PureMatt

I've always purchased via SWGfL - but now we're a Trust we want the benefit of a management central portal, which I'm told you don't get with the SWGfL offering. Over the last 6 to 12 months I've had loads of problems dealing with Sophos and getting costs down to what they should be. Trying to get parity with SWGfL pricing for a purchase as large as ours shouldn't be that difficult. In fact, i agreed this with Sophos when i first moved from SWGfL to phoenix/sophos via an account manager. However, costs have rocketed up since then. During the summer I agreed with Sophos a fixed cost for onboarding schools over the next 12 months into our contract. Now i want to onboard a school they're trying to give me the same UNIT price, but for a shorter duration. Absolute chancers. I've given up on them, the juice isn't worth the squeeze - i simply don't have time arguing back and forth. Time to look for a new AV - any recommendations?!

https://www.tes.com/jobs/vacancy/ict-technician-marlborough-1674816 Salary: £20,444 - £24,920 Full Time, Permanent Start date: As soon as possible Apply by: 25 Jul 2022

Useful administration guide from the DfE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN8koK9_ifM&ab_channel=DepartmentforEducation

IT Technician or Senior IT Technician Location: Marlborough Closing Date: 16 Jul 2021Salary: £20,092 - £25,481 - Depending on experience. This is an exciting opportunity to join the ICT Network Team as either a Senior or IT Network Technician. You'll be based in the Marlborough Hub and occasionally working remotely from home when applicable. The successful applicant will have a passion for IT and be someone who keeps abreast of technology changes within the Industry and Education. They should have an interest in IT support and possess excellent communication skills. The successful candidate will work within the Excalibur Academies IT Team, sharing knowledge and best practices to implement an evolving strategy for Excalibur Academies IT Vision. We are looking for either an IT Technician or Senior IT Technician. This is dependent on knowledge and experience. The successful candidate will be paid according to experience within an evaluated pay range. https://www.tes.com/jobs/vacancy/senior-it-network-technician-full-time-wiltshire-although-travel-to-other-schools-within-the-trust-will-be-a-key-feature-of-the-role-1464175?preview=1

IT Technician or Senior IT Technician Location: Marlborough Closing Date: 5 Jul 2021 Salary: £20,092 - £25,481 - Depending on experience. This is an exciting opportunity to join the ICT Network Team as either a Senior or IT Network Technician. You'll be based in the Marlborough Hub and occasionally working remotely from home when applicable. The successful applicant will have a passion for IT and be someone who keeps abreast of technology changes within the Industry and Education. They should have an interest in IT support and possess excellent communication skills. The successful candidate will work within the Excalibur Academies IT Team, sharing knowledge and best practices to implement an evolving strategy for Excalibur Academies IT Vision. We are looking for either an IT Technician or Senior IT Technician. This is dependent on knowledge and experience. The successful candidate will be paid according to experience within an evaluated pay range. https://www.tes.com/jobs/vacancy/senior-it-network-technician-full-time-wiltshire-although-travel-to-other-schools-within-the-trust-will-be-a-key-feature-of-the-role-1464175?preview=1

Hi All, Our finance team are making the switch from lloyds link to lloyds commercial banking. However since switching they are reporting it has been running slow from within school, but fine from home. Is anyone else in the same boat? I'm wondering if they're using it from home in 'off peak' hours which is making it seem faster. Any input would be appreciate. Many Thanks, Matt

Of course they know this... it was just like talking to a brick wall on the phone. They know exactly what they're doing and must know it's unreasonable, they just don't care and see it as a way to strong arm schools into giving them more money on top of their maintenance support.

ha, was hoping you'd say that.

Had a call with a manager at civica, as expected we'll end up paying. Apparently howartp and AJWhite1970 are both mistaken and they didn't get theirs for free at all. I was told NRS don't have to be PCI compliant because they don't deal with sensitive card data (that's done at the other end between parent pay and the customer who is putting money on). Also, NRS has had to work hammer and tong to get the sync2 in operation last minute because ParentPay didnt tell them until January they were making this change. When i told him that they've had the sync2 client since long before then and they certainly wouldn't have installed sync1 on a new site for some time he went quiet for a while as he realized i'd called him on BS... BUT it didn’t change anything. They're adamant they're going to charge customers this cost for "2 hours work". I take their point, it is last minute work and they may have had to take on extra staff or make staff work overtime to meet this deadline HOWEVER, it would be more palatable if they charged us at cost for the extra administration fee rather than the £150 per hour they’ve actually charged us. They obviously don’t care about their reputation, when our multi academy trust starts looking at a single provider NRS will be bottom of the pile for sure. It seems like they’ve annoyed a lot of people for a comparatively small fee.

I'd phone them if i were you and confirm, they didn't email me back either. Apparently they have a massive backlog and are "working their way through a huge spreadsheet of schools". I'd phone and make sure you're on that spreadsheet and then try and book a time in with them... at that point you'll probably get a quote through for £295...

Ha my thoughts exactly. I've emailed parent pay support for their opinion/advice. I'm sure this will go nowhere and i'll end up paying it, it's not like it's a massive amount of money, it just seems so unnecessary and makes me want to look at other cashless services.

Hi All, Apologies if this isn't the right forum, i wasn't sure what it fitted into and after some searching a lot of parentpay stuff was here. So we use parentpay and NRS (now Civica) NRS/Civica sent out this email, stating we must update our server as TLS 1.0 / 1.1 is soon to be discontinued by parentpay. [TABLE=width: 100%, align: center] [TR] [TD]"Reminder: action required to continue to accept ParentPay payments [/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Unless important changes are made to your cashless catering system (formerly NRS Trust-e), as of 30th October 2019 your ParentPay payments will no longer be processed into the system." So I contacted NRS to arrange this upgrade, on the phone it sounded like everything would be fine, they just needed teamviweer access to the server, upon giving them the access, they then reply with this email: " Thankyou for your time earlier. We have been advised by your 3rd Party provider, ParentPay, who as a payment service provider are required to be PCI complaint and their systems have to meet rigorous security controls. As a result of their recent audit it has been identified that your method of communication needs updating to our newer Sync2 software in order to maintain service. See below quote for the installation to be completed remotely. Sync 2 - £295 + VAT To schedule this in, please could you forward a Purchase Order for the above amount, quoting reference 682053 and we will be able to book this in. This work is not covered under Civica maintenance as the current communication method, Sync1, is unchanged and remains fit for purpose. The changes identified are due to updates with your third party provider, ParentPay, and not a result of changes to the Civica system which remains fully functional. We have ensured that the cost of change has been kept to a minimum considering the work required and time frame to deliver. " Has anyone else paid this fee? i can't help but think that NRS should be up to the TLS 1.2 standard, and not charging us to adopt it. on the other hand, they are having to remote in and change stuff that isnt directly their fault... i dont know, what do you guys think?! Cheers, Matt[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]

Update: I've found a bit of a workaround, but it isn't perfect. Basically i just made it groundhog day on 3rd Oct 2018 so that it is always within the trial period. There are two vbox commands which are needed, one disables time syncing to the host, and the other can move the virtual machine bios clock forwards or backwards by milliseconds. "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\vboxmanage.exe" setextradata "VM Name" "VBoxInternal/Devices/VMMDev/0/Config/GetHostTimeDisabled" 1 "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\vboxmanage.exe" modifyvm "CodingEnv01" --biossystemtimeoffset Visual studio is clever enough, that if you set the virtual machine clock before the install date, it will say the trial has run out, so i needed to find a way to keep the time in the 'sweet spot', as our own date moves forward. using vbs i got the difference in milliseconds between todays date and a date just after the install (3rd Oct 2018) dtm1=int(Now)dtm2="03-Oct-18"intSecondsDifferent=DateDiff("s", dtm1, dtm2)intmilliseconds=intSecondsDifferent * 1000 now i had this i worked it into the logon script which locks down the virtualbox. The only problem i can foresee with this is if students need to code their projects referencing a system date!

Hi all, we've just deployed vbox coding environment to a bunch of IT rooms with VS community 2017 installed on the base image. Our vbox environment is locked down, with no network card attached and therefore no internet connection. It only allows students access to their home directly via a mapped drive from the PC vbox is running on. Our vbox image also has an immutable disk, so each reboot it resets to it's fresh build status. i was hoping this was going to save us from the activation count down, but because VS uses a fixed date (30 days after the initial install) it continues to count down and on further investigation it checks out to the internet every 12 hours. the way it's supposed to be activated is with a free sign up from the student, upon logging in with their account it will then activate the product and continually check every 12 hours. so presumably even if i alter the base image by activating VS with a dummy account before making it immutable, it will still deactivate itself? Any advice/help would be much appreciated. Cheers, Matt

Hi all, we've just deployed vbox coding environment to a bunch of IT rooms with VS community 2017 installed on the base image. Our vbox environment is locked down, with no network card attached and therefore no internet connection. It only allows students access to their home directly via a mapped drive from the PC vbox is running on. Our vbox image also has an immutable disk, so each reboot it resets to it's fresh build status. i was hoping this was going to save us from the activation count down, but because VS uses a fixed date (30 days after the initial install) it continues to count down and on further investigation it checks out to the internet every 12 hours. the way it's supposed to be activated is with a free sign up from the student, upon logging in with their account it will then activate the product and continually check every 12 hours. so presumably even if i alter the base image by activating VS with a dummy account before making it immutable, it will still deactivate itself? Any advice/help would be much appreciated. Cheers, Matt