jthompson

Ideally you need to be using a dedicated tool that integrates with your MIS so as to use 'correct' contact details of parents, logging of comms, etc. rather than sending/replying ad-hoc from individual staff mailboxes. Especially where bulk messaging is concerned. For heads of year, it's sensible to assume that some degree of direct emailing with parents is going to be necessary. If a shared, generic mailbox for that year team is not being used for this, then delegated access to that staff member's mailbox would be needed to account for days when they're on leave.

Google Classroom's Visit a class feature requires a GWfE Plus license, iirc. Without that, you're basically needing to be added as a teacher to any class you need to get inside of. As others have posted, that either needs to be done for you by an existing teacher of the class, or you can do it via the API using a third-party tool such as GAM. You can't manage individual classes from Google Admin. However, your description of the password management spreadsheets suggests that all you really need is access to the sheet(s), which ought to be possible via the regular Google sharing mechanism, even if the sheet(s) remain stored within a Classroom class (that might need checking!). Give yourself suitable access, and give other staff read privileges as required. If the sheets are stored in a Shared Drive, all the better, since as an admin you'll be able to manage the membership of shared drives from within Google Admin. If other, non-admin staff need to be able to reset students' Google passwords, you can delegate that by creating an admin role for the purpose and assigning that role as required. Users with that role would then have [limited] access to Google Admin to perform account password resets on the OUs that you have scoped their admin role to (e.g. just your student OUs).

Workstation number labels and an email-based helpdesk. That's about as easy as it gets for staff in the room. Anything else, be it a web form or clickable floorplan, is just more clicking to pull them out of the job of teaching, imho.

I'm assuming that it's a case of it not being a focus for them, and so {businessDecision}.

This reminds me of when I bought my Xbox360 with Forza Motorsport 3 and an extra controller. The game and the controller arrived... but the console itself took about a week longer. Quite annoying to have the game and controller in my hand, but no way to play. SAD!

YubiKeys are buy one get another one half price. https://www.yubico.com/gb/store/2023/cyber-week/

I've just noticed that you can use Markdown syntax in Google Docs - https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036 Not all of the Markdown syntax is supported, but headings, bold, italic, strikethrough, lists, links and inline code (`) works.

Yes. It seems dependent on having the post title ("implement-account-lockout-for-g-suite-accounts") in the URL. Take that out and it works. Another randomly selected community post show the same behaviour: https://support.google.com/a/thread/244430513 vs https://support.google.com/a/thread/244430513/can-t-add-more-storage-to-my-google-workspace-account

If I go to the original OP link (https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?hl=en&article_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsupport.google.com%2Fa%2Fthread%2F38689646%2Fimplement-account-lockout-for-g-suite-accounts%3Fhl%3Den&assistant_id=generic-unu&product_context=38689646&product_name=UnuFlow&trigger_context=a) using a Workspace Plus admin account, the page is blank apart from the main "Google Workspace Help" banner. If I open it in an incongnito window, it asks me to sign in. The underlying url in there is https://support.google.com/a/thread/38689646 which loads fine either way. If I go to https://apps.google.com/supportwidget it's a 404 either way. If I go to https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/helphome I get the little support chat widget. Is that available for those on Fundamentals? I suspect that live support widgetry is meant to be being integrated across the support pages but is not quite behaving right, with the site not quite sanitising URLs properly.

Not sure how helpful this will be, but I thought I'd just run down how I've got the Play Store apps managed as an allowlist for OUs in our domain. These are targeting the users' OUs. I've not done anything with managed Android devices: our only Android devices are user-owned. Admin > Devices > Mobile and endpoints > Settings > Universal > General > Mobile Management. Android is set to Advanced. Admin > Devices > Mobile and endpoints > Settings > Android > Apps and data sharing. 'Available apps' is set to 'Only allowed apps'. Admin > Apps > Web and mobile apps. Android apps that we want to allow are added here. You can filter that list by platform to show only the Android apps that you've got configured. On the same page as your list of allowed apps, you can select 'Settings > Android app collections' to dress up how the Play Store presents things to end users. When Android sets up a work profile, iirc there are a few key apps that are available by default. From memory, those are the Play Store app itself, Gmail, Google Calendar and maybe one or two other core Google apps. As I say, this may not be answering your problem since we've not been dealing with company-owned Android devices.

Along a roughly similar topic, this other demo has got software devs worrying about how long it will be before AI transforms their careers into mere data centre carbon emissions. Ars Techinica - “Make It Real” AI prototype wows devs by turning drawings into working software: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/ai-powered-drawing-app-stuns-developers-by-turning-sketches-into-functional-games/?comments=1&comments-page=1

This is the modern equivalent of having a novelty Arnold Schwarzenegger voice pack on your Tom-Tom.

Not quite a feature complete compatibility with Google Messages, but it's still a surprise. I recently used a troll emoji on here after hilariously suggesting that Apple might one day support RCS. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/apple-announces-rcs-support-for-imessage/

Can't remember exactly off the top of my head, but you can make apps from the Play Store available on an allowlist basis.

Have you tried this? Admin > Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail > Spam, phishing and malware > Spam. Add a new rule and name it "Provision Maps Delivery" or something. In the rule, enable the option "Bypass spam filters for messages from senders or domains in selected lists". Click on "Create or edit list" and create a new list to use. Name the list "Provision Maps sender" or something and add "replies.schoolrobins.com" to it. After creating that list, return to the spam rule in the previous tab, click on "Use and existing list" and pick your list. See if that does the trick.

Would a content compliance rule do? After matching for recipient and sender, under step 3, Modify the message > Change envelope recipient. We restrict anyone from turning on automatic forwarding, due to the potential for a data breach.

To clarify, this is just VMs on classroom PCs, so not available to students outside of the classroom at all. There may still be a case for Replit free accounts for those students who want to do coding out of school, but the classroom side of things is likely to carry on being based on the local VMs and producing work there.

We use VirtualBox, which reliably sandboxes students' coding. We've explored other options from time to time (Replit, GitHub Classroom) to reduce the reliance on VMs deployed to ICT classroom PCs, but we always seem to come back to using our stalwart VirtualBox VMs!

Was literally looking today at whether we could start to make use of Replit. I guess this goes a long way towards answering that.

I've not configured them, but if they're available as computer configurations, that would lead me to think that they'd work as such. The administrative templates do differ in what options are available under computer or user configuration.

I can't see it being viable for certifications/qualifications. For it to be adopted, you'd basically need a load of trusted organisations to serve up wallet hosting services, etc. to make it usable enough to bother with, at which point you may as well just stick with some conventional certificates. IMO blockchain still looks to be a solution in search of a problem, but that's not to say I'm not interested in what might crop up in this thread.

FSRM has ultra-basic options, so yeah, it's probably just using port 25 with no auth.

Have you got some other system on-site that you can point to smtp-relay.gmail.com:587 so as to test that relay service? A photocopier or something?

We use our public IP address as a condition in a Google SMTP relay service, so it does work. We also specify that it requires authentication, but it looks as though you can disable that requirement. There's obviously a risk attached to that, but in theory it would allow FSRM, which doesn't have any auth options available, to make us of it directly without any intermediary relay.

My painting has definitely taken a back seat in recent months, but having children was always going to do that. I know from experience that waiting for about 20 years after purchasing a model before painting it makes it look waaay better, so this parenthood thing is time well invested on the hobby front.