HereIGoAgain2601

We are 8 secondaries and 1 AP - £25k a year. Could have ran it better ourselves for that amount. Really frustrated as decision was made prior to me taking up post and contracts signed. Let’s hope today is better.

Evening all, Just a word of caution although I’m sure most in the community will be well aware. Avoid SIMS connected (the rebrand of hosted SIMS) at all costs. Our Trust moved across over summer and has had nothing but major issues this week - it is best summarised as a disaster. Long story short it seems the connected platform is woefully underpowered and doesn’t have enough server resource on its RDP sessions to allow users to connect reliably. The support is also shocking.. tomorrow will be day 4 of 50% of our staff being unable to logon and use sims. Avoid avoid avoid.

We are currently using Impero but looking to move to Senso when contract expires

Consilium Academies is excited to announce an IT Engineer post within our Technical Services Team. This vacancy is based at Heworth Grange School, Gateshead, NE10 0PT. https://www.heworthgrange.org/ This post is Grade 7, currently £25,926 - £28,227. (This salary is pre-uplift - there is a pending pay award). Consilium Academies has an in-house team of Technical Services staff that provide high quality services and support to over 6000 students. You will be joining our team at an exciting time, as we begin a transformation of IT provision within our academies. Over the next 18 months schools will migrate away from on-premise server infrastructure and into a Microsoft Cloud environment. You will be supported with training and development and will receive industry recognised certifications as part of our CPD offer. This would be a good post for an engineer with previous experience that is looking to join an ambitious and forward looking team. We have a team of 15 engineers with a wealth of knowledge and high ambitions for our service. Potential candidates are welcome to contact us for more information or an informal visit to the school. IT Engineer.pdf Application Form - Support.docx

Just wondering if anyone is using this product to keep on-premise servers up-to-date with 0365 - we have multiple on premise ADs and one office 365 tenant across all of the sites. Currently being synced by an expensive RM unify contract and AD federation that we are looking to remove. This product seems to meet all the requirements just wondering if anyone has any experience of it. Plan is to retire on premise AD as soon as possible this is just a stop gap. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/cloud-sync/what-is-cloud-sync Cheers Joel

I am not aware of them doing this at the moment. Just a few options: Could you go down the route of having a 4G dongle - maybe one of the Dfe provided ones if you have any still - and put a SIM card in for worst case scenario? Even if it’s a pay as you go thing you just load with £10 on the day of any issues, or a monthly contract for unlimited data can be had from 3 business for less than £20…. If it’s really that much of a concern! In our schools SLT have a work phone so worst case scenario they might have to share their 4G with the safeguarding lead. Or do they not have a work safeguarding mobile - a few of our schools do for out of hours emergencies?

Hi there, We have just moved across to hosted SIMS or SIMS connected as they are now calling it - we are just reaching the end of the onboarding process. I have to say the process has been far from seamless, lots of work for IT to do to migrate across, reinstalling connectors and manually provisioning user accounts for each member of staff. The whole process is so time consuming and not well thought out. All our staff are getting @connectED.sims.co.uk e-mail addresses they now need to remember in order to logon which is obviously not ideal. The first time sign in requires them to change a password and set security questions - which isn't too bad - but the fact it then takes time to sync the password change before they can actually logon to SIMS is a bit of a pain. I am also disappointed that the MFA will trigger even in school - so we are now having to pick between MFA everytime someone logs in or not at all. We are hoping they will work on the promising M365 integration so that our conditional access and single e-mail/password can be used. But I'm not holding my breath this will be anytime soon. Only 2 weeks in and we are already having issues accessing the system - there has been a 'partial outage' for the last few days which doesn't bode well for ongoing reliability! I'm glad it's no longer running on premise as it's one less thing to worry about ourselves but the actual service/solution is not great either. The decision to move was taken before I joined the Trust otherwise I wouldn't have done it. The actual access to SIMS if the internet went down is not a concern realistically - everyone has a 4G hotspot nowadays so it will still be accessible and probably more resiliant than what we could have provided ourselves. We are also in the middle of putting in failover internet lines in place so the likelihood of any downtime should be minimal anyway. The safeguarding issue for me is more around how often SIMS cloud has an outage as there is nothing we could do to get access. As I say first impressions of this are not as good as they should be. Cheers.

It didn’t when I set this up 12 months ago, but they may have added it now. I haven’t looked again at it as it hasn’t been a major problem for us, everyone has got used to logging onto everything with their M365 account.

We used PaperCut Print Deploy to get the printers onto the machine - deployed this via intune. PaperCut server then had authentication set to Azure so the users would logon to print deploy with Azure credentials and then the printer would install. Been working really well for the last 12 months. Happy to help you - PM me if you wish.

My experience of the IRIS and the onboarding process (last few weeks) has been very poor, not well established in the slightest - I would say very poor understanding of maintained / academy schools and the systems they need to link with. Linking with 3rd parties has been far too complicated and still not convinced it will work correctly on the go live date for September. We are getting there in the end but it has been too much pushing of “have you got a solution for this”, “how will this actually work”. Things that we have taken for granted in SIMS just don’t exist in IRIS. The sales pitch was very strong and the price was the cheapest I believe but have to say I am not impressed. Even technical support during onboarding has been poor - no clear guidance on how to get 0365 SSO working. Seems like a very small team at the moment and all the help documentation and info is related to ISAMS and not been updated to reflect the new offering of EDGEN. Would strongly recommend avoiding this platform for now. That being said I’m glad that the move to the cloud is finally underway as SIMS being on premise was holding things back. This is the only positive i can find.

We have been charged £150 per school in the Trust for moving to IRIS EDGEN. A drop in the ocean compared to the charges from CRB Cunninghams to switch over the cashless solution.

A few primary schools I worked in recently have had “unlimited” print contracts offered - cost based on a per pupil scheme. Service has been great - sounds to good to be true and felt like there would be a catch but have to say 2 years in everyone is happy including SBM as costs are as budgeted. Was cheaper than previous contracts which were on relatively good click charges of £0.02 per colour

Hi all, Can anyone recommend methods/3rd party software to pickup data from Teams (documents and Class notebooks etc) and move it to a new 0365 tenant? We are all sorted with Salamander for account provision and Teams provision this is simply something to pickup data that is in the old O365 teams/tenant and move to the new one. Thanks

Schools or trusts that are eligible will be contacted by the Dfe to let them know. Sadly just being in the investment area isn’t enough. There is some top secret criteria as one of our trust schools desperately needs the investment and is in the area but isn’t getting it. We were told by DfEit is also based on the OFSTED rating and RI or inadequate schools are getting priority. Meanwhile we have several good or outstanding schools who are eligible. Quite annoyed about the whole thing and the lack of transparency around the criteria. I have the contact for the head of the CTC programme at DfE if anyone wants it. He is quite good at replying re eligibility.

Would love to find out the actual criteria for this. Spoke to the DFE who said it was priority investment areas, and the OFSTED ratings. In our trust we have 5 a schools eligible and only one is RI. One is in the investment area and desperately needs funding to get up to speed and has been declined - claims to be because they are Good but as I say we have 4 others also rated good that are getting the funding and are just down the road! Very frustrated with the lack of transparency around this.

Are you using the Sophos wireless or another manufacturer? We use ruckus Wi-Fi but You should be able to tie it down with a firewall rule to bypass portal - but still have a level of filtering. You can’t do it off MAC address though as far as I am aware - it has to be IP so you’d have to reserve the device on your DHCP first.

We always go with these formats - the first two letters being the site identifier, the second the room number or abbreviated name… and then we use different endings for the devices for the dynamic groups. We use IWB for anything front of class, SD for any staff desktop e.g offices etc. pupil pcs just named 01-02 HS-R019-IWB HS-R019-SD01 HS-R019-01 Laptops for staff HS-LAP-SL01, 02 etc Pupil laptops Department identifiers or trolley number HS-TR1-LAP01 HS-SEN-LAP01 We did consider switching to asset labels but with the same endings to make sure our dyanmic SCCM collections keep working. Maybe we will when devices refresh this time around. We don’t get much movement of devices.

Hello, Thank you for the advice - I think similar to yourselves the majority of the staff will never even use the home folder access - it will simply be the IT faculty that use this. We are having to completely rebuild the network this summer as we join the MAT infrastructure which is heavily focused on Teams/OneDrive and SharePoint. The school also has a digital strategy lead that is pushing the Office 365 as a solution for everything - they are giving Surfaces as a 1-1 for 6th formers. We are also moving to cloud MIS and finance systems in the summer. The majority of the staff are already using Teams assignments in one way or another. I think the best solution to appease the IT staff would be either a powerapp or script that gives them access to the kids folders when they need them. It seems daft to continue running a file server just for this purpose. Thanks Joel

I suppose this would work - at the moment they have read/write to the file server but only use the access to get copies of work for marking if students haven’t submitted it. Do you happen to have a copy of this script? We are going to push the “should you really be doing this” - pupils taking ownership of their own learning, teams assignments etc but there are some long standing members of staff that are insisting they need an easy way to get into kids documents or else their workload will become too high! Thanks in advance for everyone’s responses.

Thank you any help you could offer would be gratefully received - under pressure to come up with a solution for September!

Hi, We moved away from LGFL - we got lots of resistance from the LA and LGFL to try and scare us into staying. When we did a cost comparison the system was actually quite good value for money if you utilise all of the bundled features and software but as we were literally just using the broadband it was overly expensive. We must have had this conversation 10 times with the LA before they agreed to let us move away. We already had external MIS support so this wasn't an issue. Everything else we already had our own provision in place for the things we wanted. Good luck

Would be really interested in this PowerApp - would you be able to point us in the right direction?

We were using Freshdesk but moved to ZohoDesk. Always liked Freshdesk but additional features of ZohoDesk make it much better value for money in our experience.

Hello, Has anyone any experience of moving Teams data from one tenancy to another? We are looking at merging a high school into our trust tenancy over the summer break and they have quite a lot of content in Teams. Thanks in advance

We moved a primary school to CSP license last summer - admittedly they did want to go fully cloud so this worked out better for them. That being said we did come across the issue with devices that only had the home version of Windows licensed. I’m not sure if this applies to any Windows 7 era devices but if you have any running 10 Home you can upgrade it to Education for via CSP as part of the license pack. I guess you could get the free upgrade on the older devices to 10 home and then go from there?? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/upgrade-windows-to-education