TechMonkey

Do you have O365? We just bought ours from the Purchase Services page. £9pp a year for the web based version, £20pp a year for the full version.

That's interesting as I've always taken nerd to be the worse term, geek I've always taken to be someone that is really good at something whereas nerd was someone that was overly immersed in something. Though I've just read something that defines geeks to be collectors, where as nerds are practitioners.

Yes, I understand the meaning of costs and the costs potentially involved, but all I'm hearing are 101 reasons not to change, not to develop and not to help the school move on. Which, funnily, is often a charge I see levelled at teaching staff here. Or, and call me radical, we as IT professionals could be proactive and plan to implement things shown to have benefits across the industry, build them into our budgets if there is a monetary cost included, build them into our future development plans and show management what needs to be to done to implement the requests they have made. Planning is not something that should only happen when something needs to be implemented. 6 years ago I put into action a plan to make all switches POE. We didn't have any POE devices at the time and there was no direct plans for needing them. Now we have cameras, phones, access control, speakers and various odds and ends and I know with almost certainty that when I am asked to implement something, usually at short notice, our department can deliver rather than being labelled a department who says no. If we had decided to implement POE as those projects had come along we would have either had a piecemeal implementation, had to run major projects alongside each other and upped the cost of those projects dramatically, r wasted money, time and added complexity by buying loads of injectors. The alternative is not planning, being passive, wondering why everything comes at once and as a surprise, blaming everyone else for their lack of planning and finding you and your school are behind and have to make massive leaps. As I said before, in what situation would being able to access your files from anywhere, at anytime, with no lead time and without changing how you work, be a bad thing?

To add to @robyholmes answer you want to follow the linked article https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/active-directory/saas-apps/google-apps-provisioning-tutorial to have user provision. Then follow https://svdbusse.github.io/SemiAnnualChat/2019/08/17/OrgUnitPath-G.-Suite-Azure-AD-Provisioning.html to get users into the correct OUs. All of that, including Roby's link, is native Azure AD, no scripts or GPO needed.

Yes seeing the plans helps, but Business Continuity has commonality no matter the plan, plus their plans likely will not cover the specifics, so our job is to be ready to make services and files available as soon as possible no matter the issue. Name me a situation where, during an incident, being able to access your files instantly, working as you are used to without interruption, would be a bad thing? It isn't just about the school burning down, what if you had no access to the site? For example a body was found and the police refused to let anyone on during an investigation? What if your power was down for any length of time? What if there was flooding? etc etc etc. No, you can't plan for everything, but planning for the likely scenarios that may hit the school will hold you in good stead. Not events, scenarios, which there are only a few. And it won't hurt your reputation the first time something happens and you can whip your phone out and access everything, rather than shrug and mumble how no one asked for it or showed you the plans. I'd be interested in where those transfer speed numbers come from as they sound like theoretical peak rates. Also most offsite backup services I have seen have slow restore so I'd be impressed if a service is giving you a full Gig download. But again, which is better, users carrying on as if nothing happened or taking a minimum of 2 hours to restore files plus the time it takes to spin up a VM, get the networking sorted, get your users devices connected and then map their drives?

Yep, you rent a VM and have to restore all your files, home directories and shared areas. Would you like to hazard a guess at how long that will take from a remote backup? You'd still have to setup a LAN and Internet connection as you say. Welcome to the joys of O365 and G-Suite, no you don't need a LAN or to setup a Internet connection. Staff can work from home, from a cafe, from a hotel, from anywhere with a wifi signal. Teachers could set work or even, in the short-term, teach via Hangouts/Teams/Skype and get their class together online. I'm not sure where anyone has said you need to completely change your whole network, but if you don't feel you need to plan for disaster recovery then all power to you in your confidence of your local fire brigade and fire suppression systems, but I'm not sure why you are in this thread. @MrWu Obviously playing to day to day is important but if day to day can also work to your advantage in a situation or even improve your day to day be even better, then it is a win-win. It depends on your budget and how you want to go about it. To sync data you can get free tools that will sync AD to G-Suite, or something like Salamander can do a lot. Alternatively get AzureAD set up and then use that as your SSO for Google. Personally I would drop ADFS and move to ADConnect if you go this route. Then make a plan, but that will depend on your specific site. Do you think moving shared areas would go best or home directories? Is there budget to get something like Cloud Drive Mapper? As that will then allow SMT to keep their mapped drives. Alternatively I think there is a free Google tool but I don't know its features. This is something you need to plan for now, not in a year, as it could take up to a year to get your Shared areas moved across. Speak to your teachers and see if they are wedded to the idea or Google Classrooms, if they are then I would move that way, teacher led. Just to put your mind at rest, we are running all home directories from the cloud and if we had 10 minute wait times I would have been lynched. No one notices. There are some concessions. Mail-merges currently don't work across cloud so we had to create an onsite area for staff to save data for merges. We have media drives onsite but generally pupils use their home drives. We have been very cautious, running any changes on ourselves first, then opening it up to some willing guinea pigs and then running a migration plan for the rest of staff. As ever the three important things to think about is Communication, Communication, Communication. Keep staff informed, let them know what isn't happening yet, keep it simple and most importantly repeat. Often. Even as a non-technical person, your Bursar isn't far off the mark. Though, as mentioned, it is a bit more involved than just shunting stuff so keep their expectations realistic. If I was you, first steps would be to sit down, work out a rough plan and then get time with SLT and lay it out, warts and all. Get their input and thoughts and go from there. Go all out with costs and see what they think. If they baulk then at least you have the other free tools to fall back on, but if they give you the go ahead then you know they are committed to it.

WeTransfer?. Maximum of 2GB though

Once you get new hardware, a new place to setup and restore it all. With G-Suite or O365, everyone carries on as if nothing has happened, where ever they are.

Sounds like you need to sort your Internet connection! If your school burns down I bet everyone will be incredibly happy that they can still access their files, more than they were annoyed by having to twiddle their thumbs for a couple of hours if the internet goes down.

Yep. We went ADConnect and it is so much easier and actually gives you full redundancy, rather than having to update records if your site goes down. Be careful getting rid of Exchange Hybrid. As much of a pain it is having the synching and remembering where things are entered if you go fully cloud it does remove all Exchange attributes from our AD so suddenly you have no email addresses in AD or proxyaddress so have to add them manually. I guess this only affects things syncing directly from AD rather than Azure, but it could be a deal breaker.

This is what I feel needs sorting. How can a download game that could be 2 years old cost more than a physical disc sitting in a physical shop?!

Because we found that our drives were getting full of synced documents and that pupils were losing documents as they were not being synched quick enough between them closing an application and logging off. Once again, it works great for 1:1 devices or staff who use the same PC day in, day out. But for Pupils who as usual are a unique use case that MS didn't think about it just wasn't up to scratch. CDM writes direct to the cloud so there is less hassle attached.

What are you not finding safe about it? As others have said, make sure safesearch is enforced at your filter. If pupils are getting through to bad content then maybe that is the fault of the content filter rather than Google? There is a shift towards making pupils digitally resilient, which is what mrwoberts mentioned, and is more about pupils learning how to deal with the Internet rather than just trying to lock all the bad stuff away. The theory goes that if we don't teach them how to manage it then it will be more of an issue when they have to deal with it.

YEs we do the same. Big ole Synology box for pictures and videos.

We are doing it, with CDM as well. Not been told of any major issues, though we would probably be the last to know!! We have given a year to get files transferred, with the old shared area being set to read only, in the meantime. You do need to do a lot of hand holding. Make sure they realise that there are now 2 ways to get to the files, online and through File Explorer. I try and tell them to use Explorer in school and online off-site. Also show them how to refresh Explorer (F5), and to do that if anything looks odd or files aren't there that they are expecting. The biggest wall butting issue will probably be when staff start using Word or Excel Online and then complain when something doesn't work, ignoring the big EDIT IN WORD button.

Not done an OFSTED in a while but generally they don't. You may be asked to talk to them about IT and Safeguarding, but I had briefed our DSL enough about everything that they had all the answers so I didn't need to. You may be randomly asked about general safeguarding, but anyone on site could be. You may also be asked to be on a staff panel, but that will be general questions and often pin in a list type selection. You may be asked to help out with setting up the inspectors room; so a PC, printer, access badges if needed, wifi codes. Though some come with mobile dongles and just work from them. I have heard of an inspection where the IT systems were down the whole time of the inspection and they passed fine as everything was given to them as paper. It beggars belief and my feeling is that, depending on the cause, they should fail as there are obviously not the management or process in place to deal with an event like that, but IT isn't part of the inspection so can't be used to fail or even judge the school. EDIT: As mentioned above, it is a great time to get some research or paperwork done as the school runs like clockwork.

Whooosh

I noticed that. Our Accountant panicked as she thought we had moved SAGE to the cloud during an update without talking to her because all the documentation now says Cloud.

Depends on the capacity you think you may need. We got RS2416RP+ last time so a RS2418RP+ would give you loads of room and the possibility to expand. Though an RS820+ may be better on the budget.

Synology. Can get a rack version which fit in network cabs. Really versatile.

An Elvis bath duck. I didn't have a bath tub at the time.

I think I gave it a fixed IP and set it to bypass all filtering. I also have a vague recollection of the network details being horribly wrong. We have also had numerous occasions when their servers have been down or overloaded. We have reverted to the fax line many a time. An engineer that came out said he was dreading the time when all the new machines were deployed as they no longer were coming with modems.

Just to confirm. On your DHCP, when you select Server Options, 006 DNS Servers does not have the old server listed. On any of your DHCP servers?

Not sure if you have shared or split DHCP but if the oher DCs have got confused, due to the demoted DC they could be passing out the same IPs.

Could it be a duplicate IP? If the IP also causes an issue it can't be DNS (Though it's always DNS), but I have had oddness if a static IP has been left in the pool so 2 devices end up with the same IP. Maybe check if a particular server that is causing issues has a static IP set and if there is a DHCP lease and then if the MAC addresses match.