Norphy

"Supported" is not necessarily the same as "Works with". Chances are that this server will work with all current flavours of Windows Server and that necessary drivers are built into the OS these days. I think I've had Server 2019 running on a server of this vintage and 2022 is not significantly different. The same is probably true with most flavours of Linux too, although only RHEL and SuSE Enterprise are mentioned in the support document. The only tricky one, I think, is going to be ESXi. The last release that supported Westmere CPUs was 6.5 U3.

I'm patiently waiting for Invincible to start on Prime again. The whole adverts going to Prime thing is annoying though.

For something that size, I'd suggest either using one of the purchasing consortiums like CPC or going out to tender. That will give the vendors the chance to do their own surveys and to draw their own conclusions.

What are you using for your email at the moment?

TIL that Where’s Wally is English. Always thought it was American for some reason…

For a normal sized school, sure. For a pair of small village schools with barely sixty students between them it's completely unaffordable sadly.

They were apparently quoted £2000 to use it. Just to clarify, I don't work for this partnership, they've just asked for help to look for alternatives.

Not an especially helpful response, if I'm honest. ClassDojo is more like a mini social network; as well as sending personal messages you can also send messages to groups and do things like likes and interact with content by doing likes etc. Can't do that in an email. Showcasing work with an email isn't especially practical either, ClassDojo automatically shrinks pictures and puts it into a format which is easily accessible and shareable. An email client won't without a lot of faffing and non-techs aren't going to do that. Putting points into an MIS or a spreadsheet stops the parents from being able to see it, plus Dojo also allows you to award "home points". Can't do that with a spreadsheet. These are two very small schools, with 4 teachers, six support and less than 60 students between them so they don't have any on-site tech support and they certainly don't have anything like a comms team.

Hi folks, Further to my thread here, my son's school partnership (and Dumfries and Galloway in general) is no longer allowed to use ClassDojo for what seems like GDPR related reasons. The school partnership is looking for an alternative, but it isn't having much luck. They want something that has most of the functionality of Class Dojo; they were using it to communicate with parents, to allow parents to communicate back with them, to showcase what the students are doing in school and to award them points for good work and suchlike. The council removing access to it was a real blow, no mistake there. They've looked at mySchoolApp, See-Saw and Showbie but they've been discounted either because they're too expensive, or because they don't allow two-way communication. Right now, they're using FaceBook and Messenger to perform these tasks but this is far from ideal. I'm wondering what people here are using for this?

Quite possibly. Teams can come from the Office installer. Do you have the XML file that the Office installer uses to install Office for you?

I thought it was a Croatian thing. Albeit Croats who served in France.

What licensing agreements do you have in place at the moment? If you have EES, OVS or similar you may already be covered.

The Range bought the Wilko brand. They've re-opened a couple of stores and there's some Wilko branded stuff in their shops now.

If it’s stored on the iPad and not the iPad’s music library, VLC might be a good bet

Commander

When the MAT I used to work for had a scenario like this, we used the eight port version of this switch: https://www.arubanetworks.com/en-gb/resource/2530-switch-series-data-sheet/. It worked perfectly. If you want to go cheaper, there's also these: https://www.arubainstanton.com/products/switches/1830-series/ I'd be amazed if Extreme didn't have an equivalent product.

(Let’s make a cup of) Tea

Wrong.

I don't think that anything you say there is wrong, but there are schools which take it entirely too far. Like, being sent home because you get an identical pair of trousers from Asda instead of a pair from the "official" supplier, or being sent home because your socks are an inch too short. I'm not against school uniforms per se but sometimes schools are entirely too strict about them, to the detriment of their students.

I don't know what that means, so "Dictionary" comes to mind

Sergeant

Royal.

I mean this with the greatest of respect but I have to ask - why? Why on earth would you want that? Putting aside SIMS’s horrible, outdated interface for a minute, SIMS is a massive time sink. It’s a piece of software that’s updated frequently, it’s big, it’s complex and frankly it’s not that reliable. Keeping the server up to date is close to a full time job in itself, then having the hassle of keeping the clients up to date as well is huge. There are entire companies out there dedicated to supporting SIMS and SIMS alone because the support that Capita (or whatever they call themselves) now is so poor. Getting data out of it and into tools like PowerBI is also a challenge. The only reason I can think of to not use a cloud system is if you have a poor internet connection. Having a cloud system accessed through a browser means you have to do nothing to maintain the system itself, plus these systems have none of the legacy cruft SIMS has. I would urge you to think very carefully about installing SIMS and I would also ask, who actually wants this? Has your school specifically said that they want clients installed on each workstation?

Lee ...

Alive.