TechMonkey

Loved some Dizzy Egg but I had completely forgotten HTBACB!!! You could drink too much and the rooms would spin making it almost impossible to go through the doorways as the control system was a weird two x/y panel affair. So many childish jokes that I loved. Constantly throwing things so they went wheee in to the distance. And turning the PC off in the game and your game reset the whole system!! I never got very far, had no idea what the goal was, but so much fun! Think I i may have to find an emulator with it on tonight!

I have to say I feel like I have had to chase companies more in the last year. I had put it down to having moved area and maybe a slight more relaxed attitude here.

We have a load of devices chained through VOIP phones and having Cache off causes issues as they are restricted to 100Mb. Other than that I turn it off.

You can comment out lines. I would be tempted to do that, just incase....

Gateway is correct on the Hyper-V machines? Are they on the same or different VLANs?

Not sure if this has been posted before but just noticed this. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/windows-skilling-snacks-bite-sized-learning-for-it-pros/ba-p/3725923#:~:text=Here's%20a%20new%20way%20to,slow%20day%20at%20the%20office! Bite size training released monthly, free. On the move at the mo, but will properly link once at my desk.

Yes there is an educational discount. You can also contact resellers, but I'm not sure how much wiggle room they have. Jigsaw24 have helped us before.

A Server will still be needed for Papercut? Could you mix firewall and filtering to cover on site protection? How do you create your users? If you are using anything like Salamander or Locker you will need a server for that. Those are the first things that pop to mind.

I managed to get a preview of the SIMS AI code

That's the one.

Yep, all cloud apps will ask for anything. I also put a conditional access rule to only allow MFA to be setup on site, to stop malicious setup if someone hadn't used their account.

I used OneNote. Great for linking between pages, quick to add. Only annoyance is no code container. I've started moving to our HelpDesk as we can reference pages in tickets and have public bits and private bits.

@DaveAshworth is correct, that page is redundant once conditional access is used. I thought MS were removing it, but that may have been delayed or just it needs to be removed. I have had great success using HFA Status script from this page https://lazyadmin.nl/powershell/list-office365-mfa-status-powershell/

I'd be interested in what you see as the main frustrations with communication from your Daughter's school? I think part of the problem is that a lot of School communication is seen as needing to be formal and long form. That will not translate to WhatsApp and you will just get the same problem of messages being ignored as they are hard to read. Also you will have the issue of excluding the parents that refuse to use WhatsApp for a variety of reasons. One of the issues you point out is parents going back to the school to ask for information that has already been sent. This isn't on the school, this is parents either not being organised or being lazy. How will this help? What really needs to happen is schools need to get better at communicating. Stop making everything a formal word letter that needs to be attached, stop waffling for multiple paragraphs before getting to the meat of the comms. Plan communications so that parents aren't bombarded on one day with information that could have waited. Sorry, not wanting to be a downer, it is great you are trying to do something. But there is a fundemental shift that needs to happen in a lot of schools around communication and there has already been a shift in a lot of parents expectations.

I can't talk about all IT departments but where I have had a dashboard we have used it to give us a heads up of major things or a heads up something was iffy. There were numerous occasions a teacher came into the office to report something odd and we were all ready on it and investigating or on a couple of occasions had already fixed it. Treating the number, not the problem is a departmental/management issue, whether you have a monitoring system or not. Having a monitoring system isn't about believing a user or confirming, it is about being proactive and having access to information in a timely manner. It does depend on how the dashboard is setup and used though. Monitor all the things is fantastic, but you end up with a lot of background noise, that can end up it being ignored. Having the 100 sensor free version of PRTG does concentrate the mind wonderfully. You can tie a monitoring system into some helpdesks, we have FreshService tied into PRTG so any issues generate a ticket. But we have usually seen the issue as it is front and center in the office. Another benefit is that when staff come in they see the screen and are interested, it generates conversation so staff can see what we are actually doing, and if a graph is showing orange (unusual) they ask what it means, and it shows to them we are looking at things before they break. It is also a good visual of how much we do, servers, switches, firewalls, copiers, etc, etc. But you are right, if you only run the network based on a monitoring system you are going to hit customer satisfaction issues, it should be a single facet of a multi-threaded approach, another tool in your arsenal.

Same as @fiza, range of numbered accounts. Log sheet to show which are being used by whom when, for auditing purposes (safeguarding) and then just change the password after each use.

Depends on the user. Basic teacher, they are told to set an OoO, sort their areas out, account is disabled, they are stripped of groups and shifted in to an Archive OU which isn't synced with AAD. Department heads and above, or by special request, we liaise with their line manager and then go through the delete process in AAD and assign their mailbox and OneDrive to a named user for a set period of time, again based on the users level. I like @psydii process, I might have to try and integrate that with ours.

I had forgotten about those!! Yes, had one of those, they were fantastic!

Very vague memory of an Oric but not what games we played, just the wonderful keyboard. Then we had an Atari 2600. Kaboom was one of my favourite games. Used a paddle controller and you had to catch bombs in 3 buckets and it got faster and faster until it was ridiculous. The aerial socket started failing so we had to prop it up with a game cartridge to get full contact. Then moved onto an Amstrad CPC. Biggest memory of that one as a massive helicopter game, Gunship I think. It was all wire frame and low refresh rate, but the manual was a literal book and my brother would fly and I would try and find the right page for what we had to do!! The fun of loading up from tape, the sound that would drive our parents crazy but you couldn't turn the sound all the way off otherwise you wouldn't know when it was done or if there was a problem. Great times.

Is their email not just what they log into the PC with plus @DomAIN?

Sudden thought, with email retention what do you do with CYA emails? Is it a case of file them away?

I think it is impressive no one posted a lmgtfy link

I used Cybrary at a previous place. Was geared more towards security but had a good breadth. I've not used it in anger but we looked at LinkedIn. Think that was before MS took over though so it does have a lot of good courses MS specific now.

Not wanting to follow the crowd but we started using EnviroElectronics and they have been fab. The bin makes it so much easier as we don't have to wait till the holiday to make it easier for collection. We fill the bin and they take it away. They also take batteries so we have setup collection pots around the school for those and they can do UPS batteries, which we have a few we weren't sure what to do with.

That is disappointing. Activities Manager is not really fit for purpose in this day and age. Unless it has changed, Pupils or parents can not sign up to clubs, it is all a manual process by staff, and no output to the Parent Portal to see what clubs are on.