Rob_D

Many years ago now, we joined the Digital School House esports liege. At the time they were using Overwatch, and I remember it being an absolute pain to get working and keep working. We never really invested in it as a school it was just running on our regular IT suite PCs, which actually ran it okay at 1080p low. These days, DHS uses switch games for their Esports tournaments (this year was Splatoon, and I think last year was Smash Bros), and it's so much easier. We've gone from having to have a dedicated support person at the club, to pretty much no involvement. So while it's kind-of sidestepping your main questions, I think the best way to bring e-sports into schools is through consoles. It's just so much easier to pull out a dedicated box that everyone is familiar with.

We got a 100 ap Aruba installation from SwitchShop about 4 years ago and it all works great. When I've looked Aruba instant-on seems to come in at a similar price to unifi. Even if you're less interested in aruba, it might still be worth reaching out to SwtichShop, those guys always seem to know their stuff.

We're using some old Mini-PCs that currently run LTSB, but we're looking to move to linux.

Got put on to Vivi by an MSP contact. Anyone done anything with them?

For video we've had pretty good results from Kramer HDMI over Ethernet adapters. Data's be more of a mixed bag. Our current solution of 5m USB-c cables seems to be working okay, but we've not tried anything longer.

xibo self hosted here.

Is this the manifest V3 thing?

It's a bit of a cludge, but you could use your DNS to re-point the wireless devices to local versions of http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt and http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt If it's a timeout/latency issue on the wireless, then it might help/

Parents can do whatever they want in public, but while the kids are on school grounds they are forbidden from using personal recording devices under the school's GDPR policy. It's no different from schools banning the use of phones. That said, I do agree it's a slippery slope and schools need to be very careful what they do here. There is a need to protect staff, but are bodycams the answer or are they just going to cause more problems down the line?

We'd been having the globe issues and some odd sign-in things with MS and Adobe. Rebooting seems to have fixed all of them.

For us, rebooting the smoothwall seems to have fixed the problem.

As I've said in another thread, we moved over the summer break, and it wasn't too bad in hindsight. The biggest problem we had was getting staff to engage with it at the end of the summer term, and then most everyone went off for the summer leaving us kind of flying blind. We wound up doing a lot of the setup, and thus finding most of the niggles during September. I reckon you could have a pretty smooth move if you can shake out or at least identify most of your teething problems in the test environment (hopefully you can get this during the summer term), and be prepared to have key staff to come in over the break to help with set-up and learn to work the live system before the start of term. I'd still try to avoid moving in Summer/September if I could.

Makes sense. I've never really thought about it in such strict terms, but we do pretty much do that. Add in exam periods, the start of September generally, and financial end of year (April for us), things start to get a bit complicated. That said, our MIS move wound up being over the summer break, which was definitely a complication, but it all worked out pretty well in the end.

It's the expanded universe idea and Marvel/ Star Wars comparisons that keeps coming up that worries me. Amazon have done a good job with things like Reacher so I'm sure they could do a good job with it, and TBH I'd be really down for a James Bond series. But I wouldn't want a barrage of origin stories and the Felix Lighter/Q/Money Penny spin-off series that start to feel like required reading to follow the tentpole movies.

Yeah there's 2 CoPilot apps now The AI one and the 365 homepage which has the a M365 label.

Is this the Gen-AI CoPilot or just the 365 Homepage that MS have renamed CoPilot for some reason?

Put them in portrait so you can really cram the kids in!

I hope the time jump doesn't mean they're skipping over the distribution of the "9 rings for mortal men", as I really want to see the origin of the wraiths and the backstory of the Witch King.

Mostly 22'' for student machines. Staff machines have 24" screens pretty much across the board (we've got a couple of users on 27" screens because they "need the space").

We were part of the West Sussex move a few years back, and while we had similar issues with our named contact being somewhat hard to get ahold of, our actual move and staff training seemed to go pretty smoothly. There were some definite teething problems [cough] cover [/cough] that seemed to really drag out of but overall we got a decent level of post move support. Looking back on it, I wouldn't say it was a sterling experience, but everything worked out fine in the end.

swimming

We went for the Bromcom emails as we wanted to use it our primary parent communications system, which meant whole year and whole school mailshots. So any SMTP server would need to support bulk sending and have all the necessary stuff to not get instantly blacklisted or disabled for "spam", which (for us anyway) would have meant paying about as much as buying additional emails from Bromcom but with added complexity. And given the system we were moving away from had a lot of problems with email delivery, we really didn't want anything that would be on us to troubleshoot when it inevitably stops sending to Hotmail accounts.

They'll probably be a metric size, so you just need one that hasn't been nicked, then you can measure the thread diameter and buy those thumbscrews (or not thumbscrews) from pretty much anywhere. The M number on things like M4 is the outer thread diameter in mm (see image below). I'd expect them to be M4 (4mm thread diameter) like most monitor screws.

Might be worth looking at Smooothwall. They do everything you want, but you might wind up needing an on-site appliance. I can't speak to how it compares on price, I think it will depend on how big the school is.

I've seen everything from 500 to 5,000 cycles which is a massive margin. Having a good battery management system must be a factor in that somewhere.