TechMonkey

The issue it is all down to individual experience. So I have just put down to renew our Ruckus system as I realised I had forgotten about it and everything was either coming to or actually EOL. I literally installed it, added some more APs after a year and it just sat there doing it's thing. I was going to look around at all the others but thought if the system worked so well that I have managed to forget about it why change? There lies another issue, yes I could have gone for Unifi for cheapness but if there were issues I would have kicked myself for leaving a platform I know to be stable and work. We are in an old building with walls stouter than Comic book guy and Ruckus has handled everything we have thrown at it. Suppliers who have been in for other things have been surprised that we cover as much area as we do with the number of APs we have due to these walls. Having heard the tales of constantly needing to restart APs or them being used as consumables as they break but are cheap I just felt my, and my teams, time is worth more than having to keep chasing bugs. I also don't like the way Unifi seems to funnel you to getting their whole stack, but that is a personal annoyance and I'm sure this could be a massive benefit to some. But I can understand that if someone has had issues, even niggles, with Ruckus then they would be more open to shifting. All of the above applies the same for Unifi, if you have had no issues why change and if you have had issues why not jump ship

You got me very excited then that Due South was on a streaming service. I am now very sad and going to have to go listen to and on repeat. Damn you sir!

I've got it setup to just sync Calendar presence, so staff are marked as DND if in a meeting. There should be other tabs that allow you to control what is and isn't synced, but they may only appear once the link is setup. I don't have user sync setup as the limiting settings are very basic, either all, specific users or exclude users. You are right though, in a company it is probably a God send, in a school not so much use.

The one that works most effectively for all stakeholders within your school.

He doesn't say something separate, just that a teacher working before their contract kicks in would be classified as a volunteer so get them to follow the same processes you would any other volunteer and treat them like any other volunteer, for example with their level of access. If you have a single AUP, which as you say is a benefit, that a volunteer would sign then get them to sign it. If it is a single AUP then they won't need to sign a new one once their contract kicks in as you will have one on file already.

We allow staff access to email and their logons from August the 1st but restrict access to the MIS until 1st of September. They have to get their login details from us and we give them the AUP and a crash course induction. We have the fight every year, the line managers want the staff set-up ASAP, the Data Protection bod screams blue murder and we compromise on the previous solution. It is messy and I can understand the issue but I'm never quite sure what loophole could be exploited, what the new member of staff is not covered by. If they were to leak data then surely they would be terminated and the usual processes followed? They can't just yell "Neh neh I'm not an employee yet" and we would have to shrug and suck up that they fooled us.

Sorry no, it is all mine... I hope.

That was the only thing that spoiled the article for me. Begging for just one seat at the table when every school I know has a Bursar, Business Manager or equivalent on SLT, whereas a mix of staff even on SMT would be useful. Estates manager/Head caretaker knows how the site runs and what can be accessed and what issues there are around the site, Office Manager/Heads PA knows about what capacity the office staff have for any extra work and know what knock on effect changes will have to admissions or exams or reception as well as being able to disseminate information to reception so they can inform parents and IT normally get pulled in to any plan and know the technical limitations of systems. Other wise you have one person running around everyone trying to find out what will work or not and the wrong information gets passed back. The issue is Teaching matters get thought of as equivalent to the running of the school, what is taught is often discussed at the same meetings they discuss organisational things. Schools need to reorganise and recognise that the school is a varied organisation, and it needs to be done last week!

That's a very open ended question and totally depends on the person delivering, the person receiving and the medium. Personally I prefer computer based training as I can do it a my pace, skip the bits I know, recover the bits I'm not sure and get instant feedback if I have grasped a concept through quizzes. Most of the school provision has not been that comprehensive, either being pre-recorded lessons or electronic form filling. Some forward thinking teachers have created their own resources that have mini quizzes in to help cement the learned knowledge but I would say the majority are trying to make online spaces conform to their classroom based teaching, things like worksheets are still majorly prevalent.. I imagine staff that are used to blended learning or flipped classrooms are really in their element right now. Don't forget online courses have been around for ages so nothing new just for this generation. We have been doing Child protection courses online for years, a whole school I worked at was signed up to Health and Safety training 8 years ago and we are looking to do modules like manually handling and fire warden training online so selected staff can do it at their leisure (within reason) rather than have to all sit in a room and be talked at as well as be able to onboard staff easily and not have to wait for the next cost effective slot to get a trainer in.

Depends on what features you want and your budget? Exchange has resource booking through the calendar, usually used for meeting rooms but it could be used. MRBS is a room booking system but we have used it for minibuses in the past and is free, beyond your time and server resources. We currently use Room Booking System from SchoolCloud, again nothing fancy it just books time slots. If you want something dedicated to minibuses then you need to look at some of the bigger school activity systems, like CHG or Schools Buddy. But then you will be paying quite a lot and I think have more functionality than you need.

If you mean change to a whole new system, yes. We chose 3CX. You license per simultaneous call, so if you have 3 internal calls and 5 external calls at once, you would need enough licenses to cover those 8 calls. When you look at calls it is surprising how few calls happen at once though. They don't make any distinction between internal and external extensions, you can just restrict an extension to not being able to make external calls. Biggest cost for us was handsets. You do have the option to use softphones and the IT department has gone over to softphones completely, so no handset just a headset and the 3CX client.

Someone else posted that it had been extended till October. I've just run one myself as a test and it all seems to work

Is it reading a mailbox? I've had it on a different system whereby an email just got stuck/the delete script didn't work so every time the system read the mailbox it would create another ticket. Only solution was to connect to the mailbox and delete manually then restart all the services and the server to kick it into working.

I use ADM who are based in Canterbury but work all over, including London. ADM-Computing

Is there much difference to the 2015 version except a bit prettier? I enjoyed the previous version as a way of zoning out, but there isn't really a lot to it.

Skipped or rolled through a river that wasn't as deep as it was large?

Depends on how much you want to do yourself and how much money you have? Any MSP will be able to build you a virtual setup and then with a bit of reading setting up things like the GPOs aren't hard, you just have to be methodical. Or if you have the money they will do a full migration for you. I did it a long time ago, from CC3 to Vanilla. We got a company in to build the virtual infrastructure as we had never done anything like that and then I read a very large book and worked out what else we needed. Built the new domain and server, transferred documents and set up new accounts, though now you could probably create a trust relationship and transfer the accounts using the MS tools.

Dissenting voice, VMWare. No particular reason other than it is what I am used to and was here when I arrived so no reason to change. There is a large part of me that feels having the tin on a different system than the VMs means less chance of something bad happening but I know there are ways to mitigate the risk with Hyper-V.

We successfully used Planet eStream but that was something we already had and used, so not a new purchase for the COVID season. It does a whole lot more than just host video files so if that is what you are after it may be overkill and a cost to match.

Which equipment? PC Hardware there are millions. Very PC, Stone, Dell, HP. Or do you mean a hands off, fill in a form and give you a price type e-quote? The only ones will be the big box shifters, and even then it won't be an official quote, but a shopping cart list.

Is there someone (you?) who will manage it day to day? I only ask as most filter systems are URL aware only so you have to know the address to filter it. There are a couple of proper content filters, that read the text, that keep you ahead of the game but you have to be explicit with the suppliers as they will all call them content filters, because they filter web page content. Personally I think this is weaselly words but hey ho. I would recommend a proper content filter if there is a light management touch needed (this is normally the case in a primary) as this will catch more issues and doesn't need someone to add naughties as they pop up. Before someone pulls me up, yes nearly all the filter systems offer updated URL lists, but they can be days if not weeks behind the kids. Just look at the "URL to block" threads. The only proper content filters I know of off the top of my head are Smoothwall and Openendium.

We added Kahoot by request. I don't think it is much cop, but the teachers wanted it.

We use iSAMS. I've not used Bromcom. Happy with it. Staff are happy with it. Migration was interesting but any migration will be. I've seen some MIS teams offer a hands off migration, you give them a login and they do it for you. iSAMS don't (or didn't) do this, you populate Excel sheets for them. I would recommend spending the extra time to create SQL scripts or reports to produce the data so it is replicable. Don't forget that the school, especially management, need to be involved as this is not an IT project, just an IT led project.

I'd say that is more the problem with an MIS that hasn't been updated in many, many years. There are MISs that use SQL in the cloud and work fine. We also musn't forget that "the Cloud" is a very broad term and doesn't necessarily mean using Azure, AWS or Google offerings. I would agree with you that if you were to shift SIMS directly to the cloud it would cause all kind of issues, as everyone here knows and many have commented, the SIMS backend just hasn't been designed to be nimble or efficient. It comes down to design and shifting legacy code as is to the cloud to try and compete with modern code written to operate on cloud systems will never be a winner.

Yep, iSAMS uses API's and integrate with a massive amount of third party systems. It is only because SIMS has been lazy that they are still using older methods to integrate.