TechMonkey

We kitted out 2 classrooms with them. Never really saw them used as classrooms and they were just a pain with cable routing, cables getting caught in mechanisms and the kids not being able to open and close them. I'm sure in some places they do work but I'd rather a decent space with wide benches where keyboards can be moved out the way.

Moved to FreshService over the summer and, wow! It can do a lot! Not cheap at all but we have our Estates team on it and looking to get HR and Finance on it too. Having been a fan of email tickets into Helpdesk, I'd now say try and drive them to the portal to fill in the form. It allows better information gathering and you can then base automations on the information supplied. Email submissions is a really blunt tool.

Speak to your central provider and see if they have some smaller devices? We had some desktops from ours, very low cost and only slightly higher cost per page. If the use is so low, I would point to this as proof they aren't needed, and the users should use the central copiers. If you have print release on, then they have no claim to security or sensitivity. The only claim they have then is the time or walking and they just need to adjust their workflow and not be lazy! Sorry very black and white answer but the situation you are in is the very proof why the central solution is good and necessary so the fix is to get rid of them. Changing printer is just a plaster over the problem. Alternatively, as the devices were bought outside of your contract charge all costs back to their department. Option then is they don't have it and don't get charged, or your budget doesn't take the hit.

May not be what you want but if you are looking to save money, move away from printers, go a managed print with central copiers rather than printers on every desk. Staff will kick up a fuss to start but will get used to it and may even like it. You cut down on number of devices, save on print costs (desktop printers are around 6-9p a copy, copiers can be 2p or below), have support contract to fix quickly and standardise. You can also get a print solution, like Papercut, and make the system smarter and more secure.

Or teaching staff to use the extend function rather than duplicate. TCO of projectors is higher than screens, even more so when you take into account man hours. We are replacing all projectors with large displays. Not going interactive as the staff all have touchscreen devices.

Surely 2 cables is resilience? From what I read I thought they were completely separate cables coming into the island via different routes.

This is another reason to not do it this way. Although it may seem unthinkable that someone doesn't have a PDF reader installed, you cannot guarantee embedding in Excel will work. I wonder how Google Sheets reacts to that? This is one of those ideas that seems innocuous and may seem easier to go along with, especially if the user is a special little snowflake, but will cause you more issues in the long run and probably be spun out to be your fault that it isn't working. Knock it on the head and find a proper solution and document objections for CYA.

Have we checked those tricky Scandinavian's haven't started kicking off again? Anyone checked for long boats?

That's how I'd address it. What are they trying to achieve and find a better way of doing it. Fallback position of personal laptop. Excel is not a PDF viewer and not setup for reams of text. It pains me when staff decide to do massive schemes of work in Excel because they want a table, only to come a cropper when they have to edit text or try and fit a page worth of text into a single cell. Also, the many calls about how to do bullet points in a cell, how to make one word bold in a sentence, etc, etc.

Can they point out the clause that you are not compliant with? Nothing I could see in what you posted had anything about the ability to login as someone other than the exam user. Push back to them to show where you are not compliant.

I'd be interested to see where it says "able"? I bet it says does or something similar. Much like if they took a phone out in the middle of an exam or were to be found hiding notes up their sleeves. The ability to do it isn't the malpractice (though there being no ability makes the concern less) it is the actual act that is the problem. Technical fixes could be to add the pupil group as unable to login to those laptops, set the background to be a lurid colour so if the invigilators see anything else they know the pupils has changed logins and remove the logon ability of the exam users.

Out of curiosity, why are they embedding a PDF into Excel?

This will come with confidence, as you learn the bike and grow your own skills. I remember coming home from work the first time on my bike and going slower than a 5cc moped in a head wind.

We had some SFF PCs, mounted to the back of the monitors while on swing arms attached to the wall for an engineering install. Kept the desks clear. Got everything needed from Very PC.

Same as others, we mandate Teams use for the organisation but don't block Zoom for connecting to external orgs. We don't push the client out, instead advise to use the web interface.

Yep, got it last month. Only really using it for onboarding users but will be looking at what else it can do for ensuring devices have AV on and to weedle out old versions. It is very cool if a bit overwhelming!

Another one to consider, that I have noticed larger Trusts finally addressing after some major hiccups, is who is going to coordinate across the schools and what level of managing is going to be pushed out to the individual schools. Policies, procedures and security measures are incredibly important now and what has happened is that one school may be... laxer than others and been the opening an attacker has needed. Standardisation will help a lot with centralisation, not only moving forward but as a cross school team, and there needs to be a decision if there will be a one-size-fits-all situation or a baseline that all schools have to meet and then can be built on. The position needs to have backing from the very top and the clout to enforce things happening.

We just took a look at Practice Pal (https://practicepalmusic.com/) and it looked pretty damned good at a sensible price. Did timetabling, that looked at your school timetable and followed rules like no missing certain lessons, no repeated lessons missed, etc. Also did registers that I think fed back (we are on iSAMS so can't vouch for SIMS)

Grasping at straws here, but not a DHCP? Duplicate IP somehow being handed out or a VLAN clash? Or DNS, just because it's always DNS.

Barracuda for O365 backs up OneDrive.

What are you trying to achieve? What is your end goal?

Using the API?

For AV, just using Defender.

Previous place used 10.10.xx.yy where xx was a classification (10 for management or switches, 20 for servers, etc) and yy was the dished out IP. Here we are going to go to 10.zz.xx.yy where zz is the site and the rest is the same as above.

I'm an occasional shaver. Go through phases of staying clean shaven and others of letting it grow out. Swapped to a safety shaver a good while ago, bought a back of 100 razors for a tenner and still got most of them, and a stick of shaving foam for a quid. I also keep an electric trimmer for when I'm feeling lazy. Never looked back.