HereIGoAgain2601

Have you got the Sophos Central Av suite - we moved from Stas to heartbeat authentication and haven’t looked back. It works great for intune and AD managed devices. Your Xg still needs to be joined to the DC to get the right membership though but it’s working for us as a holding solution until native Azure support is available in the XG.

In our Trust of 8 secondary schools all teaching and leadership staff have a laptop. We use the Dell Latitude series and these have been robust enough. We have them on a 3 year lease so they are constantly refreshed and hardware longevity is not our problem. They seem to just about last 3 years. We have Dell USB C docking stations in every class and in all offices / staff work rooms with monitors. As others have said the USB c can break sometimes but again we got 3 year warranty and spares so easily sorted. Our lease also included accidental damage so if the teachers damage the screen it’s easily sorted. One issue we have is that we never seem to have enough - we saved a fortune not replacing office machines but we always seem to be needing more, whether this is for supply or new roles being created. We have just signed another lease to make sure we had plenty of spares for the new academic year and beyond. We have 0 complaints from staff - they love them and it’s been pretty pain free for us. Some of old “old timer” engineers moan about the lack of a desktop but honestly the staff love them.

Amazing, that's just saved me hours of work. Thanks so much!

Does anyone know if there is a command that can bulk apply an IP helper to all of the VLANs? We have an old LA Cisco network that has been split out into hundreds of VLANs and need to change the IP on our DHCP server! I've got one that works 1 at a time - just looking for a shortcut! Surely there must be one! Cheers!

Thanks for the suggestion - the Chrome Sign Builder won't run on my devices... says it's no longer supported! And the problem still persists when unticking the 'restrict access'... my quick digital signage solution is turning into a pain!

Hi, I’ve setup a chromebox into Kiosk mode, published a slide to the web and used the URL to auto load on the chrome device. If I use the URL in a normal PC browser it works - but the chromebox is saying I need to logon. Any ideas why it’s doing this or how to turn it off so it just loads?!

We went with Stone as they were on the Everything ICT framework and could avoid the need for tenders on large orders.

This will be the list of people who can manage SIMS ID and create user accounts to access. It’s all a bit of a phaf and reliability still continues to be terrible for us. My team has a countdown for how many days are left till we leave!

Who knows what the issue is they aren’t transparent about it… but it’s down again this morning! 70 days and counting till we go back in house!

Our SIMS connected hasn’t been working reliably for the last 3 weeks. Pretty much every other day there is a major slowdown between 8-9:30 with large number of users unable to access… I wonder what that could be! Counting down the days till we come back in house…. Avoid at all costs!

We had similar resistance to fund replacements until I pointed out that come 2025 we would either have to immediately turn off 60% of our estate or switch to Chrome OS to remain compliant with GDPR and DfE cyber security standards. We now have funding to phase the replacements of the non compatible devices on a rolling programme to ensure everything is done before the cut off point. Some colleagues pointed out that we could use Win 10 LTSC for a few years longer but this was quickly discounted when it was clear there would be compatibility issues with the latest version of OneDrive / 365 apps.

We have suites of Mac Mini the new M2 model with 8gb RAM running logic no problem. Lightening fast

The Minecraft Education Edition that’s included as part of our Microsoft license.

Hello, Just wondering if anyone has setup a Minecraft EDU server and if so what resources did you assign to it? Is there a rule of general resource for 30 users - the Microsoft documentation is lacking somewhat.... Cheers!

We are still withdrawing at summer - our VPN connectors have not been working for a week.

Do you have Sophos central av? We have just got rid of STAS and gone with the heartbeat authentication which is working a treat.

We started discussions to leave in September after all the issues we were having. They agreed in October/November, but long story short we are taking our time to bring back in house to make sure it’s done right. We’ve done one back in house so far, and the satisfaction of it not going down when the rest of the connected one’s did was rewarding! The remainder will come back in house by September. If you want to get out of it I’d speak to your account manager and just make a fuss about how slow and unreliable it is - you’ll probably have to keep mythering them for weeks with the issues (they won’t be hard to find). We basically said if they wouldn’t let us go back we’d move to another MIS as it wasn’t usable. In the end they relented and gave us a refund on the connected fees as well.

Yes they let us go back but only because the system was so poor - we put in so many complaints to our account manager and technical leads they couldn’t really say no.

Just to add to my previous post, lots of issues this morning and none of our SIMS connected schools can logon!

Yeah sims connected is just a HTML RD web access. We have been using since July and it’s been terrible. Really unreliable and slow, the VPN sync is particularly problematic and causes lots of problems for us with real-time sync things such as InVentry and Classcharts. The support has been shocking as the SIMS support provider can’t do anything and the ESS default answer is speak to them or endless “we are looking into it” and will get back to you. It took 4 weeks for them to fix B2B sync when we moved across - we had so much grief from our LA. It became so bad in mid September that we very nearly pulled out in the middle of term time. We couldn’t do registers or logon to get contact details for days on end. A lot of our schools have had to buy lots of third party products to reduce the class teachers need to logon to SIMS - a lot of things they did previously in SIMS they’ve started doing elsewhere. We are in the process of extracting our schools from the service and returning to on-prem. I should say we are all secondary, primary schools may find this more manageable as their usage of SIMS is very different and much more lite touch.

We have just renewed with InVentry.. the 5 year deal was reasonable pricing wise and we got refresh’s and warranty on all of the hardware across the Trust. There was no appetite to change currently as the 5 year pricing worked out better than our old deal and staff like the kit. The sign in app others have mentioned is great used this in previous role - cheap and cheerful and has enough functionality for most schools. If we were starting out again I’d go with this. We will probably change to this when our deal expires if pricing is still the same as we will have more time to prepare staff for the change.

We are also using Zoho desk and it’s great

Everything ICT framework has been great for us - they’ve been getting the pricing for us and it’s DfE approved so saves us doing tenders.

Our hosted Sims has been impacted

We’ve recently purchased from a reseller - DM me and I will share contact tomorrow.