The_W

Hi all, Appreciate the comments – I can understand where some of the frustration comes from when comparing roles like this with similar posts, especially in the private sector. This role does sit at a first-line level in terms of pay banding, which reflects national pay structures in education – these are unfortunately not something we set locally. That said, what sets this opportunity apart is the real variety of tech exposure you’ll get working onsite, directly supporting staff and students in a dynamic, fast-moving secondary school environment. It’s not a static helpdesk role – we’re looking for someone who wants to grow their skills across infrastructure, cloud platforms, classroom tech, and everything in between. We absolutely want the right person, and we’re open to feedback. If anyone’s genuinely interested and wants a clearer picture of the day-to-day or longer-term progression, feel free to reach out or drop more questions here – happy to chat more. Thanks again for the honest input – it’s valuable. Happy to take PMs

Hi All, I'm looking for some recommendations for a SAAS product that operates similar to LanSweeper or PDQ Deploy/Inventory where I can gain an insight into all my endpoints over multiple academy networks that are not joined as part of a WAN. The level of detail provided from what I can see of the demo of LanSweeper and PDQ Inventory is ideal (OS Version, patch/hotfix versions, Software installs, AV versions etc etc) but both products requires a local networked database. I'm looking for a solution that uses both agents and network scanning to capture the data and then then pipe this data up to a centralised cloud repository for centralised reporting. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Kind regards, Wayne

Would love to know more about your experience with 9ine as considering engaging further with them for our MAT. Could you PM me your contact details please?

Considering swapping my Smoothwall S4 for individual Firewall / Filtering solutions. Can anyone provide any feedback on Relay from Light speed as a filtering solution? The set up looks good from the videos etc... Would like to hear some real word thoughts though. Many thanks W

I too had contacted Jos about this but we had no joy (although I was unable to provide him access to my environment for further debugging) One thing I am working on, is having the OneDrive Powershell add the SSO urls to the registry post mapping of the drive, this way I get the best of both worlds, (it just feels a little messy!!) The only problem I have at the minute is getting Powershell to add the URLs when Intranet Zones are configured via GPO! It seems to block any additional sites from adding via Powershell.

Hi, can you confirm if your users need to 1st login to 365 and tick the 'keep me signed in' check box for the drives to map error free, or are you using ADFS? I don't have ADFS set up but have tried the SSO option in the new Azure AD Connect tool but it's missing something (a persistent cookie I think) causing the drive mappings to return an 'access denied' message. If the user opts to stay signed in, drive mappings seem to work (not sure if the cookie expires!) Thanks W

Not with the new client, they get 1 prompt initially but that also SSO signs in once you click in the password prompt. I think Microsoft still have some work to do to streamline everything but it's a step forward.

Hi All, Installed the Preview of the new Azure AD connect to allow us to implement SSO with Azure AD Password Hash Sync - https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2016/12/07/introducing-azuread-pass-through-authentication-and-seamless-single-sign-on/ Working Really well for signing in Office 2016 apps and removing the user to type a password (when on a domain joined PC) to access portal.office.com. However!! I have found that mapping a network drive to OneDrive now fails due to the users not setting a cookie when logging into the portal. This I believe is due to the user not being able to tick the 'keep me signed in' box as the browser intercepts the sign-in and quickly signs the user in via SSO. Question - Does anyone have a similar setup or have found a way of keeping the cookie persistent? I was intending on using the OneDriveMapper tool - OneDriveMapper | Liebensraum but this yields the same results. The user is given a 'access denied' message when attempting to map the drive. I've added the relevant sites to the trusted sites etc....before moving to SSO this worked fine! Thanks W

Perfect - Thanks for all the replies. Plenty to investigate over the festive period! Thanks W

Hi All, Just wondering what options you can recommend for management of passwords for IT systems service accounts (switch passwords, AD accounts, cloud logins etc etc). I'm currently holding some in a Password Management app and others in a Password protected spreadsheet. I'm looking for a single easily updatable but secure solution. Thanks W

Hi, Have configured O365s new Mobile Device Management tool with a policy and confirmed all is good with 2 test users and devices (when refreshing email, client is forced to enrol via Company Portal app and new policy settings are applied, pin etc). However, when I nested a security group in and allowed DirSync to sync the newly nested group of users don't seem to have the new profile forced. Manually logging into the company Portal forces enrollement but the overall policy doesn't apply. This results in user having email on device, device showing as enrolled but no pin security features applied. Anyone experienced this or can confirm nested groups work through o365 MDM? Just to clarify this is not the full blown intune. Thanks in advance W

Hi. Did you get to the bottom of this? I have two sites, at one I'm getting 1000s of hits per day and a hefty amount of downloaded traffic over a few days, at the other I am seeing no hits to configuration.apple.com sites. I have no idea why? Thanks

Yeah - I have seen that too, but our Staff need to have the Smartboard speakers and device speakers enabled for when they are working away from an IWB.

Hi All Just wanted to post and say thanks for the advice. Actually resolved this issue today. The cause was Time Sync Issues - Caused by Windows DayLight Saving. Here is how I tracked it down. This site shows the Open D Logs - OS X Server: Changing opendirectoryd logging levels viewing the logs showed the timestamp in the file was an hour ahead of time at logon when returning from Windows. I then used the advice here - Fix Incorrect Clock Settings in Windows When Dual-Booting with OS X or Linux - Applied the fix and and rebooted. Worked first time. I am guessing Windows Sets the time and adds an hour for DayLight Saving. Returning to OSX this time change is not reverted at the logon. When the device is logged into OSX the mac picks up its time from a local server. So is set correctly again. Hope this helps other in the future.

Hi All We are having an intermittent issue with our Dell laptops losing the Smart Board Sound driver when staff use a slightly different smartboard, this results in a red X on the speaker and the only way to resolve is logon as Admin and remove the Sound Driver in Device Manager. We have a combination of 880 and 885 Smartboards using the CAT5-X USB Dongles Staff move classrooms and may end up using both versions of the boards at some point of the day. What seems to happen is the laptop re-installs all the drivers for the Smartboard and Speakers when the user docks the laptop. Every now and again the Speaker part fails and the red X scenario mentioned above occurs. This makes no sense at all. We have tried using Smartboard 11 software, latest firmware on both board and dongle. I am stumped. Can you anyone help please? Thanks

Hi All We have suite of mac's running a dual boot OSX 10.7 / Win7 OS Combination. A strange issue seems to have occurred recently resulting in the 'Network Accounts Unavailable message' displaying and them machines not logging in to OSX This only happens though when the machines have been booted into Win7 and logged in. Scenario: user logs into mac (fine) | Reboots | Logs into Mac (Fine again), this can be done time and time again. Never fails Users reboots and logs into Win7 (fine) | Reboots | attempts to login to MAC and is refused logon. The only way to allow the MAC to log in at this point is to remove and re-seat the network cable. This is very confusing and even more surprisingly has occurred in 2 different suites using 2 different OS X Servers with the same AD back bone. I've not got a huge amount of MAC knowledge but i'm not a newbie. This has me beat though. Any advice would be fantastic even if it is only debugging the logon window to work out why the logon process wont complete if the machine has been booted to Win7 and then rebooted. Thanks