Rob_D

I assume you mean "deep". When I did my desk I got a kitchen island worktop for the extra depth.

We've got just smoothwall at the edge and it works fine. I wouldn't have said we have a particularly complex environment, but the techs keep telling us we have too many firewall rules. We thought about splitting it and having a separate firewall, but were stopped by costs. If we did split it, we'd probably go with Fortigate or Sophos for the firewall.

Thanks, but what if I'm already a Bromcom customer and just want to test out some features without inadvertantaly breaking our staff payroll?

Does anyone know if Bromcom has a test/demo instance where I can try out features?

Good to know. Hopefully ours can last as long.

IDP S31 here too, we've got the network and double sided modules. Must have done 3-400 prints by now and still going strong (touch wood). We do all the student and staff IDs in-house and budget to replace the printer every 5 years or so.

We get ours through Southern Communications Group. Installation was a faff, but now it's in it works fine. Even with FTTP and stupidly high capacity, you're still going to get contention in heavily populated areas. So inner city schools might continue to find benefit in leased lines for a while yet.

Maybe you could train the AI to use proper British sarcasm.

It really depends on what you want, what your priorities are, and what budget you have. In the past we've used manageengine (zoho) helpdesk. They have a pretty cool multidepartment feature that lets you run multiple departments helpdesks of the same server/instance and worked fine for what we used them for, but their sails teams are super pushy (they started "reminding" us about our renewals about 8 months in advance). These days we use a Sharepoint site. There's some templates that make for descent starting points, and one of the guys built off that to incorporate all the features we wanted. And once it was tested and working for one team cloning it for the others wasn't hard.

Looking forward to giving that a go. I was going to jump on last night but it took nearly 20 minutes to load shaders. I thought they'd come up with some "fast shader" tech to help with that?

What they want is a solution that can grab all the student choices from a spreadsheet, and automagically set up the bands/classes with an easy (or at least user intuitive way) to tweak the output before it's exported and turned into a proper timetable. To be fair the Timetabler Options, looks good to me.

We originally just did it on student devices (but also had local server based Securus on the staff devices), but this was back when it was first released and there were some concerns about them storing all the logged keystrokes which was fixed in later updates. Later we consolidated to having everyone on monitor. We have it in the main AUP and again on the short, click-through AUP on the login screen (interactive login GPO setting), that all actions on the school computers are recorded. This is also covered in the ICT induction.

We use Bromcom as our MIS, but the options module isn't great. Does anyone know of any good options software? We've asked other schools in the locality, and they're pretty much all using SIMS options.

Interesting idea. I can see it working in public or selective admission schools. But I see any attempt at a wider rollout into state/comprehensive schools collapsing under the weight of teenage apathy. Also, the "2 hours or longer if they don't hit their benchmarks" they talk about in the second article is worrisome. Does that mean that slower students will be missing out on the "extracurricular activities"?

The screen directly behind reception just has a couple of our promo videos on loop, "Welcome to (schoolname)" at the top and the date at the bottom. (We used to pull the school's Twitter feed into a ticker across the bottom, but the RSS broke so we removed it.) It looks professional enough, it's GDPR/safeguarding compliant, and it doesn't need updating that often. Further into the foyer, we have one of the main "school news" screens which roll clubs, notices, student awards, this week's canteen menu, etc. (We have pretty good staff engagement with creating content, and us and a couple of other staff know how to push new slides to the news feed.)