HereIGoAgain2601

We have just moved to Wave 9 with the Sophos XG filter. Light years ahead of RMs offering and we saved a small fortune compared to the previous pricing.

Technically in our MAT the staff salary for the “technician” is paid out of school budget and everyone else that supports across multiple schools (Network Managers / Seniors) are classed as central team and paid for there. We gag pool so decide all infrastructure projects and pay for this using the centrally held funds.

In my Trust, we have a mix bag of schools built in the 60’s and BSF era builds. We also have a couple of PFI to boot. The challenges are different in each of the schools, but the bottom line is there just isn’t enough money to go around. The 60’s buildings are incredibly difficult to do anything with; asbestos everywhere. We had to spend £10k on specialist surveys prior to being able to go ahead with CTC upgrades. The newer buildings whilst asbestos free are full of problems - the fancy heating systems installed don’t work anymore. In our PFI schools, whilst we aren’t responsible for building repairs, the PFI company are only concerned with the bottom line so do as little as possible to the building on the cheap. The problems are only getting worse as the buildings approach 10+ years old, and trying to get anything done via the Council (who ultimately hold the contract for PFI) is an absolute nightmare. The PFI know this and hide behind the huge legal fees that would be involved if we wanted to hold them to account. The incredibly stupid fees they charge us impact how much work can be done in the other schools in the Trust; we were charged £1,600 for fitting two new C-Touches to the wall…. And this was just the labour and ‘making good charges’!!

We had similar issues with Cambian in one of our schools last summer. Our network at the time was an inherited mess from RM and a lot of incompetent engineers over the years. We spent many days trying to look for loops; in the end it transpired that someone had not excluded the default gateway from DHCP so every time Mr Bloggs connected his mobile phone to the WiFi it took down the whole cambian wifi network That was a fun week.

They won’t care whether you complain or not, I have tried all sorts and they genuinely know you can’t do anything about it immediately so don’t care. They also don’t allow you to go into a monthly rolling contact and blame that on the carrier. They would only let us do a 6 month extension instead of a 1 or 3 month - the same price as the full year for our new provider because the install was overrunning. Even the threat of “our finance director won’t allow us to give any future work to RM if you don’t work with us on this didn’t get them to budge.

We have just been shafted for an increase mid year and contract. They are a rip off company. We have already given notice to cancel and move away in the coming months. Crazy thing is we managed to secure the same speed 1000/1000 as we previously had with RM, add a backup leased line of 200/200 and still save between £1000 and £2500 a year per school. If you are able to move away I strongly suggest you do so!

Hello, Does anyone know how we can give permissions to Impero for our Mac devices via an MDM - at the moment every user has to approve the permissions which obviously our students do not do, rendering the software useless. We currently use Mosyle. Thanks in advance.

I should add that I was thinking of something along the lines of: “Our product full works with X integration” from the sales rep with the huge * that it technically does sync but will require a lot of data cleansing or significant change to our usual process. This is not to say that we wouldn’t end up moving, I would just like to know what we have in store so that we can make an informed decision and challenge the providers where necessary.

Hi all, We are about to start a procurement process for our MIS solution. We are currently using SIMS across all of our schools (secondary only MAT). We will be meeting with each of the leading providers and carrying out a full review of functionality. As the title suggests, wondering if anyone has anything they wish they’d known so that it can form part of our discussions with the companies. I am sure they will all be telling us how amazing their products are, but how difficult will moving really be for us as technical and data teams?

My personal gut feeling is those that don’t want to consider other MIS because they are stuck in their ways will increasingly start to do so when they get pushed to SIMS connected and find it as unreliable as we did. They will also start to panic when they see SIMS next gen and marketing lines such as everyone will be using it by 2026…. If they are going to have to learn next gen there is no benefit to blindly staying with SIMS so may start to consider others. We are starting procurement early in the new year - no decision has been made yet but my gut feeling is SIMS has a mountain to climb if they wish to retain the contract.

We moved last year to hosted impero - basically they run the server side for us and we can only access the console. Whilst support always replies promptly, their skillset leaves a bit to be desired. We will be looking to move away when our contact expires in November

Consilium Academies is looking for it's next Deputy Trust Network Manager to be based at Moorside High School in Salford. This is an exciting time to join our Trust as we continue to roll out centralised IT services across our 9 academies. You join us as we begin to look at the next phase of our IT strategy and move from on-premise infrastructure to cloud hosted services. We welcome applications from candidates with experience of working in education. If you have any questions please DM me! https://www.tes.com/jobs/vacancy/-1965267

Thanks my searching skills must need some improvement as I did try and didn't stumble across this

Does anyone have a papercut 'recipe' that will prompt users to confirm they need the job in colour and allow them to choose yes/no and then convert the job to B&W accordingly? I've been looking through the pre-built ones and they don't seem to hit the nail on the head for what I need... there is one that prompts them to say do you need this in colour and yes to confirm it, but if you say cancel it closes the job alltogether rather than sending it as B&W.

Have used for years also and would recommend. Had one or two issues with hardware failure but always covers by the warranty. Was skeptical at first but always use now.

Speaking as one of the Trusts that is tied into SIMS till 2025 we had no choice but to come out of connected and back on premise. Whilst I can understand where you are coming from, our experience of connected over 12 months was worse than just flakey. Consistently over the year, week after week, month after month, the system would just stop working. Every day we would be bombaeded with helpdesk tickets for users that could logon yesterday but not today. Despite reassurances of technical upgrades this never actually translated into improvements for the user. In all my years in education I have never known so many issues with SIMS logons and it was totally unmanageable. So many frustrations for the users as the internal team could do literally nothing and ESS support was useless. No real acknowledgement of scale of the problem just a temporary outage that would be fixed soon. Our account manager was sick of me complaining day after day. This caused us so many problems to the point where more 3rd party products were used as staff simply couldn’t get onto sims reliably to do a register, to ask for on-call or to run reports. Certainly not happy that we now have to manage SIMS servers - SOLUS 3 is still terrible especially across 1200 clients, but bringing it back in house was an urgent safeguarding concern. We are now starting a Trust wide review of the market to determine whether SIMS is the right product for us going forward.

We are using SQL 2019 to host our SIMS DBs - ESS installed it for us when we moved back from their Connected nightmare over summer. No issues so far.

I am sorry to say that this was our experience for 12 months. It was terrible from the day we started till the day we left. We luckily managed to negotiate our exit from SIMS connected and have gone back in house over summer. Best thing we ever did. There have been the usual sims issues this week where people have forgot the password, but nothing major and our in house team sorted it all in a reasonable timeframe. What you are describing with sims connected was our experience for 12 months on and off. Some weeks were better than others but they were all worse than before. Good luck! My gut feeling is that ESS don’t have a clue what they are doing and will end up losing a shed load more schools as soon as the 3 year contracts are up. Even the stragglers who want to stay with SIMS are doing so because they are scared of change or functionality issues in some areas and just love the old SIMS console. If/when ESS eventually finish next GEN and want to force everyone over, these people will also be naffed off and look to change anyway given they may as well consider options now the status quo is disappearing.

We use Fuse 2 communications SIP trunks and they host the 3CX for us so get that added bit of extra help the odd time something does go wrong or we don’t know how to do something more advanced. Very happy with the cost, service and support.

I have worked in primary schools that tried to do this with the variety of donations we received in COVID. It was an absolute disaster. Although the laptops would physically power on they were incredibly slow and the batteries would die. Chargers would go missing. The teachers hated them as much as we did so they never got used after a few months. Also how will they charge them if you do manage to get a class set, they’d have to buy a trolley realistically so you may as well just get some proper devices on a lease. 30 laptops over 3 years would cost nothing. We have been using Dell direct for leasing and can’t fault them to be honest - I’ve always used Lenovo up to now but the pro support with accidental damage included in the lease has made our life easier and the annual cost is very reasonable even on primary school budgets. Fully sympathise with what you are trying to do but it won’t work out for anyone. As others have said if you can’t afford windows devices, chromebooks are great in schools or buy refurbs.

https://www.tes.com/jobs/vacancy/ict-engineer-salford-1906850 Following our current post-holder gaining promotion elsewhere, we are looking to appoint an IT Engineer for Ellesmere Park High School in Salford. Ellesmere Park is a 'BSF' modern school and therefore benefits from having a properly scoped out IT solution. We have also been awarded CTC funding to replace our wireless solution with the latest technology. All staff have a 1-1 laptop that is used with docking stations around the school. Ellesmere Park is part of Consilium Academies and shares our Trust wide IT solution. Pay scale advertised will be subject to a further salary award once agreed with unions. Please PM me with any questions!

https://www.tes.com/jobs/vacancy/trust-senior-engineer-north-west-salford-1905851 An exciting opportunity to join our central IT team as we grow our in-house IT services following a highly successful year of transformation for IT in our Trust. This is a floating engineer role to support with project work and 2nd line support requests across 4 secondaries and 1 alternative provision in our North East cluster of schools. PM me with any questions!

https://www.tes.com/jobs/vacancy/trust-senior-engineer-north-east-north-east-england-1903918 An exciting opportunity to join our central IT team as we grow our in-house IT services following a highly successful year of transformation for IT in our Trust. This is a floating engineer role to support with project work and 2nd line support requests across 4 secondaries and 1 alternative provision in our North East cluster of schools. PM me with any questions!

Hello, We have recently moved back from SIMS connected to on-premise (woo hoo). Sadly we seem to have swapped one massive headache for another issue.... When we moved back on-premise ESS set our databases up with SSO through our AD user accounts for auto logon - 99% of the time this works. However, random users get a 'incorrect username and password' on random machines. User A cannot logon on PC A but user B then comes along and can logon perfectly fine. Leave it a while and then user A can get onto PC A again for a while but all the while user A would be working fine on PC B all day long. Does anyone know how the MIS server actually does the AD SSO and how we could troubleshoot this? Trying to get support of ESS is not getting us very far. May end up having to go back to local SIMS accounts but that won't be very popular! Cheers

Hello A couple of the schools in our Trust are using an ancient MC3200 for wireless access. Luckily we are due to have them replaced with CTC just as soon as the kit arrives. In the meantime I need to try and configure a guest wireless VLAN. Up until now staff were just connecting to the internal network which I’m not happy with for obvious reasons. Does anyone know what the crack is - I’ve tagged the controller so it can access the VLAN and done a “profile” that says use the VLAN on guest SSID but nothing actually happens when you connect to the SSID - just get a 169. If you plug into a switch port on the guest VLAN you get DHCP and everything works so an issue with my wireless controller / settings. Does anyone know if the APs themselves need tagging on the VLAN - I was assuming it would just be one of these old systems where all traffic goes through the controller uplink? If I can’t figure it out we will just have to soldier on until CTC goes in! Cheers