TechMonkey

We have just gone through the same process. Went with an IP solution so we had greater flexibility and interoperability. I don't remember it being that much more expensive, unless you hadn't got POE+ already. The analogue systems were semi IP anyway so seemed like abit of a bodge. We also found that with certain IP systems you could address a single speaker and microphones could be built in so in a situation, 2-way communication would be possible. This may not be a major consideration to all but it was felt that it would be a benefit in our situation. The final benefit was that we will be able to add on ourselves with an IP system. I'm sure we could have worked it out with an analogue system but with the IP we just need a network point and to use the software.

I'm not going to claim we have won but I think we do all right. As a department we use Teams to bring everything together. This has our IT documents (also accessible via SharePoint), IT OneNote, IT Planner and a our chat channel. This works well. Everything can be accessed separately but this is a great way to tie it all together. This is where we are encouraging everyone to head towards and felt it only right to be the guinea pigs and 'eat the dog food' as the saying goes. As a School we are using a Shared documents on SharePoint. We are still in the process of migrating fully to this so still have an onsite shared area, but this is locked to read only. We do use SharePoint as our Staff portal. It is our Intranet, first page they get when they open Chrome and has all important links and where everyone is directed to go to. It is out external address for staff and where they have to go to get if they want to work remotely. Everything is starting to revolve around it. The big winner is having mapped drives to your shared areas. I have been told this is possible to automate with the OneDrive client via GPO but we haven't got it working. It is also possible to script it but this felt like a backwards step so haven't gone that way yet. So currently we are using Cloud Drive Mapper. This means staff work how they are used to in Explorer and don't end up, like you say, with a million copies in their Downloads folder. Don't forget though that if they are using Office 2016 and above Office documents will be opened from SharePoint so it won't get downloaded, unless they choose to. Next step it is to go native and make the OneDrive client work for shared drives and I will be (fairly) happy. Can't disagree at your vomit analogy though. MS seems to be just throwing as much as possible at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. There is so much overlap in some of the applications that it is hard to know what to use. If I want to communicate in O365 should I Yammer, Teams or use Kaizala? I hear the same from MSPs, MS is just producing stuff and then asking them how customers want to use it.

Tricky, as if it had kicked off it would have been good to have documentation, though I guess as ever it depends on what happened to that footage. If it was handed into the school or Police and that was it, no issue, but if it was posted on YouTube, big issue. Has anyone asked those members of staff what their thought process was for going for their phone? if it wasn't to document for the Police then you may have to point them in the direction of your School policies, especially safeguarding or use of images. For the kids it may be a good opportunity to do an assembly on something related.

Only ones I have comment on are Getting staff to print emails out just seems redundant. If it is that important it should be transferred to another system such as the HR or MIS and there should be a process for that. In my experience CC is a heads up or FYI. If someone needs to action something then they should be included in the To. The final line is important and we go further and almost reverse it, reminding staff that people work differently and that if they send an email out of hours they should not expect an immediate reply, or an instant one when hours start back up.

@SchoolsBroadband Many thanks I'll take a look and consider. I'm still not quite sold on a cloud filter though, something doesn't sit right with me not having a beefy bit of iron at our perimeter. Thank you for the response. I'm confused though, Simcfc73 says that the Sophos box only reports on items that have gone through the filter. So how will I give my DSL a report showing what pupils have tried to access or at risk pupils if it only shows what they have been able to see? If the system is set up correctly you will never be able to report as everything dodgy will be blocked and you can't report on it. Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

Just wondering if anyone can expand on Sophos Filtering and PREVENT/Reporting? I'm going to be starting a tender for a new firewall soon and Sophos was high on the list, but if in reality it can't show us even what Smoothwall can show us now there doesn't seem much point.

Read an interesting thing I hadn't really thought of before. Someone asking about recycling emails and how people avoid it. The gist was that to prevent accidental identity theft email addresses should not be recycled as email is now used as an identity check and not recycling seemed to be widespread thing. The biggest issue that seemed to come up was a management position having the same or similar name to someone who fills a lower position after the manager left. I've never really considered this, except for one rare case when someone was receiving old correspondence from a company as they shared the same name as a previous employee. Do others attempt to prevent this? I can't even think of a way to stop it other than unique emails using some code, but that wouldn't be friendly and you wouldn't be able to use any alias to make it friendly as that would defeat the object! Thoughts?

We've started using What's App. Use a dedicated trips phone, so staff personal number doesn't get sent out. Create a group and email out the QR code and link. Set the group to Admin posting only and make sure a second person is set to Admin in case the worst happens. So far parents and staff have loved it as it means no having to login to email systems (I'm not talking Outlook or Exchange, something like School Comms or MIS), easy to send quick messages and photos, parents don't have to rely on patch phone service to receive text messages and they are used to using it in their day to day lives. In an emergency I can see it being useful to get information out quickly. My only concern is there is no way to lock the group down or know who has joined without adding parents numbers to the phones.

I keep meaning to dig mine out, I have the same mix as you but having moved away from the coast don't have as much space. Worth a go though I reckon.

And PREVENT compliance? Surely if you can't see who is trying to access the naughties you can't be compliant? Or is this purely an issue with trying to generate a report to export? You can see the PREVENT transgressions on screen?

Might be too late but I used to use Trello but have moved to Planner within O365. I use it a lot with my team, assigning tasks and putting them out there for them to grab if they are at a loose end, as well as using it to jot down possible ideas and projects so they don't get lost in the general hubbub, or sit in the helpdesk never to be completed. There is talk about some kind of link between OneNote ticks, Tasks (Outlook) and Planner which would be nice.

Which is amusing when you consider the biggest gripe about Smoothwall is the reporting

LibreSoft was a sensible price, not too many over complicated bells and whistles and a nice simple interface. Runs from the cloud so no local setup needed. We didn't go for it as the Librarian here wanted some features it didn't have but had good feedback from people on here about it.

Depends how good your school is with overtime/TOIL/out of hours work. If they are fine then I would say the 7am start, just in case, is overkill as you would generally know of a major problem from the night before and come in early to sort it. If they are rubbish then at least it gets you that flexibility. Nearly 2 hours is a heck of a just in case buffer though. As CHiLL pointed out, have you looked at your teams workload? If the 7am guy is fully busy and getting plenty of calls and tickets during the early hours then it works, why mess with it? If he is sitting around doing busy work then he may be better applied. If the load after 2pm is massive then is it better to have that covered, in the middle of the working day, then for just the early birds to be covered and someone to have a slow start? Get some analyse done, call logs and tickets, and base your argument on that. Previous school we were all 8 till 16.30 (16.00 Fridays), here we are 8 till 17.00. Being honest I would say that extra half hour only has benefit to me for meetings, not a lot happens during it.

Well that video hit close to home within 5 seconds!!

It's good to disable QUIC anyway as it often bypasses filtering.

Does it give a reason for monitoring? I'm trying to remember but I'm sure back in the day we had to give specific reasons (Training, Safeguarding, Criminal activity, etc) and if a disciplinary was brought based on something not within those parameters then it could be taken to tribunal and it would be a slam dunk loss to the employer. If the reasons were too wide, so used every reason under the sun, and felt to be over reaching that could also be taken to tribunal and the policy dismissed. This may be out of date though so check up.

We have gone to Prowise boards and not had any major gripes. We moved from a couple of SMART screens as I didn't feel they were great. I keep meaning to try Sharp touch boards as I've heard good things, just not had a chance and want to keep standard as much as I can. There is an issue with a lot of boards and the viewing angle, you have to be really careful and as a lot of the brands don't make manufacture their own panels it can change and a board that was OK can seem to be worse. The prices on bigger and bigger panels are dropping so it is getting more viable to stick a bigger screen in a room and make it more viewable.

They may have changed but Flex have internal Optical drive and card readers. 3 Display ports would be nice though. I think I'm using a VGA, DVI and HDMI across 2 different cards! I went for Flex as it can be converted to an AIO, I have a dislike for a base unit taking up space or being stuck under a desk. But base unit choices are like cars, everyone has a preferred style and everyone else will have an opinion on that choice

I completely agree with this, and have done roughly the same but went the Flex route. Considering we could end up having VMs running, video converting or editing, as well a multitude of tabs open to cover what we are working on and research I don't think it is a 'luxury' or a 'treat' to be able to do the job effectively and in a timely manner.

Something I just found, CodeTwo Out of Office Manager, which may be easier as you can plan ahead. No idea how it works but CodeTwo do good tools. It's one of their free ones too.

As usual, no guarantees on this and definitely no guarantee that it is pretty or efficient! Ensure you run the first two lines of code (uncommented) separately first to get an encrypted password file. Then put it somewhere accessible by the script and edit the path in the second line of the Credential block. Do not use an MFA user. I can't see anyway for that to work, although I did spot some talk about an AzureAD bypass auth token so I may investigate that. Create two script files, one with "OoO on" line working and the second with the "OoO off" line enabled. Set up your Scheduled tasks to call either the turn on or turn off script. #Use the below 2 lines before running this script to get an encrypted password file. #$credential = Get-Credential #$credential.Password | ConvertFrom-SecureString | Set-Content "C:\random\ExportedPassword.txt" #Ensure not an MFA account #Credentials $username = "[email protected]" $pwdTxt = Get-Content "C:\random\ExportedPassword.txt" $securePwd = $pwdTxt | ConvertTo-SecureString $credObject = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList $username, $securePwd #Import Exchange Online Module Import-Module MSOnline #Connect to Exchange Online Connect-MsolService -Credential $credObject $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $credObject -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection Import-PSSession $Session -AllowClobber #Set OoO on Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration -Identity [email protected] -AutoReplyState Enabled -InternalMessage "Just testing sorry" -ExternalMessage "Just testing, sorry." #Set OoO off #Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration -Identity [email protected] -AutoReplyState Disabled #Disconnect Remove-PSSession -Session $Session As a separate project I'm going to look at how to loop through and apply against a whole OU or Mailboxes with an attribute so I can set all teaching staff to have their OoO on over the summer holiday. Let me know if there are any issues or if anyone spots a clanger!

Theoretical, I'm afraid but sound. The script should probably have a line importing the Exchange Module and some encrypted credentials. Ok, I'm probably setting myself up for a fall here but give me a day and I will knock something up as this might be useful to do enmass for staff over the holiday... To give me some wiggle room, lets go day and a half.

Less than £150 for an IP camera would work out more cost effective than keep replacing the broken kit. I've found making the staff using the room responsible helps as really this is a classroom management issue. Go to your management as you will need top cover for any solution put into place. CCTV will get the teachers back up as they will instantly say it is to monitor them. You could start charging the departments, spreading across multiple if you can't pin point when the damage happened and explain that as no one reported it then it has to be split. That will get the teaching staff starting to check and report breakages at the beginning of the lesson. But this will still need to be enforced and signed off by Management. If you have the time you could do a bit of detective work, and track back through who logged on to the PC, ask them if they noticed anything off about the PC or ignore those that logged on for a very, very short time and narrow it down.

Yes. Create a .ps1 file. Copy it to your Task Scheduler server. Create Scheduled task to call script. Profit.