TechMonkey

The ol' jelly baby trick

Should. Not the most inspiring word. Why force someone to jump through hoops when you can just lay it out? With the details in an email, if the person has recieved it then even if they are off line they can get your details. Automate it and you have no issue. It's not like you are being charged per character!

You are doing it wrong then. Our signature doesn't break, or have attachments. Not if they want to call you, or maybe want to find where you are easily for a meeting, or numerous other reasons. Just because you can't think of reasons doesn't mean nobody else can or doesn't have reason to.

Bit of an oversimplification. Office hasn't changed since becoming cloud based. Hopefully some training has been given to staff about new cloud based systems and they haven't just been told to "click Chrome", the major changes would have been backend and IT will have self taught or had a company train them. Remembering the uproar of users of W7 to 10 I'm not sure I want to count that as an example of an easy transition. Teachers will have done if they were becoming major resources. Otherwise I'm hoping iOS or Android aren't running critical systems without any training. Again, I'm hoping people aren't relying on EduGeek for critical system support. As much as I love this place and hold the support and advice in high regard I wouldn't expect instant 24/7 support from it. There is a massive difference between "Hi guys, this system is acting oddly anyone seen this" and "OMG phone system has gone down, no service anyone know how to fix it?" You are mixing up issues. There is a difference between a system going EOL, which should be monitored and managed by the IT dept, and a person moving to a different organisation and leaving a system that no one knows about or has a clue how to deal with it. Putting "must have experience of X system" especially if that is a critical system as part of a job ad is going to restrict your candidates, where as "experience of x system preferable" with the knowledge that a support company will be able to either take up the slack or train up the new person is a very different prospect. Especially if the candidate that does have experience of that system turns around and says that they can get x amount more going to another company due to having this knowledge, what does the school do then? Not a great or helpful response. Generally you will have a clause in your contract that says anything created on school time is the property of the school, then using school time to support that for other schools, especially if the department is flat out anyway is not a great plan. No but often upgrades are associated with security and bug fixes, so unless you are happy leaving an application vulnerable or with bugs your users want fixed then you need to upgrade. Can't say I have ever been forced by Microsoft to upgrade, except for the same reasons. Often yes, or they had experience with Windows so knew the terminology used or how the UI worked. No one has said people wouldn't pick it up but as part of a proper tender process a competent IT person will add in time and costs to train IT staff, users and future staff. No one is saying Linux isn't used, but how many of those devices that you have do you interact directly with the Linux interface or had no training on? You seem to be ignoring the point lots of people have made that a proper training programme should be costed and planned whether it is a new version of Office or a new switch. In IT we generally just accept that we will read the manual, look online or do a webinar. That really isn't an acceptable route for users so needs to be properly considered.

You can recommend it, but I would let it be a Management decision and let it come down from them. People are weirdly attached to their vivid pink, curly font sign offs. We went with a standard school banner with name and job title above it, allowing people to add their own sign off (yours, kind regards, etc). Internally we just have name and position, to allow new staff to match people with roles. We don't put direct dial on so that first contact can be through the school and then if wanted the person can disseminate their number. We then turned off signatures in Outlook and locked them down. The image in sigs is a hard one, we have it but it is part of our brand and helps identify us. I hate those corporate multi-lined advertising ones we get that often are bigger than the message sent. My first thought is if your logo looks naff push to get that updated even if it is a redraw. One of the best things I did early on was convert our logo to an SWF in Inkscape as it allowed any size to be created as a crisp new logo, rather than fuzzier and fuzzier versions being made. Overall it isn't a ridiculous suggestion but has to be a input to a wider school decision and the final decision will likely be out of your hands.

Gather round everyone and let me tell you the tale of my parents, the in-laws and the game of hide and seek... So my parents love Alexa, I have lost count of how many they have now. So during a sale they bought my sister and I one, just a dot, but it was still cool. My Dad is a bit of a gadget head so we were often messing around with it, trying out features. When drop-in was introduced we played around and then forgot about it. Fast forward a few months and my wife and I had planned a getaway and all the parents were chipping in to spend sometime with our son and share the load, her parents for the first half and mine tagging them out mid week. All was going swimmingly apparently until change over day when the in-laws hear my Dad. They've arrived early, they thought so went to open the door. But could they find them? They went to open the other door, no not there. This went on for a good while until they realise that my Dad's voice is coming from a corner in the Kitchen. Yes, my Dad had stupidly dropped in unannounced. I understand the reasoning, the in-laws wouldn't know what the Alexa sound was or how to answer, but he didn't think about them not knowing what the hell was going on. After that drop-in was turned off and now if the in-laws are alone in our house they unplug it.

One issue in a school is if you save £20k on an open source phone system it isn't as if you can then say "We saved this money so can we use that towards a Technician to administer it?" You will be asked why you choose a system you couldn't administer and you will never see that money. I'd be interested in an independent study showing the costs for a full kitted out school with Open source as much as possible against a Windows kitted school and the cost differential. I'm not sure the cost difference will be as great as we think due to the fact that generally Linux administrators can command a higher salary as there are less of them around. You then have to take in to mind that any Tech will need more training than on a standard vanilla network. I'd also be interested in the difference in cost of support companies for Linux and Windows, as part of me thinks the Linux ones will be slightly higher as they have higher costs due to staff and there will be less companies offering so they can command a higher cost. As ever, it is all well and good having a pet project that you run saving the school money but if that vicious red bus jumps out and gets you or when it comes time for you to move on will the school be stuffed or have to spend money, and wipe out the cost savings you made, to install something that can be more universally managed. All the implications need to be taken into consideration, not just cost, personal opinions or what is easiest. Compromises have to be made, and unfortunately it is often IT that have to make them. I would love to retrain as a Linux specialist, migrate the school and see if I can create a wonderful open source utopia. But I also realise that I can't just drag the school off on a random path because it is something I want to do. Now, it is getting easier as everything is becoming cloud based, the platform doesn't matter as much, but still having a teacher turn up and being given a Linux laptop will have a training implication and we have enough of an issue getting induction planned in, let alone a deep dive training session.

I'd use MacVendors to find the manufacturer. Might not help but may narrow it down. Then use your Switches to see if you can pinpoint what area it is in. You may be lucky and even narrow it down to a port. Depends on what switches you have but if they are HP here is our quick documentation: Trace a device by MAC In the CLI for the core switch enter • show mac-address xxxxxxxxxxxx This will show which port a device has come into the switch from. Note port info Enter • show lldp info remote This will show all ports and the info (if available) of the device at the end. Match port reported If showing another switch repeat process on that switch If no info that port is probably the end device connection. Trace port to patch.

Have you hosted it internally or gone with their hosted solution? Does it do all kit? Switches, servers and the like? Does it do fancy things like port allocations? I'm torn between Snipe-It and GLPI. GLPI covers a lot of stuff, but may be too much that will just get ignored and get out of date.

I'd be interested to know the issues they had and what customisations they have not been able to do. We manage on pre-paid hours and have barely spoken to our support company in years. We aren't doing anything particularly fancy but anything anyone has wanted to change we have managed it ourselves. We have 16 sim calls and also could probably drop to 8, but the cost isn't that high to worry about and it is nice not to have to stress about calls. 2 extensions making a call to each other is counted as 1 simultaneous call. Think of it as connections, rather than people talking. Caller 1 connects to Caller 2, that is one sim call. If they conference call in Caller 3 that is another connection so 3 Sim calls. Unless you are a very large organisation, sales or a call center most sim calls are quite low. As ever, upgrading always pleases a company, trying to downgrade is either impossible or very hard to do.

I'm trying to find a laptop we have done this to, but we have been doing it for about a year. What are you having to control with the Powershell? If you mean the sign up we got the info needed and used the AutoPilot sign up. We did rebuild them all as well. SO if you aren't able to do that it may be harder. Off the top of my head we setup an MDT server on its own special VLAN, Laptops are built using that and having had their details imported they get sucked into Intune as soon as they are built.

Intune. We dont have many and not done anything fancy but it seems to work well and is getting better as time goes on. Good practice for the cloudy future too!!

Ah, further ingress of the North American Fibre Seeking Backhoe. When getting a backup line survey if you state that is what it is for, the engineers should try and plan it that way. If they don't I think in an emergency the company would have a case against the company. But sometimes there is no option.

Depends on what you are trying to off set. Phantom JCBs eating your line would be offset by just a line coming from a different exchange using a different route. Complete telecoms meltdown would only be offset by a different carrier. Workout cost and likelihood and see if it is worth it. Former example I would say is likely to happen, latter example is less likely to happen.

Could there be confusion over where they are saving having two different redirects? With OneDrive we found an issue where pupils were logging off before the OneDrive client had synched fully so files were staying locally on the PC. We have also found that with AutoSave pupils have closed the document before it had saved fully, though this is mitigated with the latest iteration of Office as it gives you a warning. Though users have been known to ignore or not read a warning before. None of the OneDrive possibilities explain why it is appearing on DPM though.

Tricky as how will the system know what is a name?, particularly a pupil's name? John may be a pupil, or the name of the local church a visit went to. I'd also be hesitant as if it missed a single one, all hell could break loose.

Could it be that you have some file sync is going on but it is being delayed until the pupil logins in again so an old copy is wiping over the network copy from the machine? Worth checking on the HDD of the PC to see if old versions are there? As you are talking about DPM I'm guessing this is all locally hosted, no OneDrive?

To give an alternative view, go for a half or quarter step. Companies are more than happy to bump your speed up, but will not drop your speed down. The important bit is that you have a 1Gig bearer. So maybe go for 250Mb or 500MB, and see how that goes. Obviously check with your provider what hoops you have to jump through to increase and if there are any penalties, but when we were looking at this they all said they would happily increase with no additional costs except the additional bandwidth. Another option would be to get two half speed connections and balance the load. That way you have your redundancy, you have your full speed and if anything goes wrong your users will only notice some slow down, but importantly you aren't paying for twice as much as you need. This will still work out more expensive than a single connection, obviously, but at least you aren't paying for capacity you won't use for the majority of the time. Also don't forget that to run a line from a separate exchange, especially a redundant line that doesn't follow the same route, will be more expensive than the first line as you aren't using the path of least resistance, or the path of least engineering time/screaming.

The other big DNS filter is openDNS, though Cisco took them over so it may have been merged with Umbrella by now.

Yeah, this as well. Apart from trying to remember all the faces and what actually happened it felt a bit like a Christmas special. A chance to see thebold faces, see what they were doing and maybe mop up a few loose ends. Enjoyable but not ground breaking

To suggest a completely different tack, is it worth suggesting getting some of the visual stress\dyslexia tinted glasses? That way it will work for PCs and printed work.

We use Prowise, with built in PC module. Makes for easier cabling and less faff.

Don't feel bad, apparently that is a very common mistake and is often included from legacy rules.

#Little girly scream followed by a manly cough and some talk about that ridiculous display last night#

Another vote for Synology. We have three of the beasts for various things. Much easier since they did rack mounted ones. As an alternative, if you have Office 365 or Google, why not an area/site/drive on there? Allows collab and access in case of complete network failure.