not fun to work on permanently so having some docks with screens available for staff to use is good. Or have some desktops dotted around for good old work sessions. I stand by that this will not be a cost saving exercise though. It will work out around the same cost, if not a higher cost due to many factors.

I think you would find you do have a legal stake in it now you are paying. What makes you think you do not?

You may already have done this but there is a GPO setting to give more informative messages at login. So rather than a generic message (which I think is preparing Windows) it says which bit it is looking at. This will give a very good idea of what needs looking at. I think it is Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System> DISPLAY HIGHLY DETAILED MESSAGES