TechMonkey

Our very own @Katy has some good articles and some under Azure.

We are using a company called Evolving networks, but this is because we have multiple sites and they specialise in SD-WANs. They supply multiple lines and aggregate them through their kit, allowing a supplier to fail and everything to carry on with barely anyone noticing. They also monitor the lines and if service is not up to par can change supplier and sort it all out. Pretty cool but might not be worth it for a single site.

What boundaries did you use? How are you deploying the client? As per the docs that icon just means status is unknown of the device.

That is probably one of the defining factors. Although I have heard of multinational companies using actual names based on location/role, most are scripted by information available on the device because with that number of devices it isn't practical to worry about individual device names. This is then where a good asset DB comes in and proper linked service desk. It's always good to see what bigger orgs are doing, but doesn't always means it suits all.

That is cool, that may be a change since we kicked up a fuss and I know other schools who were sold the dream did also. Glad they made a sensible decision

Is it a campus agreement of the new Cloud Agreement? If it is the Cloud one then, yes, it changes how Windows is licensed and your KMS will be redundant. But be warned, if you have any devices that are older and do not have firmware embedded Windows licenses you will come unstuck.

Yes, as yac2016 said ensure you are going for M365, unless you are totally sure you only want O365. Any supplier pushing O365, or not pushing M365, needs to be looked at with a modicum of curiosity. This change came in around 2018 and all suppliers should know about it and be using it. The confusion is that both options come with A1 and A3 levels, so it can get very confusing if talking at cross purposes.

I've found if you can get it on a printer server then it is all fine. Had an Evolis Primacy working fine on the network with Net2 and currently got a Magic Card 300 (don't get this one) doing OK. But if you want the card scanned into Net2 as well, certainly sounds like Network enabled won't work.

And naming devices after rooms has worked for 2 decades + for people. Doesn't make that anymore valid than your solution. Different things work for different people and situations. Some would find having to look up a device in a spreadsheet non-sensical when you could just very quickly work out the name from the room it is in. I have heard of a mid ground solution of naming devices after serial/asset and then using DNS to name devices something sensible. But then you have another record to keep up to date and manage. Swings and roundabouts. You pick the system that works for you and your setting.

No help with your actual question but could you edit the template of the Parent Portal email to include your IT welcome information and then get the admissions person to send the email once a child is confirmed? They have been talking about their new Parent Portal having the ability for parents to update their contact details for a while now so that may solve point 1. It would be great to have workflows within iSAMS but I don't think that is even on their roadmap. Having just looked at a fundraising CRM that had all of this natively and cost about half of iSAMS, I'm starting to feel education is going back to the bad old days of software development.

Off the top of my head I think a lot of NAS boxes will do that, I'm sure Synology has this ability. But it isn't going to be easily managed.

Managed to get an LRAT2000 kit into my budget and got a great deal. It was totally worth it and saved us a lot of headaches when troubleshooting cables. Went to get one at my new place and the price seems to have doubled and it isn't as clear what product is a direct relation to it. Can not rave enough about them though. Gives switch info, port info, vlan info, poe info, full end to end testing including DHCP/DNS/Google connectivity. It also does the usual tone testing, break and cable tests (with estimated distances) and dongles to identify ports

Used Solarwinds WebHelpDesk, previously. Good system, if a bit of an old fashioned UI, but expensive to setup. Currently looking at FreshDesk/Service. Looked at TopDesk but that was a bit OTT for what we needed. Ohh and originally the school was looking at Parago but it didn't sit right with me so I'm glad my gut was valid.

If it works for you, then cool. I'd use an asset register or spreadsheet though.

Not wanting to pick holes, but why put year of purchase in the name? It makes it very hard to programmatically script names and if someone is rebuilding a station and didn't take note of it before they moved it, or just forgot, then it adds time to getting it built while they have to find out. Much easier to just know you are in room 1e and this is the 15th computer along. As for offices, I used to do the same across the board. 4 letter location code then 2 digit number, numbered starting from the left side of the room as you entered and working clockwise round. So the IT office would be ITOF-01, the assistant head would be ASHD-01, the pool office would be POOF-01, and classes would follow the same format so English room 4 would be EN04-01 etc. Now I'm on a multi-site organization I'm going to add a 3 letter code to the start. Going to be harder with Intune as you can't set a fixed name.

Do we know what is missing from Hive? Looked at their product page and their didn't seem to be a comparison matrix. EDIT: Doh, never mind. Found it. Compare Products

Have they put the whole cab on a timer or put timers on each switch that plugs into the cab's power switch? If they have put the whole cab on a timer then you need to put down getting them changed to fused spurs.

As ever, and has been mentioned, this isn't a technical issue, it is an educational issue. The school needs to educate the parents to make sure they haven't blindly turned off the mobile provider default filters and of the dangers of giving children unlimited data; educate the pupils about responsibility when browsing and using the Internet; educate staff to know what to look for. As an IT team you need to make sure your Wi-Fi/Internet is more attractive, or at least not less attractive, than hot-spotting. If your network or internet is slow, they will work round it. If your filtering is too aggressive, they will go around it. Personally I am against banning mobile phones. I feel that in school it is a good opportunity to learn appropriate use, but it does bring challenges and they are what the school need to meet. BYOD does bring its own set of challenges, as does school owned 1:1 devices, and the School needs to be fully aware of the pros and cons before starting down the path of either, or when evaluating if the path they took is still appropriate for what the School wants.

Wow, that is a big one. No idea how many schools the LEA still support but a whole county changing from SIMS is a real shift.

Interesting as my experience was the direct opposite. I'd be interested in what was worse for the IT team or Staff? It may have just been the position the school was in before we moved to iSAMS but I think I can honestly say that 95-99% of staff were happy with the move and better off because of it. Moving to iSAMS instantly cut off a minimum of a weeks work each term for reports, but a move to any system would have got near to that due to the way we had to do it before.

Does your SMTP go through M365? Microsoft are doing intermittent outages for anyone using basic authentication, to force people onto modern authentication. If PS Financials haven't done anything about this they have left it last minute as MS have been talking about restricting this for 2 years or so. Full turn off is October.

I'd finally be able to build my utopian megalopolis in Cities Skylines. Or take over the world like the dictator I really am in EUIV. Thinking a bit deeper, I took up paddle boarding last year and got a 360 camera to catch every dunking I take, so I would be able to put some nice videos together and hopefully make some VR or 360 videos.

All I can think of is the Sean Locke riposte when Rachel Riley puts a fake beard on...

We had this. One supplier even slated the Sharp casing, saying cleaners didn't like it as the rough surface held dust!!

The porthole appearance makes me laugh everytime.