pete

If you're using either O2 or Vodafone for business phones/SIM cards in various premises equipment, how awful is the backend (ordering new SIMs/Phones/etc)? cheers Pete

Otter's outsourcing of consent for recording to the Otter-using person (vs explicit consent from each person being recorded) has won them a lawsuit: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/otter_ml_privacy_lawsuit/

Any patterns? I'd expect bog-standard things (DC, Fileservers etc) to upgrade without issue provided they're in good shape (rebooted, logs clean of errors, patched, sufficient diskspace, checked compatibility for any installed software).

The A3 license covers the Operating System (or rather, the OS upgrade from Home/Pro to Education/Enterprise). IIRC it's 40 desktops for student use per A3 staff license. You can look here to see what you're covered for (filters at the top): https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/terms/product/StudentUseBenefitsandAcademicPrograms/all Device licenses for Microsoft 365: We buy A3 via the JISC Campus 3 Agreement (which I mention because it may alter the part code). Microsoft part code is: RQL-00001 Description is: Additional EES M365 Apps Enterprise Devices Education Subscription Add-on (Additional Product) *Monthly Subscription* - Academic - Licence In 365 admin centre > Billing > Licenses it will appear as "M365 Apps (Device)". In 365 admin centre > Billing > Your Products - Volume Licensing > Contracts > License Summary (click the three stacked dots next to a contract > View License Summary) it'll show as "Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise for Devices EDU"

If you have A3, you can either rely on the student login or ask your reseller for (free) device licenses to cover the computer suites. Caveats for device licensing is that computers have to be Entra Hybrid Joined (or Entra Joined) and the devices all have to be members of the same licensing group - you can't add multiple groups. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-apps/licensing-activation/device-based-licensing

It's partly learning how your school(s) communicate internally and also making sure your search terms and locations are sane. There'll be loads of things that mention the person that aren't about the person (or aren't the only copy of that information). For example: Our schools send out weekly automated "list of students whose attendance/behaviour/whatever is a bit troubling" reports to HOYs so they know where to apply course correction. Those are ignored because the same data is in the MIS export for the SAR. That same information is included in the meeting minutes between the HOY and that year's form tutors. And the meeting minutes of the HOY and their SLT link. And (if it gets to that stage) likely SLT meeting minutes.

Handy Outlook/OWA integrated button/tool that punts it somewhere with a longer retention? Making it easy to apply retention labels in email? Some other archiving routine? We need to do something and SLT (trust and school level) are the worst offenders for "most likely to have the only copy of an important document/email chain in their mailboxes". cheers Pete

Settings > Org Settings > Name Pronunciation. I can see this would remove some frustration (or at least excuses from others) for a subset of our users with "that's not pronounced how you think it is" names. I can also see our students recording fart noises instead of their name. Anyone got it turned on with minimal comedy soundboard problems? cheers Pete

Can you disclose why the IT Director role reports to an Assistant Head at the secondary rather than directly to the CEO/Exec Head? I'm guessing habit, but a clearer reporting line would be direct to the CEO/Exec head rather than someone "outranked" by the primary heads.

My guess (if I'm being charitable) is that they've sent an email to [email protected] and had [email protected] or [email protected] (taken over the responsibility from Bob) join the meeting enough times that their process is: Let everyone in Verify identities KIck anyone they can't verify Actually begin meeting and discuss confidential matters Since (IME) trying to get a third party to a) acknowledge a role change and b) stop emailing the previous person takes somewhere between 6 months and infinity.

Mods: It's in here because it causes data breaches. One of our headteachers joined a council-hosted online meeting recently. As soon as one of the meeting participants joined, a "read.ai meeting notes" "person" joined straight after. The meeting organiser queried it with the participant who said "...they had no idea where it had come from, and it happened all the time". The meeting (as you'll probably guess) was not the kind of meeting where it's OK for a random person to sign up for a trial, forget about it and send a recording of every meeting to a third-party service for transcription and intent analysis. Policy now is to check chat and flag any sign of such tools to the meeting organiser. If we are the meeting organiser, we kick the tool and the person from the meeting unless a) everyone is OK with it and b) the participant's employer is aware of their use of said tools. More info: https://support.read.ai/hc/en-us/articles/23222131547795-How-do-I-remove-or-stop-Read-from-joining-meetings https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftTeams/comments/18zdaxp/readai_bot_how_do_you_block_this_for_the_whole/

I mean, fighting all censorship while balancing school/college/uni is probably a bit much, so I suspect they concentrate on the needs of their core user base. 😛 You're acting as though this is a new thing - it's not. We've always had technical students testing limitations. Were I a nation state, standing up a (good, fast, secure) proxy service on Github with a sprinkling of C&C in there wouldn't be a bad idea for some deniable actions.

Without naming names, is this the intern unfamiliar with the Streisand Effect contacting you or a functional adult? What's worse (for the vendor) - someone sees a price for rough budget purposes which may change or "vendor actively works to conceal pricing to the education market, where margins are typically paper thin for software / services, with the implication that some schools are being milked more than others.

Odds they'll send the correct message? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_alert

Had one today. Reads like a drunk robot who keeps trailing off-topic and then repeats the same phrase again. Investigation reveals the kid is just truly awful at writing and rephrasing themes and ideas in a way that engages the reader.

Does anyone successfully send to the whole 230? Or does every sender emailing groupname@schoolname get 190? Are there any "Bob can't email Geoff via allstaff@" rules in place to avoid the finance dept (for example) rampaging due to constant "Fred's lost his trainers" all-staff emails? So a random Geography teacher emailing allstaff@ never gets delivered to finance/IT/estates/wherever but an email to allstaff@ from a member of SLT, finance or the admin team will get delivered?

Check that you've got your root CA/subordinate CA ticked in the "Trusted Root Certificate Authorities" section of the WiFi GPO. In Windows 10 if there were no CAs ticked it treated it as "all of these are fine to use". In Windows 11, if no CAs are ticked it treats it as "don't trust any of these". (See screenshot - we have N+1 CAs for cross-trust auth). Also check that the computer certs being handed out to the clients are being generated from a recent cert template (2016 compatibility or better).

There's also the endless parental drama to consider. The kids who cheat have a higher-than-average chance of having parents who (even faced with paragraph-by-paragraph comparison between the robot-written essay and the student essay) insist their child wouldn't do this and the teacher is obviously engaging in a vendetta against Tarquin*. *and the teachers aren't allowed to give the snarky "why would I engineer any situation that increases the likelihood of having to listen to you or your child whining at me?" response.

Export all the linked documents from SIMS to a folder with the UPN and student name and (ideally) document title in the filename. Re-import those files into Bromcom at no more than a thousand documents at a time, cursing the Bromcom DMS that times out, falls over and doesn't properly handle some punctuation in filenames. (The latter part you'll have to suffer through regardless, the first part Salamander make easy).

We've used GPTZero, ZeroGPT, Grammarly (yup, I know - used as a third opinion) for sections of student work where a teacher has walked in and said "I'm fairly certain Bob didn't write much of this essay because it's way too articulate and demonstrates an understanding of the concepts beyond anything he's previously show in written or classwork". Even then we haven't seen a better than ~60% "might be AI-written" result unless the student made the laziest "write me an essay on penguins" and then copy-pasted the output into Word.

We've use Krystal since forever. 30-odd domains, no complaints.

Current preferred model is the Iiyama Touchscreens mentioned up-thread. Our estates team greatly prefer mounting them vs the (needlessly, stupidly, heavy) older Promethean touchscreens (3-person lift to mount) they replace.

^ It'll work fine but I'd recommend you and each headteacher sit down to discuss setting expectations for staff around "your employer should be able to readily access things that they're paying you to create". That might lead to a "your personal (lesson resource) stuff can be where you like, but the dept development plan needs to be in location X on platform Y". Headteachers get grumpy if they have to faff about playing the "where did Bob save the latest version of Z?" game if it's not in the expected location and without setting down the ground rules at the start it can lead to "Bob ruined it for everyone".

We added football team names to Entra ID's custom password ban list. And months and 4-digit years.

The password checker doesn't have the context that Bob is enough of an idiot to complain about how often he has to change his password and then use that rant (or a variation thereof) as his password.