GeekyPete

We never give 3rd party access to anyone without the DPO doing due dillgence first. DPO is is not a member of IT so we never get the blame.

Got about 400 various VPC computers across 6 schools. The standard cases are a little flimsy, but they are very easy to service. Out oldest ones are about 7 yrs old now. Had a few of those fail in the last few months. We do take out the 5 yr warranty. I Reported a noisy CPU fan on a 4 1/2 yr old computer on Tuesday, replacement fan arrive Wednesday. We're happy with them.

We looked in to it. We still planned to use our 3rd party support partner, we seem to have a regular turn over of staff and we really need someone to get them up to speed and answer all those "how do you do this..." questions. In the end we didn't go hosted. We ditched our RDP based remote access a while back because we didn't feel is was secure enough and went for Forti VPN. Hosted is just RDP remote access, only without the 2FA that we had. It became clear we need a real cloud based solution not a pretend one we could have done ourselves only better.

We are a MAT of 6 School. All on SIMS. We have been planning on running a procurement for a new MIS for a while as SIMS is increasingly falling behind what is required. Our first response was "well that's sped things up!", then talking to the Very high ups we got a "hold your Horses!!" response, "Half our schools are overdue ofsted inspections, there's no way we want to be bedding in a new MIS in the middle of inspections". The one that it has done is cemented our resolve that whoever the next MIS supplier is, it will NOT be SIMS.

I don't envy you. There are some major pitfalls. Have you considered a leasing scheme? The school buys the laptops and leases them to the parents. The school owns the laptops so can insist on certain things, like virus protection. More affordable for all. You have a budget for Equity, which I think would be largely unaffected, Some might default on payment but more would probably be able to pay a lease. Downside would be the initial outlay for the school and there may be legal considerations regarding leasing 3rd party software.

We set the laptops up with a local user account and a local admin account. They are not on the domain. We use Senso.com instead of Netsupport/impero. We have netsupport for the LAN but prefer Senso for off-premises. Some we set to auto log on to the user account, using sysinternals autologon.exe. It just makes it easier as the password is independent of the domain account. This confuses some people. It's mainly students. Staff need better data security so they still need to log on. Senso is really easy. Great for live support and you can easily log out the local user to install software on the admin account. There's none of the server set up Netsupport as it's all web based, just a small client on the laptops. We also route all internet back through the trust's filtering using Fortigate. Don't forget to change the BIOS Password and they are really quite secure. EDIT: After typing that up I re-read that the parents are to buy the laptops. You said that you were thinking of introducing a 1:1 scheme. You introduce it you pay. That was not clear in the original post and it makes a massive difference. Their device, they own it, they say how it's used. Controlling a personally owned device is not the remit of any organisation (apple might disagree). Give them access to Office 365, Set up Groups or Teams for classes to share files. Think carefully about video calls on school systems, like teams. If you have an incident on school supplied teams it might look very bad. We don't let students have video calls for that reason. You can't really enforce good security inc virus, malware and updates. You may consider Senso still to offer support but get that documented and signed to accept that they allow you access to their property. If the parents are buying the device how are you going to ensure equity? Disadvantaged students who can't afford one will get even more disadvantaged.

I'd call the session something like "essential skills". Put an agenda out with the first 15 minutes a walk though of the kind of thing that should be in every induction. How to log on, change password, where to save stuff, how to access email, teams shared areas etc. Summarise the AUP perhaps. Then no one has an excuse not to use the computers. Everyone has the minimum knowledge required. The rest of the session would be a "Open Skills workshop". Those who don't use computers often can practice the content from the first part. Anyone else can raise subjects that they need help with. Either on the day or beforehand, that would be up to you. You could put a few items in there yourself in case you get nothing back. Filtering data in Excel, good power point practice, how to use the IWBs.

All the red light have been about the DPA and GDPA.. But there's also the Public Space Surveillance regulation too. Don't let the name fool you it covers private spaces too. If you only use it to detected intruders your OK. If you identify people on it you need to get licenced, and so does your boos. https://www.sia.homeoffice.gov.uk/Documents/licensing/sia_get_licensed.pdf Read page 10.

We have a Science Room with Island Benching. We needed a 15m run to the IWB. VGA over Cat5 works OK. Used Cheap Lindy converters. We get a little interference. Enough where one Teacher moans but the other 3 who use the room don't notice.

I found that it wasn't enough to add MyMaths to the allow list, I also had to ignore recommended security rules too.

If the Driver is indeed a person, the driver is included. If it's an AI and not a person then the driver is not included, either way the definitive number stands.

Just turned the heating down and opened the window. I love fresh air!

To add some weight, We run a CC4 network and we'll be replacing 70% of our hardware over the next 15 months. The remaining 30% the year after. We won't be looking at Windows 10 until Sept 2017 at the earliest. If we have to limit our Hardware choices to continue to run Windows 7 it would give grounds to re-evaluate using CC4.

Why don't you ask them? I guess it's because you're not "just wondering". In the last year or so they've signed deals with one or two very large MATs which included Broadband. Don't know the details though. Having said that RM have cropped up once or twice on AET's news pages on their own site. RM have installed CC4 across multiple sites with a Single AD. They've done that for over 10 years to my knowledge. I can think of one College that have over 10 sites, some 30 miles apart on one network. At the time they used 3rd parties for the comms. It was all connected with LES 10 circuits. Like I said it's been a while.

The Two Ronnies were a big part of my TV viewing growing up. It's a sad day even if he was somewhat overshadowed by Ronnie Barker.

Thanks to all that responded. We've shortlisted and have some very good proposals.

OK I assumed you were CC4. Not to worry, CC4 is only a GUI for AD/ GPOs anyway. You will have (or Should have) a GPO that sets your firewall settings. Have a look at this..

Switching to Linux is a No! Incorporating Linux is a must. We are not a company looking to squeeze every penny out of our investment. We are a place of learning. We need to embrace Linux, Windows, IOS, Android, Adruino, chromebooks, BBC Micro Bits, Raspberry Pi and all, to a lesser or greater degree. It's up to us and the teachers to offer a range or experiences to the students. We must do this cost effectively but we must also avoid a monoculture. The student's need to be able to think on their feet and adapt to whatever society throws at them. As alternative platforms develop and become cost effective for larger scale up take we must be skilled up to take advantage of it.

It'll be the windows firewall. It's quite easy to do. You'll need to know what protocol too (TCP or UDP usually). You can then add the rule in globally or for a specific computer type to keep the security tighter. You need to open up RMMC, go to Registry Policies, Computer Policies, Then select a specific Computer Policy, Shared Desktop, Personal etc. Or open Global and select all computers if you prefer. Click on Windows Firewall in the Middle pane and check Define Port Exceptions. You should see other entries there in the form "2968:TCP:*:enabled:RM Virus Protect - RTVScan - 2968 TCP". Follow that for the syntax will end up something like 1200:TCP:*:enabled: RM Accounts E1 - TCP 1200 Remember to click Save Bottom Right (you'd be surprised how many people miss that). Reboot the computers and test.

I've been given some of these from another school who were upgrading. I've got a couple working OK. I've upgraded them and for an i3 with 8Gb and SSD they perform quite well. But I have two more that are stuck in boot loop. This is an RM CC4 site. They reboot as soon as they've loaded Win PE. It's not a windows issue. Clean SSD, and the boot images worked OK with other computers. It happens when booting from CD, USB or PXE. I've reset the Bios Defaults, pulled the Cmos battery, left it for 30 minutes, power cycled it without the battery, etc Passes Memory tests, tried known-good ram too. I'm looking for any suggestions, or if anyone has a workshop manual for one so I can see if there is a cmos reset I've not tried (can't find one on the MB). Cheers

I've worked on RM CC networks for Many years. I've eventually got every computer I've ever come across working as long as I had the right drivers for the OS. You can't build Windows 7 if the laptop only has Windows 8 and up drivers available, like the new Dells. But that's got nothing to do with RM tbf. To echo what @Crumpet said, Double Driver is your friend. Boot it up, harvest the drivers, import to RMMC and that's 90% of the issues fixed. For alternative OS hit the manufacture's website. This is why I buy Tier 1 devices where possible. It's true that sometimes you get a pain in the bum of a driver that won't install and it can take days and days of trial and error trying to get the right one. The first time I had to roll back a Windows 8 laptop to Windows 7 was time consuming too. I Hadn't used DiskPart for a long time up until then. For the most part, it's not too hard. And having seen other build processes I still thing CC4 is about the best out there. I can truly leave it unattended, right up to user log on. You don't realise what a genius interface Assignment Overview is until you live without it. It could be better, I've fed back ideas. But it's elegantly simple.

We've seen Core 2 duo go from around 100 seconds to boot up to around 15 seconds by upgrading to SSD (cheap £35 drive), log on times improve but not by as much. log depends much more on the user profile so it's harder to set realistic expectations.

Someone just bought a batch for world book day here (been and gone), You can't set them on USB, you need a wifi connection. They won't even work with our Transparent proxy. last I heard they were sat on the teacher's kitchen Table until she gets round to setting them up. Se la vie.

Refurbished! That's what I was missing... With that said, still a cracking deal!

The price on the Z220 Can't be right can it? What am I missing?