Primus

I cannot understand why a school wouldn't run a WSUS server or WUS using SCCM tbh. That said if you're selling an uncontended product and then make excuses that the usage of other schools is impacting that's not great either!

No, it's about following the law or not, you can't do what you are advising others to do and, as has been pointed out, sooner or later you will get reported to the ICO for this. I would not want to be responsible for the school getting an official telling off from the ICO or even worse, being made out to be an example if the ICO gets fed up of schools not following the law in this area.

NetSupport products certainly do seem finicky about using RDP to install them.

It sounds like these were bought for a school, therefore they are not a consumer and so those rights do not apply.

Have you deployed the MSI using GroupPolicy to install on the clients? I also only seem to get the 4 .dll files installing.

For Group Policy it asks for the Gateway Key in encrypted form but I cannot find documentation on how to get this. I've tried the key in the same form as entered on the server, I've tried copying and pasting from the config file on the server but no luck!

Thanks Al, how do the three of us go about using the licences - will we receive 3 separate codes to enter individually or 1 code to cover us?

Python is an interpreted rather than compiled language so students wouldn't be running .exe files. There's no issue having Python or Scratch installed - this is now the second school I've been at where we've had both installed and we've never had a single issue with either.

Guilty as charged on the multiple accounts (though we are all genuine Edugeek users!). Sadly no information as yet, but I understand you'll have been swamped!

I now have an image of @AlanD in my head as McGyver, holding things together with improvised solutions everywhere - rotating hard drives manually, using anything other than a leased line for Internet etc... For what it's worth, the more automated your backup solution the better. The more manual interventions that are needed the more chance you will forget, get distracted or do something wrong that will be catastrophic. Obviously you need to monitor automated backups but they're the best solution.

We've been very happy with GeTech.

Sorry but my understanding was that it costs either $15 per year per device or $59 per device perpetually. Plus the Google management licence of circa £18. So that would be £46 perpetually plus the £18 Google fee = £64 per device. Not as cheap as it would need to be IMHO.

At which point it becomes (IMHO) unjustifiably expensive to re-use ageing equipment using Neverware rather than just buying new equipment with warranties etc.

Yeah me too for the PS Handbrake script please!

Careful with Macs and Bootcamp - your MS license usually only covers devices that shipped with an original copy of Windows - the stickers are meant to be on every PC. Macs obviously didn't come with an original Windows license so need a license purchasing before you can use your MS site license.

Couldn't disagree more, G Suite is far easier to use, the UI is intuitive and their phone support is also excellent. I look at local schools who went O365, paid for loads of training, spent hours of CPD and take up is minimal. We've gone G Suite, provided minimal CPD yet take up has been huge.

Was there an outage? We weren't affected if there was! If you're referring to the phishing stuff then we haven't been affected by that either!

Is it wrong those of us on G Suite feel even more smug about our choice at the moment?!

Blank here too.

Apparently the appliance LCD screens only function on the full UTM product - SWG doesn't drive them - we had the same problem with our UTM-1000 when just using SWG and not the full UTM.

To be fair they need to get a wriggle on, there's been no new devices added to support for a while now.

Signed up to the EAP but haven't heard anything yet.

Indeed, though a few backup companies might be looking a bit nervous now!

Google have knocked it out of the park with these recent announcements. Vault for Drive with indefinite retention for free too!

Yeah it's not exactly a proper solution! They were quite dismissive of the question which is something I've had asked by multiple staff in multiple institutions.