TechMonkey

Not personally but I know the Pro Home Cook, who I think is fab, really likes them

The problem is, if the schools or Arbor are doing it wrong, & I mean full on wrong, then they should be pulled up on it. And we all know schools are not the greatest at following processes they should. If it is just a technicality then I think that is bad form on Bromcom's part.

I imagine the thought process is, it could take us up to 3 years to get this squared away. Let's lock them in to try and stop the customer leakage (which looks bad to investors) and then when they come up for renewal we will have this fantastic product to migrate them to and everyone will clap. It is about giving themselves breathing room. It is a hell of a gamble but if they can pull it off there really will be some hat doffing. @thomsm86 - the thing you are overlooking is that the other providers have been working with scalable infrastructure for as long as their products have been available, and are used to adding on resources as they need it each year or during demand periods. The real question is, will the Next Gen SIMS be able to handle not only the first dump of new customers and prove itself to be stable, but also prove it can handle those big crunch times, like results week or when reports are being produced or even that 9am crunch when the register is done. They have no track record with that (unless you take ParentPay as the track record and how that copes with start of term) and schools are being asked to effectively trust a new comer who is claiming to be the old, stable hand in the market.

You can adjust the 30 day retention period to longer, that is just the default. We looked at lots of solutions, all costing quite a lot and using the "MS don't guarantee your data" scare stick to push the sale. In the end I found that our Synology boxes did M365 duplication so we turned that on. So we have full circle, data backed up to the cloud and cloud data backed up to our site. Cost us nothing, but would cost you however much you can acquire a Synology box and disks for. That is a one of cost as well, instead of annual.

Surely pausing is not good advice as if nothing comes of their talks then the clock has been run down and schools have less time to get sorted? Use the time constructively to meet with other MIS suppliers, get ideas of how to proceed and get quotes to see what the implications would be. Maybe hold off pressing the go button but be ready and informed to make the change.

I've not done it but if you have access to the API, then all the information is made available there. It is an XML file so easily read.

I've watched the first 2 episodes of Dexter: New Blood. It's interesting and cinematography is lovely. Feels a bit like a reboot but with the previous series slightly relevant.

Shouldn't be anything to miss. I don't know how it works but I have the connection setup in Visual Studio, copy it across and it works. Before I had to go in through the web interface and adjust the data source.

I found staff were actually happy and very receptive as the system was so much better, more intuitive and less hassle. Take it slow, show them the parts they need now and build on it.

That's interesting, only issue I've had with the new module is it didn't like Academic Reports, which has been fixed. Apart from that it is has been fine, even swapping the data connection automatically for me which I nearly always forgot to do.

You can get Set lists by year from the wizard bar. Teaching Manager > View Teaching Sets Lists. Do agree though, the Wizard bar is a bit of a dump ground for everything. Wish we could organise it or pin things to the top. Also sounds like House staff need the Report Printing module. Can bulk whole years from there.

To be fair we get Papercut to email our helpdesk when a printer gets to 25%. Means we can check the toner stocks. Didn't find any SNMP features that would help and I think it would just be noisy as staff generally clear paper jams themselves. Thinking though, I guess you could set it to only error if a fault stayed for half hour or so.

With a move from PASS to iSAMS we started in Feb and were done for Sept go live. That wasn't non-stop though and with an initial data import for us to do training on and play with and then a fresh import in August to be ready. Training was a week. Does depend on their availability. Actual import I think took a week of back and forth.

So good they made another 3!!

Ahhh the old angley quotes. Why oh why do websites use those!!!! Especially in code examples!

Stabbing in the dark as I haven't done this yet but looking at the examples in the Google Documentation looks like you don't need the data ID xml tag, just have the tag.

BBC had an article about it. Basically the age old issue of kids posting things either with the teacher videoed or about the teacher. Maybe thank them for their response first, but mention that you don't feel that addresses your concerns? How about adding something along the lines of "and we look forward to working with you and helping you address these issues"? Adds a friendly atmosphere.

Turn it off and back on again. It's a stereotype for a reason. Depends on what you covered in Lockdown. Keyboard shortcuts are always popular. Ctrl-click and Shift-click. some basic useful Excel formulas?

PRTG Free. Does what we need.

SQUEEEEeeeeeeee!!! I mean... Jolly good.

We just had an odd issue with aka.ms links, so the Waffle menu in M365 wasn't working. 503 errors, though seems to have been fixed now. Is the internet all about to fall over?

Could be worse, I heard of an ISI inspection that when they turned up the inspectors were presented with boxes of paperwork. When asked to get access to their systems they were told that their computer systems were down unfortunately. Systems were down the whole of their visit. Various inspectors wanted to mark them down for this but as it was not on the inspection framework there was no where to penalise them. They got outstanding!

To be fair to Google, the MS bits to do this are above and beyond the free Education license. I think it is Azure P1.

Label all CCTV cameras as covert cameras. Sorted

An alternate view, our policy states school emails are to be used for academic work, not personal use. Discord is not an educational resource so not appropriate use of a school email.