DrCheese

We moved over the cloud version over the holidays. They orginally assumed they could "just do it whenever" regardless of if we were still using the system (or in my case, we were on holiday) - Told them no & removed their remote access. I let them do it when we returned - First it duplicated all our staff (doh?!) - Which they fixed after a week Now it's randomly removing half our staff each day. Zero difference between affected staff & active staff in the MIS (Bromcom) but inventry can't tell us what it is their system looks for. Support is an utter pile of flaming garbage now. They don't know their system & it shows. At least, when they get back to you. Outsourced support, Simply. Doesn't. Work. It used to be so simple to get issues fixed, now it's like pulling teeth. They have a support forum/page but no updates in over 3 years.

Wonde or Groupcall. Do not reinvent the wheel by making your own sync system or make IT/Data managers do awful CSV exports.

Long as they don't outsource their support to the other side of the globe like Inventry - Or get bought up by someone like TES then they'll be ok....

It's funny we say in this thread, but Aussie schools are actually starting to remove these schemes https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/24/australian-schools-digital-detox-jason-clare https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/parents-save-money-students-digital-devices (Phasing back to school provided computers & screen time limits) An Aussie primary head came up on my Linkedin this morning saying that they've proven they can improve outcomes higher without them (If I can re-find the post, I'll post it) Sweden is doing the same https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly0vk77vdko

Aye completely agree & I've said it again and again. Buying shiny without having it being strongly driven from above is utterly pointless. You may as well take a pile of money outside and set fire to it. Teachers will stick to what they know. They're not going to stick their necks out and try new without support from above. They don't have the time & also, why should they? (If they are already meeting their targets) - It's just a risk to them, especially if what they're doing already gets the students results. This doesn't just apply to Hardware - All too often we've bought software that will make life easier, but few people know about it so it slowly withers & becomes a waste. All trusts I feel need an IT training team who's job is to go around to schools & train them on these things. Not IT people, but other teachers.

Still have it here. Although it used to cost us around £2.2k for 3 years subscription, it's now around that per year. I do toy with moving to Windows Defender at some point, but Sophos really is a "Deploy and forget" whereas defender is a metric ton of work to config (Not to mention, removing sophos would be a headache)

Yarp. Have another issue at the moment that only occured after they setup their cloud stuff.... The client on the machine is stupidly unstable as well now, crashing after an important visitor tried to sign in today. Fantastic demo of the software

Aye, I've since read more into this - Third party suppliers *were* placing orders with enough time & scheduled for summer, but Apple terminated all existing orders & forced reorders. Massively unfair - It's one thing raising new order prices, but another cancelling confirmed orders at the old price. I can only guess Apple wanted to avoid suppliers holding old stock/selling at new price but it massively screwed over the education market (or anyone that had projects already booked) Apple get away with it because they are the only supplier.... PC OEMs have so far honoured orders on anything that's flown up in price after an order because you could just go elsewhere

This doesn't surprise me. The forum used to have a really long grumble thread about these guys that was.. deleted for some reason that went over years of substandard service & over-promises from them. @ZeroHour Where did it go? Home providers have to guarantee a set speed & Ofcom force them to automatically pay out if they don't meet it https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/service-quality/automatic-compensation-need-know But Business to Business seems to be the wild west - There's no protection here. Businesses often write their own SLAs and obviously make it almost impossible for it to apply to anything. Individual schools/trusts are too small to really push back on, so they get away with it All this will end up happening in the end is the DFE will start forcing schools to use frameworks for Internet provision which will come with *much* stronger terms. The providers will grumble about it, but like with Printing/MIS vendors it'll be a situation entirely of their own making.

If you have dual scan allowed & your machines are hotpatch capable they'll be pulling the hotpatch from the web instead. This has a different KB number so your WSUS server will still think the devices are unprotected & show like that (But in reality are fine)

We use Cloud Drive Mapper - £900 or so a year for us https://www.iamcloud.com/cloud-drive-mapper/ Worth it because it avoids the problems you mention

All outsourced now & they just run through a script. We moved to Bromcom, worked fine for a bit then stopped writing marks back. Went through the "Does it have the right permissions" loop which yes.. of course it did because it worked before. Instead of just asking questions in one go, they'd ask a single question each day at 4pm, ("What's the account name?" "Does it have write permissions") meaning if you replied the next morning, you were stuck until 4pm again. Got handed half way through to another agent who... started the script all over again. The answers were RIGHT THERE in the email chain. The hardware is slow & runs awfully. I couldn't believe our last renewal they were still supplying Windows 10 kit. Kit that was now some no name Aldi brand instead of the decent HP kit that it was before. It *was* a great product around 2014/2015. Since then it seems that it's had virtually no development & is now just coasting on existing customers. It's really tiring to go through this cycle with edutech vendors. They usually start off great, then get bought out by someone bigger or the bean-counters take over and then the product runs into the ground. We all move to another supplier & it starts again.

The best laptop in that price range right now is probably the Macbook Neo.

Suprised this is still on going - It's nearly 2 years since 2025 came out yet I still read about these issues on here & reddit/sysadmin. I only ever had the one 2025 DC for a few weeks (About 6 months after release) and ended up having to revert it. It's fine for everything else, just domain controllers it seems are (somehow) still a no go area, nearly 2 years after release

Curry still had the old prices on Saturday so snapped up an M5 Pro. It's.. bad when you feel you have to distress purchase equipment to make sure you've got something to last you the next 5/6 years of this.. mess.