Primus

This might not be what you want to hear but I expect the trust you are joining will expect you to move to M365 in time. Speaking from experience - having different schools in the same trust on different platforms (in our case we standardised on Google Workspace and moved the M365 schools) is not a good experience.

Smoothwall Monitor works both onsite and offsite.

For switches it's a "limited-lifetime warranty" now which is coverage to the end of sale date plus 5 more years.

Do you mean now it's a "limited-lifetime warranty"? I favour Unifi for the edge but even for the edge I don't think Aruba are particularly expensive when compared to others in the industry. Their "limited-lifetime warranty" covers the device up until the end of sale date and then 5 more years so it's not a rubbish warranty by any means.

That hasn't been our finding, however we only use them at the core and we're still happy with the 5400r ZL2 models until they go EoL and we're forced onto the slightly more expensive newer line - for the core I don't think they're parcticularly expensive and if it wasn't for Unifi being such a price effective solution we'd have probably gone Aruba at the edge and/or for WiFi too.

What's your concern with Aruba? HPE bought them in 2015 and the kit is solid and well supported.

We've just started with Secure Schools and they're great. We also tried BoxPhish but found their UI really basic/hard to navigate and their built in templates too generic - Secure Schools has a really good range of UK school specific templates.

Thanks that's really useful, in order I think the Unifi equivalents would be: U6-Pro - £125 U6-Enterprise/U7-Pro - £226/£139 U6-Pro - £125 U6-Mesh-Pro - £159

Out of interest - how much are you looking at for the current Cambium APs?

I don't really see how Win 11 LTSC gets people any further - we already have Win 10 LTSC and if you use the 2021 IoT version it gets patches until January 13th 2032 - surely by then anything not Windows 11 compatible will be gone - I know funding is tight but... It should also be noted once again that Microsoft say LTSC should not be used for general purpose computers and you may run into issues using it in this way. Have I missed something?

We use the UPN and the only way we could get it to automatically sign in was to add a username alias without the @DomAin part of the UPN which does rather defeat the point somewhat but it does work and we've been lucky enough to not have any clashes yet.

This is the way.

They never followed them to begin with, they wouldn't fund divergent fibre paths as far as I'm aware.

We treat the DfE specifications more as guidelines than actual rules... Their specifications are way over the top for most situations, completely miss how context is important in devising a specification, don't serve as a baseline as they're so over the top and they disregard them themselves with their own projects eg Connect the Classroom. We've a relatively new build school, it certainly doesn't have divergent fibre paths internally - I'd be interested if anyone had moved into a brand new build school recently where DfE have funded this.

The Dell NHS framework pricing is very very hard to beat, I'll PM you our Dell account manager's details.

Did you genuinely believe they'd just keep running forever? Did the "your own risk" part really not make you think that there's a time to move on from these devices? If no support means no support then how would Google know when a change would affect them without testing - that's Google providing further support by testing EoL devices. This is where people can be "too helpful" - running Chromebooks 4 years after their EoL isn't reasonable. Schools are poorly funded it's true but if you keep old kit running they'll never replace it - we've had schools with 14/15/16 year old PCs that were horrendous and they complained about them all the time - we replaced them when they became part of our MAT and they then wanted them back "just to stick at the back of the room for kids to use". We said no and recycled them and we have a similar issue at the moment with our Win 11 replacement programme - people wanting the old ones to use elsewhere and we've had to explain that that would see us replacing the devices twice and obviously budgets are stretched. The issues people are having with Chromebooks miles beyond their EoL is an effective illustration of why you shouldn't run EoL kit in production. If you do run EoL kit in production you shouldn't be surprised to walk into a storm one morning because it's all fallen over and you've got zero support.

"We strongly advise against it and it's at your own risk" - why do you think they might say that? Could it possibly be that once a device goes EoL it's completely unsupported and likely to have issues at some point?

This is what they mean by unsupported and EoL - they've likely made a change on their backend, I'm sure they've tested this with a range of devices but how far back do you want them to go with their testing, are you realistically expecting them to test with EoL devices? I'm not arguing for the sake of it, I'm shocked that you have been running EoL devices and are now up in arms because they've stopped running. This is exactly why you don't run EoL devices in production - they'll likely work, maybe for ages, but they're going to eventually have some kind of issue and you're going to be completely out of luck getting support for them as they are EoL. The devices people are talking about on here have run for 4 years beyond their EoL date - we are not talking about devices bricking on their EoL date.

What lack of communication?! You had the EoL date for years - once you are beyond that if you choose to run them it's at your own risk of something like this happening!

If you're running equipment that is no longer getting OS and security updates then there's a significant problem with that, unfortunately sometimes you have to be the bearer of bad news, just because you *can* do something doesn't mean you *should* do something.

EoL is EoL - you cannot expect something to continue working indefinetly and people are asking Google for support which is definitely way beyond what you'd expect of an EoL device. They also didn't just stop working the day after, we're talking about devices here that are acknowledged to be 4 years beyond their EoL date. If you're using devices this far beyond their EoL date you're potentially going to have issues all over the place. You've no evidence that this a purposeful change - given their reliance on the cloud if Google make a change on the back end they can't be expected to test that change with devices that are way, way beyond their EoL date - if you expect them to do that then you're expecting support beyond the EoL date.

They're so heavily reliant on the cloud that it's not like an old iPad running an OS from years ago still chugging away (and even then you'll get problems). If you're 4 years beyond their EoL date then it's definitely time to move on. This is why Google publish EoL dates etc.

That's called ChromeOS Flex now - I'm not sure you can easily load it onto most Chromebooks though I've seen a few that you can - I think you're likely to have issues with stuff not working though.

I think Google would say they gave enough notice with the EoL dates - devices stopping working after that is a risk you take. I doubt this is something they've done deliberately, it's more likely they've changed something on the back end and these older Chromebooks can't handle it.

I tried asking Pearson if they would at very least sign their macros and *shock* look for something a bit more modern like a webform etc They replied asking how they would sign a macro