JohnRMoore

Hi, this was a long time ago, so perhaps things have changed? Our MAT has only two schools, but a third is on the horizon. We are looking to move to a single IT service provider, and all sites will use SIMS. The schools each have up to 500 students. I have been asked to look into general approaches for linking the sites, which are a few miles apart (if this makes any difference!). The only decision that has been made is that we do not wish to use cloud services for applications or data storage. We of course want as much simplicity as possible, with reduced costs. Like the OP, most articles on the internet point towards SD-WAN, which is clearly not the preference of you guys for some reason! Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Unfortunately I don't have access to multiple computers. I could (I suppose?) request that our network team create me a virtual machine?

Hi, I have used pulsar.exe to launch multiple instances of SIMS.net. Does anyone know of a way to launch multiple instances of Nova-t 6? I've finished a timetable which is OK except for one lesson where would prefer it AM rather than PM. I've blanked out those periods and left auto schedule running to see if it can find an alternative. (I've never had auto schedule manage to find a solution in this way, but thought if I can leave it long enough it just might find something!). It currently on 9 out of 12 levels after 2 days, and I need to try out a few other things on Nova-t. Any advice on how you get around this problem gratefully received. John

Yes this is for a school so the staff laptops are imaged specifically for staff with the software they use. Software is then sometimes remotely deployed, but occasionally the laptops are reimaged. This is all part of the maintenance contract, but I suppose the sudden urge for encryption wasn't anticipated early enough.

OK. Just asking because our IT would encrypt at the end of the year since the tend to rebuild anyway. I suppose it's the unusual nature of the timing that makes the difference, as it's an unexpected extra job. This is another school in our MAT.

Hi, if laptops need encrypting for GDPR, shouldn't they have been encrypted anyway? So if work needs dong in this regard, would I expect our IT suppliers to charge extra, or is this just part of the ongoing maintenance and upkeep?

That's a great idea, I can sense a policy emerging...

Yes, and when sharing with students, any methods will be fine (I currently share with google classrooms). But the rule of thumb could be that to collaborate on staff docs, put it on the staff shared drive. This will provide some degree of logical separation.

That looks good. So a simple rule could be only share via team drive, do not add users explicitly.

Excellent point. But I am looking for ways in which there is less chance that a well trained individual would accidentally share a document with a student. I know it will warn you if you attempt to share to a different domain, but as we only have one sub-domain, I am unsure what would happen if you attempted to share to a different subdomain, or perhaps to the main domain. If that would also warn, I think that would be sufficient safeguard, assuming, as you say, staff are properly trained. I need to demonstrate a risk assessment and I don't feel training is sufficient mitigation on its own, especially since Google is designed around sharing!

Hi, our students use google docs with a subdomain of 'student'. If staff also wish to use google docs, but for content NOT to be shared to students, what would be the best approach to allow staff to collaborate on google docs but minimize or eliminate the change of accidental sharing of content with students? PS if there is a more appropriate forum, apologies, please let me know PPS my current thinking is to create a staff subdomain, or for staff to use main domain (which could be confusing as they already use outlook email). It may be that neither would help, and we should ALL just use the main domain for neatness! Just so you know the ill-informed mess going on in my head...

Thanks all, comments have helped enormously. One provider I have contacted called schoolfibre run the filter on an external server, which seems quite attractive to me. Again, are there any issues here (e.g. bottlenecks on the internet, privacy, data protection) and what questions should I ask or what expectations should I have with regards to how contended the filter is, can we have different filter settings to others, is there any type of traffic that isn't filtered that other filters might cover etc. (are these sensible questions?)

I can't find a supplier that quotes based on devices

Thanks yac I've asked for a quote

I have a quote (filtering only) of £4.80 per student. Seems steep...?