Primus

From our experience Arbor is more user friendly.

Go for the Unifi U6-Pro They don't need a controller in the traditional sense, you can run the Unifi Network Server in a Linux or Windows VM on your existing servers. Depending on what configuration you choose to run the APs can function completely without the UNS being on - however if you wanted to use the captive portal for guest access for example then the UNS needs to be on.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/meeting-digital-and-technology-standards-in-schools-and-colleges/broadband-internet-standards-for-schools-and-colleges How to meet the standard You should ask your supplier or in-house support team to investigate the availability of full fibre broadband services and speeds. Primary schools should have a minimum 100Mbps download speed and a minimum of 30Mbps upload speed. Secondary schools, all-through schools and further education colleges should have a connection with the capacity to deliver 1Gbps download and upload speed.

Just FYI to put in 70 Unifi U6 Pro APs would be less than £9k rather than £40k. We run Unifi APs and switches extensively across our MAT, we've had no issues but the warranty isn't very good so have some cold spares (that you can definitely afford because of how much you saved!)

If you're relying on the device and it can't last the required time then not much learning is going to be done. Are you 1:1 already and have you already bought these devices? Transitioning to a 1:1 environment can be challenging for staff - kids not having their device with them, broken devices etc etc water down the impact - if people can't rely on the device to work then they won't bother to adjust their classroom practice to use the device and it ends up being a waste of money. Even in a perfect world where devices never break etc it's challenging to make such a big change.

Isn't this something you'd handle at the point you selected the device - if you need all day battery life then selecting a device that doesn't have it seems a bit odd?

Inter-vLAN routing?

Yeah we have this too.

You can get a a derogation from DfE if you can prove Unifi is your platform across the trust. That said even with Unifi switches and APs one of our schools is getting a spend of not far off £300k because of the number and length of the cabling runs.

Yes I'm surprised there's a few members who don't see the benefit of a cloud MIS or aren't convinced by them - SIMS is a terrible product that hasn't been fit for purpose for years - adding more and more add ons on top of it will not change that. I know some members will be unable to get SLT to budge on this but that's different. The churn away from SIMS is telling - it'll not be long before they lose their majority position in the market - they had 75% of the market in 2020 - in Q1 of 2023 that was down to 55% and there's a reason for that!

New-VMSwitch -Name "vEthernet" -NetAdapterName Ethernet -AllowManagementOS:$true This PowerShell command creates a new virtual switch with the name vEthernet. The -NetAdapterName parameter is used to specify the physical network adapter to bind. The -AllowManagementOS parameter with a $true value is used to allow the host OS to share the virtual switch and physical NIC with the VMs.

Are you allowing the management OS to share the NIC bound to the vSwitch?

Is there a vSwitch in place? If so delete it and recreate it.

CSB will run on a Chromebook only now I think.

They don't support any SSO services unfortunately - another bone of contention!

Not everything that governors deal with can be requested by anyone - they see information about student exclusions, hear appeals and deal with staff misconduct etc - obviously a SAR means that information is disclosed to the person concerned but not to anyone else without subsequently being anonymised if it's within scope of a FOIA request. There's potentially lots of documentation that is sensitive or contains PII. I disagree, in 2023 we need to be able to force or at very least audit - that's why the big players like Microsoft and Google provide these features. Would you not police or audit staff use of MFA? We use CPOMS rather than My Concern - to do anything other than log new information on there you need to use MFA - this is forced and rightly so.

All papers our governors and trustees receive are shared with them currently through GH which includes sensitive and confidential data as well as PII data as far as I know from my discussions with our governance staff. The DPA says you have to take appropriate technical measures - a policy isn't that and not being able to enforce MFA in 2023 is madness - we use it for our emails/cloud platform, our MIS etc. This is why in platforms like M365 and Google Workspace you can both force and report/audit MFA usage - it's also the same in Arbor (can't speak for Bromcom). The fact they have MFA as an option tells you it's clearly needed, the fact you can't force it or report/audit it is very strange. It's also worth noting our DPO is contracted out to a company that specialise in this and the rep we deal with is always very sensible in their interpretation (IMO) so when they say something's an issue then it's highly likely to be an issue.

Hi all, just wondered if anyone else was aware that although GovernorHub supports MFA, governors and trustees have to enable it themselves and it cannot be forced on or reported on. They can choose not to enable it, or enable it and then subsequently disable it and we'd have no way of knowing. Our DPO is now (quite correctly in my view) pointing out that given the very sensitive data we are using GovernorHub to share, not having the ability to force or report on MFA means that we are not meeting our requirements under the Data Protection Act to take appropriate technical measures to secure data. We're now looking at alternative options such as using our existing cloud platform but I wondered how many schools/trusts out there had implemented this and weren't aware of this.

It's worth noting this statement is about paper 2 whereas CPUs and binary manipulation are paper 1. Paper 2 was very very different to previous papers and had questions with errors.

I personally wouldn't accept a recertified drive in place of a brand new one that was DOA.

Depending on the version of iDRAC you have on your Dell server, you can update most things through it simply by putting downloads.dell.com as the source Maintenance > System Update > Source Change it from local to HTTPS or HTTP

Agreed, 4am is annoying, I've asked a few times over the years.

You'd be surprised...

Even their CTC projects allow for derrogations if you have a good reason...

I have any number of issues with the document - I know exactly what you mean, I raised it with the DfE at a lunch at BETT where one of the contributors from United Learning was present, I'm not sure he liked my comments!