Rob_D

1.6m pages, approx. 14% colour and 62% duplex. At the time we had about 1,100 students and 160 staff. 18MFDs (including the 2 big ones in repro), and 9 office printers. Top 5 MFDs, outside of repro, do over 100k pages each. Repro MFDs do 300k and 200k.

Would be interesting, but coming from a M365 school, it sounds like a lot of work and staff training, which all costs.

I think it's less about moving from on-prem to cloud, but moving away from one specific on-prem MIS, and the savings which come from not having to have half a dozen paid addons if you move to something more modern that has things like a parent comms app, or payment system included in the base MIS. It's going to be tough here, we're already running a deficit and expecting student numbers to go down again next year. Combined with all this, it's looking like some very lean years ahead.

What's the benefit of wireless KB and mouse? And is there enough benefit to make up the additional costs? I could see the argument on a laptop, but I don't see any real benefit on a desktop. We've got a couple deployed where we have mini PC's behind the screen in meeting rooms, and they do seem to look after themselves, although one room is on it's 3rd charging cable.

I use windows at home, mostly for ease of use (and gaming). Although It might be interesting to see if I could get to dual boot to Steam OS.

We've been asked to look into occasional remote access for up to 3 people to connect to their desktops from home. During the lockdowns we had some Teamviewer licenses but we let them lapse since we came back and no-one needed them. But now we've been asked to bring them back, but since it was such a pain getting the licenses the first time around, I'm inclined to see if there's anything better to be had. So Teamviewer vs Anydesk? Any opinions? Or anyone have any other recommendations? Thanks for your help, everyone!

Sorry, email, sharepoint, teams, and admin center are all working fine here.

I don't have PN listed anywhere, it just comes up as "Microsoft 365 A3 for Faculty (Annual Subscription)". But I really would recommend a dialogue with your reseller as there might be issues with removing the old licenses from your subscription mid term, and you don't want to wind up paying for both the old and new licenses if you can help it.

When we moved from A1 O365 to A3 M365, it was as simple as upgrading our subscription to the new licenses, deploying them to the users and taking the old ones off. We made it easier by changing the subscription during our renewal. If you're moving from OA3 to MA3 then you might need to build in a some overlap to avoid anyone loosing access (your reseller can probably advise on this).

Looks like their pricing is going up this year: https://www.secureschools.com/en-gb/pricing They say they have a free tier, but I can't find any information about it. We've been with them for a few years for Phishing simulations and Cyber Security training. I've been very happy with them.

You'll definitely need an amazon account to link them to and you'll need to be careful no-one inadvertently signs the account up for amazon music or another paid service. I would probably set up a separate VLAN for this. The Alexas themselves will need a bunch of holes in both your firewall (link below) and webfiltering and I'm pretty sure you can't set static IPs on them. It will also make it easier/safer to add other home automation things. https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/alexa-smart-properties/networking-best-practices.html

Homer

Could we get the Sandworms forum anyway?😁

I remember reading that you have to send adventurers out to find artefacts (or something like that).

My Outlook rule still worked today, but I did it by sender address.

Ravenous Devils? Husband upstairs is a tailor, wife downstairs cooks up the unlucky customers. Was an interesting little resource management game.

Well that'll keep him going for a while ��. There is a WoT game that came out back in '99, but I've not heard of anything more recent. Wait, you've seen the whole series already? How'd you manage that? [edit] I'm being a numpty, you were talking about Life is Goodish, not Wheel of Time, weren't you. [/edit]

We're on course to have everything <8th gen replaced apart from 1 IT suite which we're looking at getting a year of ESU for with the intention of upgrading summer '26, and the old mini-pcs for digital signage which are going over to linux. Then we've just got to deal with the CCTV stations, but they're on LTSC so we've got until '29 to deal with them (by which time Windows 12 will probably be out).

We're old school. Keepass file on SharePoint and regularly backed up to a USB which sits in the key safe (in case we loose the SharePoint) The Keepass login is stored in the finance safe in a sealed envelope for "break glass" access.

Yes (sort of), but be careful as there's now 2 streams of edu licensing. The Microsoft 365 Education A3 licenses include Intune. The Office 365 Education A3 licenses don't. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/office-365-platform-service-description/microsoft-365-education

I tried to start with Colour of Magic because I was coming off the old point-and-click adventure games and was looking for "the Rincwind novels", and found it hard going. Years later I read Guards Guards and both loved it and realised most of the first game's plot was taken from it. For my own part, I'm reading Fourth Wing at the moment. Good, fast paced action.

But is Smoothwall then wbefiltering users based on their AD account? Or does it filtered by location (so everyone on the BYOD gets the same filtering)? I only ask because if you have got filtering based on username working but the usernames don't appear in the reports then somethings gone pretty weird and your probably stuck waiting for support to get back to you. But if you're using ident by location rather than by username, then the answer (as DrCheese suggested) to change to core authentication so the smoothwall pulls the username from your NTFS to identify the users should fix it. Although, hopefully smoothwall have gotten back to you by now and this is a moot point.

Single LA secondary, approx. 1200 pupils, 200 staff, and 1100 devices (mostly windows, some imacs and ipads). 3 IT people.

Are your BYOD users filtered based on their AD account they logged into the wifi with (assuming this is how your BYOD is set up)?

Back when we first did gaming club, we lost the first 5-10 minutes of the session to downloading updates. Did you have a way around that (scheduled OOH updates or something)?