Rob_D

The Covid restrictions say "up to 6 people" or "2 households". Consent issues aside, and assuming the other guidelines around distancing are met, 6 people from different households outside is fine. (Parents golf club has been looking into this for competitions and I get to hear all about it) In other news, some of our contractors have been wearing "stay socially distant" high-vis tops, which are rather nifty.

It doesn't entirely meet your requirements, but it might be worth looking at Smoothwall Monitor (formerly Visigo) - https://www.smoothwall.com/education/monitor/ The pre-moderation of events was what really sold our DSL on it, and it's been working well for us for a couple of years now.

I'd have thought a badly done/contaminated test would be likely to show false positive than negative (but I'm no doctor, so what would I know).

I'd have thought redirecting to a mapped drive would be more problematic as the policy could wind up trying to apply before the drive is mapped (this definitely happens in our environment, but YMMV). Although it might be worth a go. Are you getting anything useful in event viewer (the Windows>Application event logs are pretty good for Folder Redirection stuff)? If you run Group Policy Results, does it show the Redirect policy applying? More often than not, I've found redirect problems are caused by permissions. The other one I've had before are policy conflicts. The last place I worked the folder redirects only worked if they were in their own GPO without any other settings (never really got to the bottom of that one).

I'm not seeing anything that hasn't been mentioned before, but it's always worth having a go with the HPE Switch selector.

You could do what my old boss did with ICT suites. The last teacher to use the room before the damage was discovered gets repairs cross-charged to their department. They soon got very good at checking everything at the start of the lesson.

I'd agree with the others, Intune isn't great at iOS. We use Filewave for our macs and ipads.

Our these directed at staff or students? We're a secondary so the rules were for the students. The big ones for us were: Report any damage to the teacher straight away. Don't pull the bloody keycaps off. Make sure you're logged off (and ideally shut down) before putting it in the trolley - don't just close the lid. Don't remove chargers from trolley (although it keeps happening anyway). Also, wound up with a little graphic for which way around the laptop should go. Because apparently it would never occur to teenage students to just orient the laptop so the power plug was close to the power lead rather than trying to pull the power lead over to wherever the connector wound up.

We signed up to https://phishinsight.trendmicro.com/. We're still setting it up so haven't done more than a test run so far, but it all looks good.

People might not need to move, but goods do. And I'd guess at least some of the international transmission is trade related.

I'm being dense, how does a signage solution help?

It very much depends on what you're doing, and what resolution you use. I assume gaming, but are you looking at streaming, video encoding, a bit of cryptocurrency on the side? When it comes to gaming, the lower your resolution the more pressure is put on the CPU. At 4k you'll probably be more GPU limited than CPU even with a lower end CPU, while at 1080p even 10900k would probably be limiting your FPS. From my experience the R7 5800X doesn't bottleneck at 1440p, and does seem to be the current gaming sweet-spot form a price/performance viewpoint. Wanting to stream or encode does make a case for a beefier CPU. For streaming the you'd want the extra cores as your running multiple programs, although 8 cores is probably fine. If you want to eek every last scrap of power out of the 3090, then Ryzen 5000 series gives you access to PCIE 4.0 which does give a marginal performance uplift to the RTX series GPUS (although barely enough to be worth mentioning).

I got my AMD5800 in an AWD bundle before Christmas (at the time was actually cheaper than buying the board, CPU and cooler for amazon/rrp prices). Be warned, AWD do have reported a tendency of offering items as "in stock" without actually having the components in hand, in my case it was a modest 6 weeks or so between ordering and getting it due to them not being able to source the CPU.

We use Horizon cloud PBX with Polycom handsets (all provided by a local supplier). Installation was pretty smooth, system has worked fine ever since and support (when we've called them) have been great. Nothing to complain about. Before that we used Exponential-e's cloud PBX (with Polycom phones again). Nothing wrong with the service, support was alright (although current provider is better), but personally I find the Horizon management interface easier to navigate and much better documented.

Back when I first started, we were supposed to all be in shirt and tie, but went through a stage with lots of temps where no one bothered enforcing any kind of dress code. Now we're "smart with a collar" for the techs and "shirt and tie" for NWM and ANM.

You say that but I think it was about 2 years after install that once of our site team was on the roof and noticed that the solar array was all set up but hadn't been turned on.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere (it might even have been this thread) that AZ vaccine is more likely to give side effects (or worse side effects) on the first dose, while the Pfizer side effects are more likely on the second.

Both my parents said they didn't sleep well the night after and spend the following day feeling washed out but were fine (apart form a sore arm) the day after that, and I was pretty much the same. Based on the other people who I know who've had it, 75-80% were broadly similar, feeling a bit rough the day after, but mostly fine after a good night's sleep.

We upgraded to 2019 back in 2019 (heh), and more recently switched to the 365 install. Outside of 365 integration, the most noticeable thing I've seen from the end user POV is that 2019 has better spelling/grammar checker (and a weird obsession with hyphenation), and better narration/dictation options - if any of that matters to you. If your licensing allows, I see no reason not to upgrade.

We've been using parago asset management for a few years now. It's been great for asset management, and it does have a helpdesk built in but we found the helpdesk rather barebones and clunky to use. If you're happy to go with a separate helpdesk, then check out ManageEngine, it does pretty much everything you want on the helpdesk side. It's not free, but it's not been hugely expensive for us.

Any one else watching The Terror on BBC 2/iPlayer? Just finished it, was rather good if a little grim.

We set up Web print in papercut and it works well for non-domain mobile devices. As the end user UI is web based it's almost completely device agnostic, but will only work on-site.

That's why I wouldn't want self service password resets either. We have different SIMS logins for the all the security reasons talked about above. They might use the same password (even though they've been told not to), but we have different username formats as well.

Sorry, we use Smart IWBs throughout. My experence with domestic TVs is only at home/friends houses.

Viewing distance hasn't been a problem from our experience (although we've gone up to 75" in some of the larger labs and workshops). The higher resolution improved brightness makes distance viewing much better than on an old projectors. If you do need to make things larger then use the windows 10 display scaling (now helpfully called "make everything bigger") rather than dropping the rez, especially on regular domestic TVs. Even the higher quality TVs handle sub HD resolutions poorly in my experience.