Rob_D

It's a bit of a workaround, but... What we used to do was have a "redirects" folder on the C drive that was updated by a startup script and then GPO redirects to there. So your user based redirect GPO points to "C:\redirects\desktops\staff" or whatever. And on your server share you a library of "redirects" root folders (with all the desktops/start menus inside) for each of your different computers/locations. These could be copied to the end PCs by startup script or GPO using the PC name, or OU to differentiate, whatever works for you. Or, if you're not worried about updating them, they could even go out as part of the image. Hope this helps.

Hey the MEPs did something useful for a change. I've never understood the need to change the clocks. If people still feel the to start an hour earlier in the summer, fine just arrange to start an hour earlier, what does it matter what the clocks say?

As everyone's said, uprading to an SSD is definitely worth it. I would also say (especially if you're windows 10) trying to get everything up to 8gb of ram will also make a noticeable difference. We had some PCs with SSDs but only 4gb ram and they still chugged at times. Upped them to 8gb and they've been fine.

+1 for clonezilla. My first school I had a handful of clonezilla memory sticks I went around with to re-image PCs. At least until I got MDT up and running.

And by the time you've done all that it's about as much work as stripping the crud out of Edu. What would be ideal is LTSC+ with things like the old calc and photo viewer on as standard.

double carriage returns have worked to fix my [code ] tags before.

We've got one of CompuCleaner Xperts and it works great for us. It's just a case of finding a power-point close enough to an outside door, because I'm not blowing out PCs inside (the cleaners would kill me). At my last place (and to use at home) I picked up a ball pump and that works pretty well if you're only doing a couple at a time.

Papercut's not hugely expensive, but is probably a bit much for just a cloud print solution. And I wouldn't recommend getting it just for that. Have you looked at Microsoft's Hybrid Cloud Print solution? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/hybrid-cloud-print/hybrid-cloud-print-overview

Are you using any kind of print management system? We've set up web-printing from Papercut here.

As I understand it, all windows store apps (like the win10 calculator or photo viewer) are "modern" apps.

AFAIK the LTSC skew doesn't support "modern apps" and definitely doesn't come with any by default.

Normal redirected start menu and desktops here. We don't bother with the tiles. The thing that caught us out with redirected start menus is they can only be one folder deep (unless this has changed since we installed).

What you mean with all fun stuff stripped out? Actually, yeah that sounds about right.

We do scheduled scan every night to reduce server load. And all the end-user PCs have OAS enabled so that should be scanning the shares anyway.

The AQA email our exams officer forwarded on to us says: Which I would read as being a unique password for our school. As long as they're careful/compliant when sharing the password I don't see this as a problem. It's probably safer than "please include this form that asks for the password with your physical media" that I remember from last year.

What's making you move away from Edu?

No. We don't charge students. Teacher's printing is charged to the Curriculum Area budget and outside lettings are charged for any printing/copying they do. But the cost of student printing is just sucked up by the school. We give students a limit of 50p a day and anything over that can be authorized to a Curriculum Area budget by the teacher (mostly for courses like graphics or photography). When I was at collage (about 15 years back), we had to pay for all our printing.

They basically want the song as a backing-track/template for recording their own lyrics and instrumentation over. The idea being by the time they're done it's mostly (if not all) their own work, but the original gives them a baseline to work from (TBH, I don't really understand the methodology). The idea of choosing only 3/4 of the most popular songs per class and only getting them (from amazon/itunes/etc) might work. As I said before, the use case would (to me) seem to fall under fair dealing, so I'm not so worried about copyright as long as the method of getting the music is legit.

It's our problem in so far as we're the ones who are saying they can't just download whatever they want off youtube. And we're the ones who are (probably) going to be bringing this to the attention of SLT. So it would be good to come with a solution.

Edu for us. We tried LTSC, but by the time we'd added back in things like calculator and photo viewer, it was less work to strip the crud out of edu, and (for us) edu seems to run better

Hi guys, One of our music teachers has been asking about downloading youtube videos for students to use in class. They have to make their own cover songs. Obviously our initial reaction is "that would be against youtube terms of service Section 5.1 paragraphs A, B, C and L." But that doesn't really solve the issue of them "needing" a bunch of age appropriate (re modern popular) music to be able to do this module of work. I think copyright is okay(ish) as this would be covered under "personal study" or "examination" as fair dealing. https://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p27_work_of_others But the issue of acquisition remains. How have other schools gotten music tracks for these sorts of lessons? Thanks!

Under the licencing pane (Admin Center>active users>select a user> licencing) you should be able to go in and turn on/off specific parts of the licence (or specific products). If you're using the A1 (like us) then "sharepoint" and "exchange" should turn off onedrive and outlook respectively. Other licences should have similar options.

We'd just unplug the network from the switch or at the device, even for things going into POE switches. The idea of (presumably) de-powering the port from the switch interface never occurred to me before. But then I've always had fairly easy access to the POE switches or would have to have gone to the switch to find out which port the device was plugged into anyway.

Hi guys, I was wondering if anyone has used a POE injector panel (or rack mount POE injector) like this? It strikes me as a good way to save a bit on not having to get new POE switches. Sure, if you're getting new switches anyway then getting POE ones makes sense, but this seems like a good idea for places where the current switching is fine, but you need a bunch of POE. But, I've never really heard of people using them. Is there some gotcha that I'm not thinking of? Or are they more common than I think? Thanks!

This is the main stumbling block we're coming up against. Like you, we'd like the devices to be managed/monitored while their being used in school on our network. But we really don't want to have any management/monitoring while their at home.