Sibrows

Sorry to be a PITA; I've got a request that I'd like to throw back at the requestor as it doesn't link in to M$365 but I need a bit more to work with. Would you mind elaborating on your basis for it not being safe?

On what grounds?

If it doesn’t have a perpetual cost - how do you expect it to keep up with an ever changing technology landscape?

Is there a live chat support type feature in teams? I’m trying to have a ‘support’ chat that any end user can use to try and get support but that the whole team is subscribed to and can pickup a conversation from. Thus avoiding people being messaged directly. The advantages from email are the machine remote control is already built in and working.

Why not have a NAS on each side for the local backup and use part of that for each other school’s offsite backup to spread the bandwidth load and avoid a single point of failure for all sites.

Thats great, much appreciated

@Rob_D have you got a higher resolution version? I'm struggling to read it

We’re left to manage it in a spreadsheet essentially a tally of days off. I’ve never been asked to provide these details to anyone but always wanted to be able should I need to justify it.

Attachment doesn’t work?

So I've read through the whole of this thread and find myself in the same situation as others, the existing infrastructure is in-place and doesn't warrant replacing a projector that has never been used interactively with a screen that cost 3x the price. We've got most of the school across onto the Casio LEDs projectors (80 in total) and have been very happy - no issues warranty or other wise and we're 6 years in. I can see the BenQ options on page one - has anyone used them in anger? Theres no mention of their warranty where as Casio were shouting about 5 year warranty.

Unless there has been a significant change I would be surprised to see it going ahead and if it does I would expect numbers to be down significantly it would be interesting to see a number of the sessions going online though. Personally I'm avoiding public transport for the foreseeable future. Just my 2p worth

So I've had jobs both in and out of Education, one of my observations more recently and with having some involvement at a trust level is a number of people who are great teachers don't make great managers or business leaders. And I think this is a by product of that reality. I completely get the fact that education is the core business but there are a number of decisions that aren't considered from an impact on the business point-of-view. To be fair to this very broad brush I'm using, its reflected in the comments above the training and structures aren't there be it HR, IT, Finance. A number of the Trusts need to be run like the corporate multi-site organisations that they are not just scaling up the 'lets just paper over the cracks and hope for the best' that they are.

We've used a mail merge run the day before into Outlook running in off-line mode which allows the email to be checked before its released at an agreed time. For our sixth form students for the last 6 years.

Our Geography and Media departments clubbed together with their bids and purchased one. It has now been licensed as its over the weight limit. We insist that any staff flying it pass the, not very taxing, drone license. In sort; it's been out on some field trips for Geography. Media used a lot initially but then the 'new shiny toy' wore off and its been sat in our office for the past year as it needed a new battery I would recommend something with obstacle avoidance as a must and budget for more than a single battery!

Is your door entry system Paxton? We had real issues with the different data that was scanned from the same card as this is what we'd hoped to do but couldn't as the Paxton readers read a different number when reading the cards. It was something like the Paxton card readers read the serial number and the card readers on our cashless system and Papercut read a different value. We ended up sending cards and readers off to Paxton but they couldn't resolve it.

We use both Paxton and Salamander but we don't use Paxton to generate the badges. We use the same cards for both door access, print release (Papercut) and cashless catering. Paxton uses the card serial number. Print Release and cashless catering takes some other number from the card. This results in a very long winded onboarding process with the card being scanned manually twice

We use a mail merge in Microsoft Word

We have three generally available across the site: - Staff (domain connected devices, school owned etc...) - Students (1:1 iPads no personal devices) - Guest (Guests and staff personal devices, no student devices) Then in our training suite we have an additional Wi-Fi network with SSL filtering turned off. Captive portal enabled and a specific password for each event. As we can have 100+ people in of an evening installing SSL certificates isn't practical so we filter the domains. Students don't have access to the floor with our training suite on it and it isn't broadcast anywhere else in the school so the impact risk is reduced but still there.

We've had very mixed results with it, for some its been ok for others very unreliable. We've ended up opting for https://www.msp360.com/remote-assistant.aspx setup in unattended mode.

We're using the Splashtop SOS product, sorry I should have been more specific. The SOS +10 product gives us a concurrent connection and 10 unattended machines. We're a team of 5 supporting multiple schools and 2 concurrent has been fine for us thus far in the past week we've increased our capacity to 3 subscriptions.

For remote support my team are using Splashtop for remote access we're using Google Remote Desktop.

We've got a secondary and two primary websites running on their cheapest droplet with Plesk managing the websites. We've added some block storage to it we're using Plesk to run daily backups of the sites (we're using Wordpress) then the droplet is snapshotted once a week and retained for four weeks all for less than £10 pcm.

We've moved most of our websites and apps to Digital Ocean. You can scale the droplet size. If your after an all-in-one control panel then we've been using Plesk, the free option is limited to three websites but thats encouraged us to not have too many websites running on one droplet.

For something as important as the fire alarm a) do you want to use a piece of kit that's been EOL for a few years and b) do you want it on your head when it doesn't work?

Being based in the UK we’re not as affected by this (yet). Interesting to see how people are approaching this kind of situation. Sorry I couldn’t answer any of the original question.