jthompson

Google Classroom is a solid, stable and mature option: Google aren't about to drop it or drastically reimagine it. Worth noting the following points, though: It doesn't really do homework, as such. Teachers setting homework will be setting regular assigments, so there's no categorical difference between classwork, coursework or homework. That could be a problem for management if they're wanting or needing homework stats. The parent/guardian features are very basic and are limited to weekly or daily email summaries only. There's no live view of what work a student has been set at a particular point in time, which isn't great for supporting parents/guardians of pupils needing to be proactive and fully-appraised of what work has been set. Sticking with Google or MS tools will give you the easiest ride in terms of new staff joining the school, I would argue. Those are the platforms that they're most likely to be familiar with already.

Just to correct my earlier post, Azure Update Manager is no longer free for on-prem Arc-enabled servers.

Annoyed. Having excitedly binned WSUS a while back in favour of WUfB for clients and Azure Update Manager for servers, I've now been stung by surprise pricing for Azure Update Manager. It was free all the way up until February, when it suddenly became $5 per month for on-prem servers. Turns out that it was free during its preview phase, but now isn't. Thanks Microsoft. Our servers are still all on-prem, so time to ditch Azure Update Manager for now

Haven't done this myself, but you mention BIOS there. If the devices you're attempting to deploy to aren't UEFI-based, then they're not supported by that method.

I'm stealing this idea! OMG I hate a see-sawing space bar.

Same issue here since Saturday evening. I can't quite work out what the issue would be that makes it so hard to resolve. Perhaps the resolution involves disabling access to SIMS .net via SIMS Connected, which from a business perspective they are loathed to do. More palatable for ESS that third-party sync agents remain broken in order to keep SIMS Connected access online during school hours? Whatever was tried last night didn't work, and so we perhaps now have to wait until this evening before they will make another attempt. I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't aware of the problems until customers told them about it during Monday, even though our connection died on Saturday. This all cuts to my greatest bugbear with SIMS Connected which is that the third-party integration is like a Heath Robinson drawing, only less amusing.

I was just about to reply with this tip. I only discovered it recently but it worked a treat for me for a Latitude 3190 2-in-1, although not one originally supplied via DfE (that shouldn't make a difference). I did have to read the instructions carefully as I needed to enter the "System Number" from the device's BIOS password prompt, which is the Dell service tag plus a few extra characters, rather than just the service tag. Devices have a manufacturer-set master password that can be used to recover BIOS access. This varies from model to model as described here, so YMMV for other brands/models.

Loading times seem to be the prime factor here. That's almost entirely why our trolleys of Chromebooks have been a roaring success, with barely any vandalism, whereas our older Windows devices get drawn on and picked at a lot more. The quicker they can get online, the less likeyl they are to injure the computer.

In nearly 20 years of supporting 100s of teaching staff, I've had teachers unable to do their job on account of not having a laptop available a grand total of....... 0 times. Unsure how people are able to not provide spares for probably the most vital teaching aid. /s

If you have areas of the school, perhaps particular departments, where you're not seeing so many issues, maybe try and determine why and seek to replicate or promote that in other departments.* *without it seeming condescending, naturally.

Whatever approach you take, you'll need a degree of buy-in from teaching staff and leadership. They're in the rooms with these kids, not you, so having them tackle the problem at the source should be the aim. I've found that a range of different approaches are sometimes needing around the school, depending on the staff involved and/or the nature of the room. For instance, for a couple of our general bookable computer rooms, where no one member of staff has 'ownership' of the room, we find that keeping on top of repairs works out better in the long run (damage becomes less frequent, but is also more easily attributable to a particular class/student), whereas in other rooms, removing a vandalised machine from service will serve to galvanise the relevant department's attitude to caring for the equipment. Being able to provide department heads with logs of who signed into which computers and when is always a good starting point for supporting staff who do actually want to chase things up.

Spare laptops FTW. To cover technical issues, yes, but also for stuff getting left at home. Teachers are busy people, so offering judgement-free spares when they need them is an easy win imho.

For Chrome you can also get a GPO option to make it managed by your Workspace tenancy, so that policies set in the cloud take precedence over local policies. That then gives you one place to be managing Chrome rather than two. Can't remember the terminology off the top of my head, but happy to dig it up if you're interested. We're mainly Chrome here, so managed extension allowlist in Google Admin, but just block all extensions in Edge via GPO.

Mainly using Google for cloud accounts and storage here, so Chrome sync and Google Drive for Desktop FTW. One thing I would add is that if you have on-prem intranet resources, make use of Azure Application Proxy so as to make those available remotely as well (secured behind M365 auth). We have an on-prem intranet site with local DNS set to resolve intranet.schoolname.org to it. Our external DNS then points intranet.schoolname.org to Azure Application Proxy, so that the same URL can be used by staff regardless of where they are. That's handy for a browser home/start page.

BIOS password recovery for all sorts of makes and models: https://bios-pw.org/ Discovered this whilst needing to clear a BIOS admin password from a Dell Latitude 3190. One of a number of devices that were donated to us from a now defunct organisation. Most had had the password cleared prior to being donated to us, but this one hadn't and there was no contact with previous IT staff. Somewhat amazed that it worked!

Worth bearing in mind too that if there is a signiifcant difference to correct (like, several minutes), that won't necessarily happen in one instant. Windows will reduce the delta by progressively smaller amounts so as to glide a clock back into alignment.

SIMS Connected has worked okay for us from a general end user perspective. I've been pleasantly surprised by the apparent lack of lagginess or other service issues. SIMS .net actually works faster for us now that when we had it on-prem, with the app being generall more responsive. The file upload/download shenanigans are extra work for the data and exam offices in particular, but most users don't need to be getting into that. My bugbear from an IT point of view is having to run third-party agents here on prem. It's an awful way to sync stuff that really ought to be being synced cloud-cloud via an API. They're just not as performant, especically if the thrid-party is needing to write back to SIMS. It's like we're paying ESS and operating their cloud-cloud service for them.

The bulk update plugin is called Data Injection - https://plugins.glpi-project.org/#/plugin/datainjection

Use the search parameters to list what you want. You can adjust which columns are displayed, too. There'll be an option to export the currently shown results to PDF, CSV, etc. These days GLPI has its own agent, so no need to use OCSInventory or FusionInventory in order to get agents running. The GLPI agent is a fork of fusion, IIRC. For barcode reading, there's no feature for that as such, but you could use barcode reader input directly in the global search field (assuming that your barcode values will uniquely identify assets) in order to surface them in GLPI, perhaps. There's a plugin for performing bulk imports, which you could leverage to bulk update existing assets with a physical inventory date. Run around with a barcode reader to populate inventory numbers in a text file which you then use as the basis for a csv file bulk update?

We had tickets to see it over the weekend but sadly we had to miss it due to childcare falling through at the last minute. Gutted. I also missed seeing part 1 in the cinema. Clearly, the Bene Gesserit are against me seeing these films.

GLPI here too. Last physical inventory is one of the [many] available fields and the search query engine is absolutely superb.

To switch devices from one OU to another programmatically, you could look at using Apps Script. Although I suspect you want to investigate context-aware access in the first instance.

WUfB reports can be done for free, too, but it does have the feel of being somebody's half-forgotten weekend pet project.

I would recommend WUfB for your Windows clients. No cost and you can use GPO to prevent clients from upgrading beyond a particular product and feature update (e.g. Windows 10 22H2). For servers you can use Azure Update Manager for free, too.

That note about WUfB/WSUS not pushing this is welcome. I can feel abaout as confident as I possibly could be that the WUfB target version policy option is not about to be steamrollered.