howartp

Excel or Google Sheets? Which version? Sort() isn't available in Excel 2016/2019, only 2021/O365.

Have you been in Tools > Setups > Lesson Monitor Options > Lesson Monitor setup? I'm not familiar with the NT side of it but ours has P1 and P5 as AM and PM, because in NT our P1 is registration. (We have a "Tutorial" subject which is applied to p1 in NT, so that the details appear on timetable like a normal class. My understanding is if we set p1 as registration (ie the inbuilt "this is your form period/registration period") then room and teacher don't appear when you do Print Timetable in SIMS. Peter

We're with Civica Finance (formerly Resource32000)

We've had Kyocera for 3 years, extended them for further 2 years, and we've just awarded the next tender for 3 years to them for delivery in Summer.

Nothing to do with Bromcom but I entered the world of SMTP last week for another product. Made great use of CheckTLS.com for checking my server settings and what I was entering; turned out the list of IP addresses I was given to whitelist on our SMTP relay included every IP address they use except their mail server that sends SMTP emails!

Separate student-level domain account(s). Student accounts are largely read-only apart from their own resources they create anyway, so there's not much they can do with them.

Does anyone know what PPOD is in SIMS? We've stripped back lots of permissions, but when browsing System Manager > Manage Groups, there are various permissions for "PPOD" - but I can't find anything about it, other than an Ireland gov/edu database thing which doesn't seem to match what i'm seeing in SIMS.

Was about to say, i'm sure that is a Sahara mount, but google images didn't match up so I kept my mouth shut!

Hi Katy ATF files are just text-based XML. Somewhere around line 5 or 6 (assuming line endings are wrapping nicely) will be: 18.0 I'm not suggesting/advocating changing this manually (ahem...) but if you change it and save, it will let you get rid of that error.

@timbo343 We found this yesterday, and as you say some of our drives were larger than the limit yet still working. We turned it off for now. Google Admin > Storage > Storage Settings box > Manage > Shared drive storage limit > Turn on/off

I'm surprised a trust doesn't have a mandatory ordering procedure, regardless of the specific problem at hand? In our single-school academy, all our purchases have to be raised through our (web frontend) finance ordering system, that the finance team then import into the PC-based software and raise the POs, process the invoices, manage the budgets etc. The process in itself doesn't stop your original problem, and our finance team wouldn't spot/stop IT purchases unless they were over the approval limit (£5k), but it surely helps engender an expectation and adherence to procedure including "thou shalt speak to IT/Premises/H&S for IT/Premises/H&S related products...". We have good respect here and, with one or two exceptions, colleagues are pretty good at mentioning a purchase to me before they go ahead. I say mention rather than ask because they haven't all cottoned on to needing us to cast our eyes over it before giving approval, but at least they come to us so we can interject where necessary.

Does that include the mandatory support option? If we add the cheapest support package to the subscription model, it becomes more expensive than we're paying now.

Apologies, just found them in the portal. So Foundation Support makes our "discounted subscription" more than what we're paying at present.

Our new subscription is £2600 cheaper than our existing renewal. But I had to laugh at the previous email where, to paraphrase: "Customers have the option of a single subscription, support and hosting contract, including first- and second-line support "Your current renewal includes 1st, 2nd and 3rd-line support" "Your new subscription only includes 3rd-line support" "You must, additionally, buy one of our shiny new support packages for 1st- and 2nd-line support, or go to a third party, but we're not going to publish the prices of these anywhere"

SchoolComms does exactly what you’re asking, at least from SIMS. Create an Individual Report then attach it by name of the report; it sends each parent/child their respective version of it. @dmj’s comment is interesting and one I’d not considered. Ironically with SchoolComms, the only way to upload reports to their SchoolGateway app/portal is to send them by email and tick the “Also upload to portal” checkbox when doing so! As an aside, SchoolComms doesn’t handle non-binary gender pronouns - it’s tied to the male/female Sex field in SIMS - so you can’t refer to him/her/they etc in the covering email if you have any students affected by this.

I've started this last week with one test user, but worked well - the other 30 are in progress: We've made 30 AD accounts, synced them to Azure and Google (as our Google SSO uses Azure). Added them to our Smoothwall as a custom usertype and blocked all but Google and Azure domains. Added a new usertype (OU) in Google Admin and turned off all services except Drive. Powershell to enable/disable the AD accounts on schedule. Have to play with Google or Azure AAD Connect to make sure they sync in time but that's doable.

I've been using BatchPatch for my servers for a while. We do have WSUS, but I don't enable the updates until i'm logged in ready to do them. I then use BatchPatch to tell about 20 servers to check for updates, with the "Download, Install & Reboot if required" option. I then log in later/following day and do the remaining 5 or so. (Like FN-GN, I don't do both DCs, both Exchange servers or the WSUS server together)

Our mac addresses are all E0:A7:00 which is assigned to Verkada; I'm not familiar with Pi's so can't comment. We buy from RV Fire Systems in Lancashire. They do all our fire alarm support/maintenance but the vape stuff is supply-only for our sparkies to install and me to commission. I've just looked at an invoice. Cough, ahem... ours are NOT way less than £510 per unit! I'm not involved in procuring but...!

We've got four Verkada SV11's with Verkada cameras and about to add another four. SLT love catching kids, but then moan that the timing of the alert doesn't match the time on the camera - they've tested with member of staff that vapes, but i've never been around when they've done it. I reckon students are vaping in one cubicle at the far end from the sensor, and it's taking time for the vape to reach the sensor at the other end.

Speak to Ben Taylor at A.C. (https://www.ac-et.com/product-category/lighting/) They're the UK dealer for Prolights.it (not Prolight - different brand) but we've bought quite a bit for school and my church from him, both new and used. Depending how far south of the Midlands you are, he'll bring demo kit for you to see what throw/brightness/function is in your space.

We don't do that many days term-time, but nobody has ever mentioned that as being an issue! It's only 6 or 8 bolts (ish?) per room so a minute or two of drilling four times per day can't be too bad.

I've managed to grab an MSI for XDisplay from the self-extracting exe and deploy it with normal silent install. Seems to be working fine after reboot (I think the driver installs ok, but maybe service doesn't start up until after reboot?) on my PC. I've deployed it to the ICT teacher that asked so will report back if any issues. Peter

We're paying £1780 for 65", old projector/speakers removed, TVs installed, assuming 4 installs per day either term-time or holiday. We're slightly south-er/east-er than NW but the company is based nearer you than me.

Hello Our ICT teacher has come from another school where they used to use Duet Display for using their iPad as an additional display/monitor when sat working at their desk, but the costs have gone up and you need an account for every user etc. I've found Splashtop WiredXDisplay which seems to work well on my PC, and is free and no account needed, but wondered if anyone else had used this or any other software - particularly anything deployable? Peter

Ooh, I started looking at Azure a couple of months ago but couldn't find anything that didn't need lots of extra student licenses that we didn't have, without paying lots more money. That's looking a more reasonable proposition on the face of it.