Rob_D

Finished Arcane Season 2 today. That was a very good show. I hope they do more stuff in the LoL universe.

If you use HP brighter futures for PCs and Laptops they only accept up to 8 year old kit for trade-in, so that's your refresh cycle.

Power automate has worked quite well for us for copying libraries between SharePoint sites in the same tenancy (tidying up the hodge-podge of sites create when we rushed into SharePoint in 2020). I don't see why you couldn't use it to move stuff between tenancies as long as you have access to both. Spitballing, but if you're backing up your 365 data, then you might be able to use that to restore to the new tenancy.

Q4 should probably a multi-choice and ideally non-mandatory. What if we get all of them? Or none of them? Do you mind if I ask what you're hoping to achieve with this survey?

I prefer headphones to earbuds too, but I've struggled finding a wireless set that aren't the giant DJ/flight controller type.

I think the Simpsons said it best: "Instead of one bigshot controlling all the media, there's a thousand freaks xeroxing their worthless opinions." I tried Bluesky, but what I assume is the "default feed" was just people moaning about the US election so I gave up on it. Maybe I'll try again later when I have the time to curate out all the nonsense. As for the school, if you're going to use any SM, then you want it to be where the current and upcoming parents are at.

Depends how much linear/live TV you watch VS streaming/on-demand. If you're happy with mostly live TV on-demand, then I'd go for a Humax freesat box. (I think some even have netflix and prime now) If you're more into streaming and on-demand, then something like a firestick would be the easiest option. We had YouView some years ago with somewhat mixed results (was also a bit of a bandwidth hog).

Good point. But I think the next step (if they aren't already) is for ESS to start getting rid of self hosting options and pushing everyone into the ESS options. Which makes total sense. If you're trying to move to proper cloud, you don't want legacy installs dragging you down.

I might have it wrong, but reading between the lines I get the impression, there's also an element of ESS trying to depreciate self hosted/3rd party hosted SIMS in favor of ConnectEd/ESS hosted SIMS. If true, it would mean any support providers helping clients move SIMS anywhere else would be doing so against instruction from ESS.

Thanks for the suggestions. Have replaced the cable, didn't seem to have any effect. I'm on the latest GPU drivers and the issue has persisted through several driver updates. Yeah I've got gas-lift chair, but if it were something like that I wouldn't expect to see the issue more randomly across all PC usage. Even so, I'll have a play around with positioning and see what happens. I wonder if those ferrite cores would help if it is interference.

We're using Smart SB60 series boards, in a mix of 65 and 75" sizes. Next renewal cycle (in a few years) we're looking at moving away from Smart, but we'll probably jump to a generic hardware like Iiyama or BenQ. Samsung's Flip range look really good and I love the idea of being able have a single USBC to the board, but they are a bit pricy (still less than we've paid for Smartboards before).

As an alternative viewpoint. If we're using 365 and cloud based MIS, then I don't see there's any compliance issue. Obviously nothing should be downloaded to the local device, but if they're working wholly in the cloud and that access is password/MFA protected, then it shouldn't matter what device they're on. And is technically no different from working at home on their own PCs, which we know some staff do. I just say no to printing and local services on BYOD devices. If they want full network access then it's on a domain joined/school managed device. If they're happy just accessing the could resources (which is most of our stuff these days), then it's fine*. * Our BYOD/home use policy states that devices accessing school resources should have up-to-date endpoint protection and the latest vendor security patches.

We use DMS Netflow for this. https://www.dmsystem.co.uk/services/our-products/ The MDT addon allows you to run an "applications only" task sequence against live machines. It even allows you to pick either a single or multiple applications from your available MDT installs to run.

We've got Solidworks and Autocad running fine on machines with integrated graphics, although they are desktops. Our Solidworks setup uses an on-site server for licensing, but I'd be surprised if there weren't newer cloud-compatible ways to do this. Autocad doesn't have a server component (at least none we're using), but did take some bullying through the firewall, and some local permissions faffing. From our point of view, Solidworks has generally been less of a faff to install than Autocad, but did require more ground work. If it were me, I'd be lead by the teachers on this one (they're the ones that have to teach it after all).

But I guess the question is, can you add CoPilot onto a A1 staff license? The information I have suggests the answer is no, but I could be wrong.

That certainly seems to be the implication of the slide.

According to the DMSystems webinar from a couple of weeks back, CoPilot is an addon for the A3 or A5 edu licenses, at £296.40 (per year/per user) If it helps anyone, the license Part no is: CFQ7TTC0MM8R:000K:P1Y:Y

Pretty much just roll with it, yeah. The Jeremy Vine/news montage in the trailer is about the extent of the explanation for how they "got from here to there". (Basically, society realised it needed to stop violence against women, the government passed the bill, and in a thoroughly unbelievable level of efficiency, made it happen.) There's a little of the logistics of ankle tagging half the population, but only in so far as it intersects with the main story.

For us, anything with a large storage capacity (backup serves, file servers, virtual hosts, etc) is RAID5. OS drives (like on a DC), would be RAID1 Anyone using ZFS, I keep hearing about it as an alterative (mostly on LTT), but not really looked into it.

In the past we've used Securus (un-managed), and Smoothwall Monitor. We're looking at Securus FMS for our next renewal, as far as I've seen, it's pretty feature comparable with Monitor.

Been watching Curfew (the new one. not the Sean Bean one, although the Sean Bean one is well worth the watch if you get the chance). While I find the social commentary stuff rather eye rolling at times, the murder mystery/procedural cop drama is surprisingly well done.

LGFL listed prices aren't terrible, but I've got quotes from both BT and and Vodafone for data only SIMS at around £5 each. I just used the contact form on that page to get a BT sails guy to reach out.

Those LGFL prices are pretty steep, just go to BT direct (or vodafone), we've been quote much lower per-sim costs from both than are advertised on LGFL. I just used the contact form here and a BT sails guy called. https://business.bt.com/business-mobile/sim-only/

So you've got to migrate from Socmis to on-prem SIMS and then migrate from there to another MIS? I can see so many schools doing that...

Interesting. I can see this becoming more of a thing as the "desperate job seeker" starts cutting corners on their hundreds of applications by using GPT to tailor their covering letter/application, although I wonder how good it would wind up being given it's all going to be rather generic. I like Bedes's approach of guidance, but given the amount of anti-AI sentiment I wonder how long before we start to see straight up bans on using AI for applications? Which would be an interesting one to test in court (can you discriminate on someone based on how they filled in their application? I mean probably yes, but still...).