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I don't ParentPay's disdain for their customers has changed one bit.

just looking at other systems to get away from parentpay so thanks for the headsup. My list so far, now schoolcomms is off the list is: Tucasi / scopay Wisepay sQuid Parenmail has anyone any others or recommends ?

Affluent. <= 11% Pupil premium Complaints were minimal, most parents accept it.

You can assign admins different permissions over different OU's. As well as delegating domains you can even give certain teachers access to students mailboxes, drive etc https://support.google.com/a/answer/6129577?hl=en

I think our finance team can take cash if they want to but don't think they do very often. How did we do it? - we refuse to take cash and everyone uses parentpay.

seriously? Just re-read *everything* I said with tongue in cheek.

You must be new to forums.

You can automate it and use SIMS data. see: Salamander Active Directory | SalamanderSoft Limited

MS have improved, but as they do so Google are still ahead of the game. The new differential tools, admin audits and parental access from Google are especially welcome, eliminating the need for tools such as show my homework. In the meantime, Microsofts roadmap for Classroom can be found here: https://support.google.com/edu/classroom/answer/6149237?hl=en

@nathan you're only creating more work for the poor technician who has to move them back to GSuite after they realise what they had was better all along. Why don't you save yourself some time and not create work for yourself!

We have about 650 machines per technician, but mostly they are chromebooks. It looks like you are in a similar situation, so I'd try and decrease your PC's in favour of chromebooks/boxes if you want to make it manageable.

The conductors should be opening the doors. It's safer. The drivers should be sacked and replaced with computers. It's safer.

I think it's up to the operating system; ChromeOS is encrypted by default, android you can select whether to disable offline file encryption (it's in drive settings on android). On windows the files are in C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\File System Unfortunately I don't have a windows PC at hand to check

Have you looked at Google cast for education? It might be a bit off-topic but it means that you can cast directly to a PC attached to a projector/lcd without need for Chromecast hardware. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-cast-for-education/bnmgbcehmiinmmlmepibeeflglhbhlea

We actually have this working with Google forms. It needs some third party addons (form mule and copydown) to make it work but when it does you can setup an approval system. We use it for approving orders by our finance team but are extending for staff training requests. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/formmule-email-merge-util/kabhamaiihmaphgpijdolgcihofefajn?hl=en interestingly, Google are about to launch "app maker" for extending exactly type of thing. See the 'blue forms' comment in the video and sign up for the early release

All I can say about Biostore is they seem to have stopped answering calls. I'm not sure if they have gone bust, or they just don't have any engineers left ? We used to have an instant response from their helpdesk - and their engineers were very good - but now they won't answer the phone and there is no reply other than automated response. Personally I'm going to start looking elsewhere unless they can resume their previous level of service.

With reference to the article title: "Google schools" - they don't have word, and "disallow external storage" means that the internet is the only way to distribute content.

Sure - so create a vlan for each yeargroup, then setup radius or NPS server to put the students into their yeargroup vlan when they authenticate. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd283091(v=ws.10).aspx

With 802.1x you can have a scope for each year group.

With Chromebooks you don't need any servers onsite and everything saves to the cloud, yet you can still do per user content filter and restrict what is installed. I think the issue is for those who really need/want to keep some windows computers but find the cost of having just a few windows machines is now massive for comparatively little benefit. At least that's the situation I am in and am looking towards those things like SAMBA for help.

Yes Samba can be used for Windows logons, windows shares and printing. I think it even does group policies these days too. My suspicion is that this is one of the reasons that Microsoft want people to move to their cloud now, because it is getting easy to not need windows servers and pc's.

Having looked in more detail, you would still need to use SAMBA on OSX but the mac server may still be useful for DHCP and DNS. For off site hardware there are many cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others that would allow a full non-windows domain controller to run off site.

You may have missed my post (previous page) about how you don't need windows server (and CALS) to manage windows logins anymore. 20 years ago it was the only option, but nowdays you can do it on OSX,Linux or unixes and bypass the CAL's. Keep a few windows machines by all means, but don't get sucked into an EES agreement for a few machines.

I think mac server is about £14. That can be setup as a windows domain controller. So can Linux using Samba. Both will do DHCP, DNS, File/print sharing and Windows login. If you went this route you wound't need an EES agreement at all assuming you already pay for windows licenses when you pay for the computers.

When I read that I couldn't help but think of the £1bn investment that Google committed to the UK this week, coupled with the derisory comments made on this very forum when chromebooks were first released. You probably need MS less than you think you do.