pete

This one? I'd send them an email to the people linked below asking for access on the basis that your telephone company (who I assume are a Unify reseller) are doing a pretty poor job of supporting their product. Make it clear you're not asking for Unify to support you as a customer but if a working driver exists on that portal you'd appreciate access to download it. https://unify.com/en/support/customer-support-portal

I assume there's nothing helpful on the Unify portal?

Was the original driver (that didn't work) signed? Does an 8.1 driver work?

Was that part of a consortium of schools? I've just given them a nudge and they say they can't beat what we're currently paying unless it's 10+ schools. I'd be interested in seeing what you were quoted by Capita and Cloudforedu (via PM, so they don't get upset).

We used Capita.

We use it and our finance staff are pretty happy with it in terms of use and letting parents access funding they might not otherwise have applied for / known about. I don't have a lot of involvement beyond the initial "make sure they're not doing stupid things with data & systems" due diligence. There's some whitelisting involved with spam filtering and I seem to recall a "oops, we didn't tell you about the other address our systems might send from" but other than that....

How good is the barcode support / lookup on a mobile device with SnipeIT? Our site staff record PAT results via their phones currently and it's significantly improved the workflow.

So did anyone else get a hopeful bill from Asset Tiger where they pretend the free version never existed if you had 250+ assets in their system? https://web.archive.org/web/20180105090511/https://www.myassettag.com/assettiger/ I suspect, given their approach ("Hey give us cash" vs "Sorry, we need to start charging from X date") we're in the market for a new system.

What're they putting on? Powerpoint, video, still images, mix of all of that? You could look at something like Screenly that runs on a Raspberry Pi. Demo here: Screenly OSE You'd need to export powerpoints as video, but apart from that..... (There's also Xibo, which probably has too much of a learning curve if they're doing it).

Our lot are using Garageband on iPads as a data point. For what they're doing (recording to the iPad) they're happy and so far they haven't broken any (~2yrs now).

Yes, a little bit. Like most of the people on here I have enough work to keep me occupied for ~6 months, even if the little (and larger) darlings weren't generating more work on a daily basis. And it's those projects against which my performance is judged. I will help you do X a couple of times. I'll teach you how to do it effectively. I won't do it for you.

As others have said, Drama & Music tend to handle it with the help of a couple of older kids who like geeking out over audio gear. We (IT) keep a general eye on what they're doing and give it the once-over before the shows for Health & Safety / WTF reasons, but don't tend to get involved beyond setting up a green room camera that watches the stage so kids are better prepared for when they need to be ready.

My objections are: Use in the server room, network cabinets, other limited-access areas or anywhere that gets rearranged frequently is forbidden People damaging cables by pulling cable ties too tight. The cable tie is usually stronger than the thing it's tidying, which means the cable fails before the cable tie. I will grudgingly accept them in computer rooms provided you ensure there's adequate slack for peripheral use.

Visual check, carried out under supervision from IT staff. We do PAT testing inhouse, so our site team have a vested interest in not creating unnecessary work. We (for our part) endeavour to not swap in untested cables when we refresh a room to make their lives easier.

Double-sided velcro on a roll that we cut to length (cheaper than pre-cut and more flexible). We get it in 10mm and 20mm wide.

We use Azure Rights Management in a similar manner to @tmoon-mint. We have had a few suppliers say "we're not allowed to click on things like that" when they get the "Pete has sent you an encrypted message" dialogue. It tends to be more regulated (finance) industries or suppliers with archaic email systems. Those suppliers are (IME) equally unlikely to be able to handle/receive encrypted zip files via email, so...

Given you control the automated source (SIMS > Middleware > their systems), there's no difference. They're still processing your manual changes on their systems. Is this a "they can't be bothered to pay Groupcall to modify the report definitions to be less grabby of data they don't need" problem? As in, their automated tool isn't compliant because they're lazy?

Check if there are newer drivers for the wireless card ..and BIOS, just in case it's doing something dumb Is power-saving turned on in the Wireless. How aggressively does it kick in? What do the logs on your wireless system say? Lots of odd traffic from that laptop in a particular location? Is the nearest AP to them in good shape? Do other people in that area get on fine. If they teach in multiple classrooms, are there places where it's always a good connection? If you're using RADIUS for machine auth, is there anything strange in the logs there? You will find certain wireless card + AP combos can be problematic, but it's usually older cards having issues with newer APs.

We tend to monitor everything (so we have metrics when we need them for budgetary / planning reasons) and just alert on the things we care about. That said, we're not paying per-sensor.

Sadly, I've had to deal with them on multiple* occasions. In my experience they'll quibble like hell over a £50 item (Kindle), but won't blink at £16K (my house flooding) or ~£200K (school flooding). Maybe the junior staff get the small stuff or they do it on a "how much bad publicity would denying this claim cause us?" basis. But if they tried "we're not going to pay because there's pictures of the thing on the Internet", they've made worthless the policies of anyone who has shiny things on public display. * School struck by lightning School flooded My house flooded Personal claim on the school's travel policy. School broken into School laptop stolen Motorbike crash

Provided the school did everything correctly (locked, alarmed, etc), how the insurance company "feels" is irrelevant. Many companies place promotional shots of their premises on the Internet, especially when they buy new shiny things for $whatever initiative. That said, we err on the side of caution because we've had to deal with the faff of break-ins in the past and we've got enough to do.

We've done 360 degree panoramas of parts of the school and then uploaded to Google maps. Usually when it's a nice day and no-one's about (it's annoying having to reshoot because Jimmy ran down the corridor late for a lesson). Rule of thumb is "no rooms with shiny stealable kit". It's not VR, but with a decent enough camera / smartphone it'll let the kids have a nose around the school. We did it for promotional reasons and it appears (based on anecdotal evidence) to help with that.

What do you hope to achieve by hiding the namespace?

We also have AVG in front of 365 for the moment. The main issue we're seeing is spam between Office 365 tenancies (ignores MX records, goes direct between tenancies as far as I can tell).

TLDR: Don't expose the person with lots of budgetary authority to bulk scam emails. We got rid of the headteacher@ alias years ago (signal/noise ratio) and just run with a generic whatever@school shared mailbox for general enquiries that's heavily filtered. The head's PA and the office manager trawl through it looking for stuff we need to care about.