TechMonkey

Just to pick up on this, you do get reports of nasties and what remediation has been carried out from Defender. We don;t have E5 or the Security module, we are on E3 though so maybe that is the difference.

Out of interest, what is not fitting any more? I know there are problems but not fit for purpose is a very strong term to use.

Newline boards, so most of the others that are rebadge, are just giant Android tablets. The Android-ness is an input, to use anything else, OPS or HDMI, you just change input, often from a shortcut on the Android homepage. Works well. We have had a teacher off long term but well enough to work and we have had Teams on the board working so no need for the teacher to lose their laptop just to show the teams view. The only thing I worry about is staff logging in and the board remembering them and giving access to other members of staff or even pupils. NewLine handles this with some apps by wiping sessions when the board is restarted, but I don't know if this is universal across all apps and all boards.

We are with iSAMS, I have been frustrated by iSAMS lack of innovation and development. I would say hold fast though as I feel things are turning a corner. I think a lot of the problems, that they can't really say, is the code base is from early internet, and changing it is a big task. Also, decisions from the very first version are coming back to bite them, just look at the contacts system and how hard that has been to update and change. At the time it was fantastic and revolutionary but now it is restrictive and holds the system back. With the investment from IRIS that seems to be changing. The other issue iSAMS has is a want to let us know things are changing and what is coming but then things hit a technical or political bump that couldn't have been expected. I spent a bit of time at BETT with one of their specialists and to see their enthusiasm for things that are coming was really wonderful, as well as their honesty about issues we were having. I do think this is one of those things that comes under the heading the grass isn't always greener, just a different shade. Can I ask, do you write SSRS reports? I do think iSAMS is a system that really benefits from someone filling gaps with their own tweaks and reports. Recently a teacher was venting that they found it hard to mark homework as it was nigh on impossible to look at what pupils were in their class without keeping a separate class register, as iSAMS had no easy view for a class. I was astonished and was determined to prove them wrong. And they were right. So, I knocked up a janky SSRS report to show them the register for a single class for a chosen date range. The teacher was ecstatic and told everyone about it, and the staff are happier and less inclined to keep a mark book now. Such a little thing but it has made their workflow a lot better.

At a previous place we used Tapestry and it was great. I was also a user and loved it. I don't remember the user import or link being arduous, I think a teacher may have been in charge of it. I would recommend it (based on 6 year ago experience) and personally would be much happier with Tapestry than photos being put on Social Media.

Yes, the actual code and application were not compromised, their hosting was. Seems to be a nation state attack, redirecting very specific, targeted users.

MS Admin is reporting 30.82 TB across Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive. Our Synology has 26.1TB and is currently using 15.8TB, with 6 bays free on the NAS. Touch under £6k which was about at most a couple years of what we were being quoted for C2C. Our Cloud backup is provided by Wasabi, through AutoData. £36 a month for 5TB, which covers us for onsite.

Does it have to be cloud to cloud? We do Cloud to site using Synology. This is a one-off payment for the hardware, so generally beats any cloud system due to no subscription. We do have site to cloud as well but we don't duplicate any backups, to ensure we don't have a backup feedback loop created!

Is this being applied in OneNote or on the document they are trying to insert?

It looks like there are a mix of issues. We have seen some Word documents that haven't worked but they seem to be either .doc files or an older version of .docx that needs converting. One teacher found that PDFs work fine so has been exporting as that and then inserting. It does look like a badly rolled out implementation but also a mix of errors all coming under the same heading, so throwing off troubleshooting.

I think our supplier set up a policy that resolved this, as well as something to allow Entra groups to work. Having taken a look, in the policy our Radius Attribute Group is set to a specific set of variables, but this is a drop down so I'm not sure where that is set. The one i think it is is User-Name: 'DOMAIN\${USERNAME}' Where DOMAIN is your AD domain. EDIT: Found it. In policies of CloudPath there is a second tab that is for RADIUS Attribute Groups. Set one up and you can create additional Attributes.

Just to confirm, and to correct myself, you've tried BT Local Business (BT Local Business | BT Business)? These are normally independent companies, licensed by BT to sell BT products and have better connections into BT.

Who did you purchase it through? Have you tried your local BT Business team?

It can also be a taster thing. One term of photography, one of screen printing, another of pottery. Gives the pupils a taste of lots of things rather than dragging one thing out over a year.

I would recommend the iSAMS training courses. It isn't going to get you a certificate or gain you a new report developer gig anywhere else, but they go through what is best practice, how things are generally organised and can help you make your first report. One thing I would say is that for office staff, using the UI would probably be better. Having just done a similar exercise all the registration tables start TblRegistationSchoolRegistrationXXXX, with the main one being TblRegistationSchoolRegistrationPupils. You then link this to TblPupilManagementPupils to get pupil names linked by txtSchoolID. There is also TblRegistationSchoolRegistrationRegister, for the actual register details (date/time/friendly name etc) and TblRegistrationSchoolRegistrationDateTime that has the individual slots. Below are my joins for a report to find the registers for a single set within a time period. Not going to claim it is super efficient or a perfect example but it is doing what we need so far. FROM [TblRegistrationSchoolRegistrationPupils] as Registrations JOIN [iSAMS_Woodbridge].[dbo].[TblPupilManagementPupils] as Pupils ON Registrations.txtSchoolID=Pupils.txtSchoolID JOIN [TblRegistrationSchoolRegistrationRegister] as registers ON Registrations.intRegister=registers.[TblRegistrationSchoolRegistrationRegisterID] JOIN [TblRegistrationSchoolRegistrationDateTime] as regSlots ON registers.[intRegistrationDateTime]=regslots.[TblRegistrationSchoolRegistrationDateTimeID] JOIN [TblStaff] as staff ON staff.User_Code = Registrations.txtSubmitBy

Things you didn't expect to read today 😄

You only have to pay for CoPilot if you want the full tenant facilities. You can use the free version you are probably using at home. If you can't then your admin has either not set it up or restricted it. Full fat CoPilot is an additional service and therefore incurs an additional cost. You make the decision if you feel that the additional features are worth the cost.

Have to say, I have been making comparisons too so will be watching this.

Some CMS' have some static pages, that aren't in the content pages but are accessed somewhere else in the admin area. Privacy is often one of them. Otherwise, it may be one of those great systems that the Privacy page is an include and only editable by the company.

Sorry, I may be having a brain fart here, but surely this is correct. You have a page that is showing a broken link. The link is broken so that page does not exist anymore, but the page with the broken link does. Or have I misread the situation? Or are you saying the link checker is only giving you the broken link, not where the broken link is located?

Don't forget that Co-pilot, and I presume tenanted Gemini, will keep your data walled off and pledge not to train the LLM on it. This is good for GDPR and safeguarding. Co-pilot also follows the age rating of a user (minor, not-adult, adult) to say if the user is allowed access to it or not. Again, I presume Google does the same. Any pupil data put into ChatGPT is essential fired out into the ether and you have no control over it.

So are we placing bets on the system going down within a minute?

Pass it on to your replacement or the company that steps in if the entire team is wiped out under a bus. It really is an end game failsafe and why it is a very, very long password sealed in an envelope, signed by members of the IT team, laminated, kept in the Finance safe after being eaten by a Doberman, as well as being checked regularily by the IT team that it is there and not been tampered with. It should be made clear that using this without proper cause needs to be a gross misconduct offense. Mine generally have a password with a length of multiple page lines, partly to put off anyone wanting to quickly use it but also to really make sure it is secure.

There are plenty of companies that will give you third party warranty coverage. I have used Millgate in the past, MISCO do as well and I bet SoftCat do, as well as other companies, such as Park Place Technologies (not used but were chasing me for HP servers going out of warranty). Depending on what you SLA you want they can work out very reasonable and much cheaper than first party extension. Would be a good option to get over this blip if the servers are serviceable. My cynical side though worries the prices will stay put as companies suck.

I would contact the LA/MAT/Trust that used to oversee the school and pass the issue on to them. I bet the collections agency doesn't think you are the owner, as they will have seen the transfer, but your details were in the history so they will try and pressure you to pay.