Rob_D

The message this week wouldn't have bothered me, if it wasn't the second run climate change/ pollution this series. Saving "whats-his-name" at the end was cool, but made me wonder why they never went back to save "thingy and her daughter" at the end of Orpha55.

I don't know weather people have already seen this, but it was passed to me today and I thought it might be worth sharing for anyone still running Smart Notebook 11 under the perpetual licence. https://www.smarttech.com/support/discontinued-products

How would configuration work if you had an MSI installer? If I make the MSI myself then the I can use my predone config file, but if ASS is providing the MSI would that mean pushing out our config file everywhere post install?

The "recover deleted items" option in outlook goes back 2 weeks for me. But I wouldn't be surprised if there were admin options that go back further.

Microsoft 365 user agreement says they don't take responsibility for backing up your data and you should do your own backups. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement

Does that mean there are regulations as to whether exam clocks should have a second hand/display?

Picard didn't entirely sell me with the first episode. It was still good and I wan't to see what happens next, it just felt like not very much actually happened. Has anyone else been watching Cobra on Sky? We're up to episode 4 and enjoying it so far.

Yeah. I enjoyed this episode, far and away the best on of this series especially with that unexpected guest. Although I hope people thinking Graham is the Doctor isn't going to be a "thing".

One of our extra time rooms has a xibo screen so we throw a digital clock on that during exams. Otherwise its just large format digital and analogue clocks for all the exam rooms (I think we have both in each room where possible).

We use DM Sytems' OneDrive Connect (https://www.dmsystem.co.uk/user-group-management/onedrive-connect) to map both our user OneDrives and sharepoint shared area. We have a support contract with them anyway and it works really well. So far we've just put the student shared area up to the cloud. We just replicated it on a Sharepoint share, copied everything up and switched from the local copy to the Shrepoint over a holiday, and kept the on-site version up for a couple of weeks as read only for anything that had been missed. I don't think you can do it without a third party tool, but a mapped sharepoint share looks pretty much the same as local file storage to the end user. Which makes our lives a lot easier.

Our "cloud only" sutdents have a token 100kb mapped My Docs as windows dosen't like not being able to write the a user's documents. Then we've got mapped onedrive for them to actually save stuff to.

Pt 2 Why not redirect the desktop to the root of the home drive. And the my documents, my pictures, my music. Then wherever they go it's the same place. Sure you now have desktop full of "studentName" folders (which might be a GDPR issue), but it's a solution. Or map to a random network share without the "make a folder for each user" option and make it read only. Then they can't save to the desktop and it's the same wherever they log in. Just make sure admin has access, so someone can update icons if required.

If they can't change it, then why do they need on each? I mean I've go everyone (or everyone in a specific group) redirected to the same (read only) folder so I can control the desktop icons centrally. Which IMO is the main reason for doing desktop redirect like that. The main (or maybe only) reason to give everyone their own desktop would be so they can customise it. In which case FishCustard's Home drive solution is ideal.

I'm not wholly sure what you're trying to do here. As far as I can see, you want to give each user their own desktop that they can't change? Why not just give everyone the same desktop (or have a couple of different ones based on job roles)? For example here we have: Teachers > \\server\redirect$\desktop\Teaching_Staff pupils > \\server\redirect$\desktop\Student and so on with about 5 different desktops for finance, admin and so on. If you want them each to have their own desktop folder then I'd go for a new share rather than messing with the home folders (I've really screwed up home folders by futzing with the permissions before).

I was originally hoping to do this, but our MS reseller says you cant forward calls to someone who doesn't have the licence and we'd need to licence everyone who wanted to receive calls.

I've got it set up with Forms for our staff absence/holiday. User fills out the form, info is sent to their manager then the relevant SLT as an approval email. If approved the original user and HR/cover manager gets a message and the absence is put on a shared calendar. Also have a couple set up to do "out of office" replies for email groups. The starter/leaver thing sounds good, I might have to look into that one. You know it's called "Power Automate" now, right?

Mostly, we use Softcat and BT Business Direct.

We use Oliver (https://www.softlinkint.com/product/oliver/) which apparently has "full integration" with accelerated reader. Although if you're a smaller primary it might be overkill.

And there's me overthinking the problem again. The label idea sounds like the best way to go. Thanks! If I was going to standardize then the the up/down config would be a good. (at the moment the teacher's can arrange the monitors themselves)

For a little while now, we've been pushing extended display rather than duplicated. This is going over well with a lot of staff but causes some confusion some of the teachers, especially with regards to which way to go to get to the smartbaord. In a lot of rooms there's no obvious way around to put the screens. One isn't clearly to the left or right of the other or the screens are facing each-other, so the orientation can only be "logical" for one of them. So, does anyone know of any way of highlighting the "connecting" edge of extended display screens? One idea was to do something with the desktop background, but not all the rooms have the same screen layout.

Could you combine autoit with the free PDQ for any multi-step installations. I've done similar with MDT before.

We use Caffeine https://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/caffeine/ when we need to stop PCs from locking/sleeping (doing it through power settings GPO isn't hugely reliable on our Windows 10 builds for some reason) One of the issues we've come up against with software "exam clocks" is that they need both a digital and analogue clock available for the students that "don't like" one or the other. In the end we set up a xibo layout for exam clocks.

Yeah OneDriveConnect is a paid for thing. We've got it as part of a larger support contract so I'm not sure what it would be on it's own.

Is it just me or did the Dr's suite and tie with 3/4 length trousers look super odd?

We use https://www.dmsystem.co.uk/user-group-management/onedrive-connect to map OneDrive to a drive letter the same as their network/home drives. There's some limitations with larger media files, but it does make for a pretty transparent solution. Personally, I'd use quotas to make the local storage less useful. We do this with new students, they get 100KB for their home drive (because we can't not have one) and then they're told to save everything to their OneDrive or the Sharepoint share (also mapped through ODC).