Primus

Yup I'm not happy about this.

Most Macs can airplay the entire display - https://www.imore.com/how-airplay-mirror-your-mac-screen-your-apple-tv

Yup - popped out for lunch and it arrived!

Ok no worries, thanks for the quick response (again!)

Hi @Al_NetSupport, how do we get our upgrade key please? Thanks!

That's fine and obviously a school should not take your word for it and would seek to verify this if they chose to rely upon it. However as I said previously, published written guidance can be relied upon without question whereas conflicting guidance from someone within DfE who may not have the appropriate level of authority or have consulted with the required people is never going to be as easy to trust or rely upon than the published written guidance. It's interesting the DfE chose to publish guidance on this particular subject in 2013, there must have been a reason for this and for the document being quite specific about who the data is intended for/should be shared with. I agree that without the DfE republishing the guidance with the clarifications then there is no real answer, however I do feel that companies should be able to accommodate schools who no longer wish to share the UPN - as someone who has come into a school that has been sharing the UPN for some time I have found many suppliers accommodating when it came to light they were using the UPN and I asked them to change. Sadly some have not been so accommodating and rather than accepting the school's well founded concerns seek to argue and justify to save them from having to provide an alternative.

Then I apologise if the "you" came across in the wrong manner, what I meant was companies who operate in the education space and use the UPN.

I'm quite happy to have the responsibility of making a decision such as this, however when the formally published written guidance from the governmental organisation that provides all our funding and regulates us says to not share something then it's wise to pay heed. To be fair you might say not to be rude but that doesn't diminish how something may come across as rude. Using an alternative ID does not put as back at square one since it is the UPN that itself is the issue, not having a unique ID or key. The DfE guidance isn't about anything other than the UPN itself. I agree not everything in life is cut and dried but weighing up this situation I have formally published advice saying do NOT use the UPN and I have companies copying and pasting advice from someone at the DfE saying it MAY be used under certain circumstances but I have no idea whether this person at the DfE is in such a position as to effectively modify the existing written guidance. What we all really need is for the DfE to formally clarify the guidance, absent of this it is very much a judgement call and it's clear why schools will opt to judge it either way, I'm simply giving my interpretation and judgement on the matter. Out of interest what would you do with independent schools who are not required to have UPNs so may not have them. What about students who have parents who refuse consent for sharing of their UPN or children who for a variety of sensitive reasons have a change in UPN?

You meaning companies such as GroupCall.

The guidance they sent doesn't help much since: a. they're not amending or republishing the guidance - guidance which is approved at the highest level - we have no way of knowing from where the more recent email guidance came from or who approved it b. they're still saying the onus and responsibility falls on schools c. none of you actually need it - you can fulfil your roles and systems without the UPN by substituting an alternative - it's just it comes down to a business decision on implementation costs. Absent of proper updated guidance properly published by the DfE I would not be happy sharing the UPN with a company and to safeguard myself would require the most senior member of staff within the school/academy to sanction transfer of the UPN.

@EdWhittaker - you mean if you ignore: "The UPN must be a ‘blind number’ not an automatic adjunct to a pupil’s name. It must be held electronically and only output when required to provide information to the LA, central government or another school/academy to which the pupil is transferring. Under the Data Protection Act 1998, the UPN is designated as a ‘general identifier’ making its use for any purpose unrelated to education illegal. A pupil’s admission number, rather than the UPN, should be used as the general pupil reference number on the admission register or paper files." and.... "The data protection restrictions associated with UPNs mean that it is only possible for UPN data to be shared by CTF between schools/academies, LAs, DfE and other prescribed government departments (OGDs)." Yes if you compteley ignore the statements made in writing by the DfE in their guidance document then it would be the case that they have not said no. Apart from where they did actually say no in writing.

Hi @Al_NetSupport no problem on the speed of the reply! So is it likely to release over the summer break?

@Al_NetSupport I know you can't rush these things but it's been coming soon for a little while now and the summer holidays is an ideal time to be able to rollout updates

Hi all does anyone know of a tool that can bulk convert Notebook files to PowerPoint files please? Smart Notebook 11 won't convert unless an older version of Office is installed so our users cannot convert files for themselves and we're going to be inundated with requests so could really use a bulk conversion tool! Thanks!

Obviously without support from above (SLT) you're fighting a losing battle. Ideally you'd have complexity enforced, a reasonable length (8+ characters) and no expiry. This is a behavioural issue with staff that can only be solved with the support of SLT. Sometimes you find that by explaining the issues, the compromises you've made (eg. removing the need to change constantly) and treating people like adults they might respond (they might not I don't know your staff!) If it were me then having to change my password every 40 days would massively annoy me and lead to me choosing weak passwords so that I could remember them!

I don't understand why you'd retain the password expiry policy when your experience and the professional guidance indicates it's flawed?

And making them change their password every 40 days helps with this how?!

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/articles/problems-forcing-regular-password-expiry

But if the one they started with is complex etc. then that's an advantage over making them change frequently and having them write it down on a post-it attached to the monitor etc. All the guidance and evidence now says don't use password expiration for many many reasons.

Always been happy with the service offered by Getech but I have found all suppliers struggling with stock of Chromeboxes rather than Chromebooks - might just have been unlucky that when I was after them everyone was low on stock but it did seem a bit odd!

When we investigated options DNA was a no brainer even without the special offer that we got. Impero pricing was just ridiculous.

Sadly no CloudBerry is a paid for app - about £125 IIRC.

Our system follows that which @rogerdnixon has spoken about previously. We use CloudBerry to upload our backups - I said it uploads the weekly backup, in fact it does the weekly synthetic full and the incremental daily files too. It's quite a slow upload - capped at around 100mb/sec per file despite the fact we have a gig symmetrical connection but it works. I wouldn't consider it anything but for disaster recovery given the time of getting the file downloaded from Google Drive but if the school burnt down I have a full recent backup of all our servers.

Seconded on Veeam Backup Essentials - it's awesome but check the version differences carefully! We needed enterprise rather than standard. In terms of what you're going to backup to, Veeam is a to disk backup program. It supports tape but it's going to need an on disk backup before it can then move it to tape. Currently I backup to an older server with 10Tb of drives in a RAID array and this also has a 20Tb NAS connected over iSCSI and added into the scale out backup repository so Veeam manages the 30Tb of space itself. From there I upload each weekly synthetic full to Google Drive (unlimited free space for schools) and I take a monthly tape. The monthly tape may get canned, I haven't made a decision yet!

If you have no edge firewall then you have bigger problems...