rbjames

I just do everything in the ediscovery area including redacting. I tag files as 'included' (no need for redaction), 'redacted', 'duplicate' and 'operational'. The last SAR returned nearly 4000 files/teams chats/emails but the system is good at spotting email chains and putting the last email of the chain at the top of the list. I then export everything straight from there after writing/committing the redactions. I then recheck the exported files just to be sure.

Hi - would you mind DM me the company too? We're currently with Ringcentral and are looking to move to 3CX in the summer but if there are other options I'd be interested. Thanks Richard

Hi Jeremy, The closest I've managed to get is a saved query in isams which produces a csv file coupled with a power automation which firstly clears the sharepoint list then uploads the csv which works nicely. Best wishes, Richard

Thanks - WCBS who develop it have been going for years and PASS was their old MIS we used before isams but certainly worth bearing in mind.

Maybe I should revise that to 'reluctance of our bursar to pay for access to the API' 🙂 The data I'm working with doesn't change often so just exporting manually and feeding the file into a power automation is sufficient at the moment.

It's quite a young system. It appears to handle the core aspect of pupil/staff/parent details, timetabling, some analytics, admissions and finance but leaves a lot of the other services to 3rd parties. They seem to be concentrating on integrations so we can choose other systems which will integrate. The pricing is about a third of isams. It's early days and I still have a lot of questions to ask but I'm looking forward to streamlining a lot of what we do.

Hi, We use isams hosted and Salamander and they have done some great integrations for us. One area that will prove to be very helpful is staff cover. Isams appears to class periods in the same way as far as weighting goes so a 15 minute registration period has the same value as a 50 minute lesson. You could have two members of staff - one has covered 10 registrations, the other has covered 10 full lessons and yet they will appear to have covered the same. Salamander have set up a system which feeds the daily cover calendar to an outlook calendar. I've then set up a power automation to pull these periods to a sharepoint list which has a calculated column to give the number of minutes of cover teachers have been given. We will then be basing future cover decisions based on this data rather than what isams provided which is currently causing resentment among staff. Another area I have found we can improve is setting for the rollover process. I have set up a power app which teachers use towards the end of the academic year which give them a list of students and radio buttons so they can choose which sets they will be in from September. This app then writes the set codes to a sharepoint list meaning that I don't have to manually populate it in the same way I have to populate all the other subjects. The third area we're going to be working on heavily is the calendar - currently Salamander feeds two outlook calendars. This will then in turn feed a sharepoint list where we'll add extra information such as a colour so our weekly information page can show the event with its relevant colour in an automatically generated html file. Currently everything is being done in Word and screenshots for signage which is time consuming.

We will probably move away from them next year - I'm fed up with being charged huge amounts for a lot of legacy modules which haven't kept up with the times along with their reluctance to allow is direct access to our own data. HUBMIS is the one we're currently favouring.

Hi, I don't know whether this is still an issue but due to costing I just use sharepoint lists. As long as you bear in mind the 5000 item implications when scoping projects, it's amazing what you can achieve with canvas apps. Richard

Hi all, I've been really getting into MS Power apps over the past couple of years (So far I've modernised the SEN department, Music department instrumental lessons and sports day). All of the data is stored in sharepoint lists to avoid dataverse costs which are huge. We use isams for our mis and currently I have a 'core data' list in Sharepoint which all of the apps pull from to get data such as student names, forms, billing codes, house, misid, year group and email address. At the moment I have to manually update it which isn't great (trying to do any bulk data operation in sharepoint lists is awful). Does anyone know the best way to set up a power automation to pull the data across automatically? We have access to the SQL into our local ip address so I'm presuming we'll need to use one of our local servers as a gateway but beyond that I wouldn't know how to tackle it. If anyone else has gone through the same procedure I'd love to hear how you set it up. Thanks in advance Richard

Hi, We have a Server 2016 Hyper-v server with 2 server 2016 VMs and a third 2016 server running papercut mf and paxton net2 v6 and Salamander. I have a second hyper-v 2016 host in a different building which the main one replicates to. I'd like to update everything to server 2022 and I'd just like some advice on the best order to do the upgrade. The hyper-v servers are joined to the domain. We are in a hybrid environment joined to AAD and nearly all of our data is in M365 Sharepoint/Onedrive/Exchange. All clients are Windows 11 domain joined with management from local group policy and intune. Here's what I'm thinking: 1. Stop replication (the second host acts as the backup). 2. Upgrade both DC VMs in place 3. Upgrade 3rd server in place 4. Upgrade Server 2016 with Hyper-V to 2022 5. Test everything thoroughly 6. Turn on replication to pull through the upgraded servers 7. Finally upgrade the secondary server 2016 Hyper-V to 2022. Does that sound like a sensible plan? I know I need to check the printer drivers for compatibility. Thanks, Richard

Hi, To cut a long story short, we hired a marketing company do some rebranding for us which included updating our website. While the website looks lovely and works quickly on their own server, they were wanting to charge us a huge monthly cost to maintain and host. I have a little bit of experience of website management from a previous role so fairly early on I'd said that we'd like to host it ourself. We tested it on our shared hosting but performance was poor so I set up a vps, gave it a good amount of memory, set up redis etc but performance is still poor. I'm going to book some time with the original developer to see whether we can speed it up but my linux sysadmin days were long ago. The site is based on wordpress but is using the bedrock framework - great for security but means that far fewer companies will support it and googling produces far fewer results. Does anyone know a good company that can help us that won't charge the earth? Converting it back to a standard wordpress site may also be something we'd consider. Thank you Richard

Costs vary but are competitive. The quotes we have through justify the cost vs laser devices.

Hi, We're coming to the end of our lease term on our photocopiers so I've been looking at new providers. I have a couple that are recommending Epson machines (AM-C4000). The energy saving looks considerable but I know nothing of their reliability in the field. Does anyone have experience of these (or similar low temperature technology)? Thanks in advance. Richard

OK - now fixed. It seems the link we always used to go to to access the site is no longer working for some reason. Found the new link and all is good.