DrCheese

The M1 still beats most other laptop CPUs in terms of usability & MacOS is leagues ahead of Windows on laptops. I honestly don't know how people use wintel laptops for any long period of time without wanting to throw them out the Window. Battery life is universally garbage. Modern standby is awful (& leads to pulling hot laptops out of bags) & performance even on high end chips is rubbish compared to a desktop - Even worse when running on battery power (Most laptops throttle when on battery power) My Macs have been the only laptops I've owned that have had desktop class CPUs, without melting into a slag heap & long battery life. I've had my fair share of Wintel laptops over the years between Macs and it was just a painful experience each time.

I only have a single Mac here - But it's Entra auth'd using "Platform SSO" https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/intune-service/configuration/platform-sso-macos Works well, auto signs into Microsoft apps/so on.

I don't think it's unreasonable, £500 for a school isn't...tons in the scheme of things (Yes I know we're all virtually broke, but still) Considering how much time is saved, which has a financial impact as well (Paying staff per hour to do manual exports) - I don't begrudge them for charging. If already have the main salamanader package it's free as well.

£249 but the build quality, battery life & overall usability won’t be in the same ballpark. 8gb on the Neo is meh, but I guess with memory so tightly built into the phone SOC its not straight forward for them to offer without making multiple SKUs and raising the price

3 years later and schoolcloud still doesn't support Bromcom, bit of a headache!

I think they'll sell like hotcakes to Post 16 (& maybe younger) students, especially if the edu store does them at £499. Just a shame that the touchID version is £100 more. Will be interesting to see what we can source them at as a school - If they reach around £400 then you're in Chromebook terrority. Management of CB's will be *way* better of course, but competition is very welcomed.

Hello, Unfortunately there's no way for them to come across but you can export them all to folders using the Salamander document exporter https://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/products/ess-sims-student-document-exporter/ You would then need to manually readd them at least, but it gets you part of the way!

The S in Intune stands for speed.

We redirect downloads to our old file server, but it's capped at just 1gb.

Not allowing locked computers is (imo) *crazy* - But then I have locking my computer ingrained in me from the IT tech back when I was at school, who would troll students who left their machines unlocked. Fast user switching is fine, just force shutdowns at the end of the day.

Ouch. Yes, don't be calling them, what on earth did you think they'd tell you? You could be a nosey parent, a journalist looking for a story, or even the attacker for all they know so you're not going to get anything other than the existing public lines. If they want to release information, they will do so in their own time & via the proper channels.

Never got the point. "Horray, I can put MBCS after my name" - Brilliant, you've just told me that you've paid money to an organisation & they've given you that in return. It doesn't feel like anything has been earned, like an actual qualification. Feels similar to all the award organisations that IT suppliers pay money towards, and then give them 1st prize...

Yeah same experience here - On ADSL you used to have to "sniff" the proper username/password and put into your own device but on FTTP it doesn't matter, they're not fussed (Unifi user here!)

Yeah... this is one thing we have to do manually in a failover - We self host 3cx & I had to have our SIP trunk provider approve both the main/backup IPs. In the event of a failure we have to change a SNAT rule on smoothwall & change the IP on 3cx. Not a headache, but still.

I hadn't heard about the Cyber Resillience bill - Is there any more info there aimed at a school audience? I'm fortunate that my management have always let me do stuff to comply with DFE regs but I know others struggle so if there's anything it's helpful

^ Have some pairs of ear defenders in our server room for this. It's not as loud as it was "Back in the day" with massive HP U5 servers, but it does help when you're working in there for long periods of time!

^ Yup - All of what @paulkerton has said is what I've pushed back on when asked about Whatsapp here. What's annoying about Whatsapp business tho, is it's not something you can pull into Meta business suite and use from there.

Primary is with Schools Broadband, backup is via another vendor (& totally seperate infrastructure) Both lines are in use the whole time, as Smoothwall lets you keep both active in an LLB pool. Backup line is 1gb.

I would go outside your LEA and get a backup seperately. With so much in the cloud now, think of the alternatives if you can't get online. In some cases I can see schools having to close due to safeguarding when Internet is out. We had a fair few lengthy outages (Hi SchoolsBroadband/Talkstraight!) towards the end of last year - Two of which went on for over 36 hours. We managed to carry on due to having the backup. Until that point we hadn't really used the backup much as the only connection, but at that point it basically paid for itself. Other local schools weren't so lucky and really struggled.

June 2005. I er.. remember creating it as well, which shows my age!

eh? New laps is available on Server 2022. I wouldn't be using it otherwise 😛

Yes - Getting off my soapbox in the previous post... We have 2fa for all students despite having phones banned for years. Students can register externally & of course it's not required in school. We do support them tho, so if they get stuck they're allowed phones out in the IT office to get registered. For students without mobiles, we keep a stock of £15 hardware tokens in that we can use, but we don't advertise these unless needed.

I am utterly fed up of them announcing this whenever they want the news agenda to move on. This is what, the 4th time the govenrment have announced this now? The Tories announced it a few times. The media should do it's job and just repost clips of previous edu sec's saying the same thing whenever they try to wheel this out as new.

Ah, but you did get a beer...

I would give up with 2025 as a DC for now, it's clearly not ready for prime time still.