Jasbo

Hello, I have a request to provide a new system for doing visitor ID badge and registration for a new reception are. Scope is still not exact as I don't know for example if they want to include teachers signing in and out as well as visitors, but I expect so... We use bio store for the tills here but I thought their stuff looked - no offence to them - a little clunky for what is a new swanky reception So, was wondering what others might be using. I'm thinking ipad on a stand type thing that can register visitor and staff coming and going and ideally print basic ID on the fly to some kind of label maker style unit behind reception desk. If there's something out there that would allow them to take a selfie and have someone in reception print it on the ID that would be good. I don't think we need any integration with SIMs, I would prefer standalone but if there's products that do it would be worth a look. Going to start trawling today...

Ms did do a whole package of migration stuff including guides, posters you could edit etc - might be worth a look to see if they are still lurking online or on the admin portal somewhere? We used a few but not all, but saved us time.

We keep it low tech, with a large monitor, pc hidden In roof on the LAN, Vnc, a PowerPoint on loop and auto start, and timer plug to switch them both off and on. We also have 3 other displays around school connected to some fee signage app, on the content pages we put qr codes to send people to our school web site / services pages - works pretty nice I think.

Deadline is this Thursday bump....

"The role that I have was advertised as a technician but they know that what they are asking me to do is Network Manager. I am happy to start as technician but will be going back to them once I have a couple of things sorted, so i have evidence that I can do the job." Read some posts by abillybob to see how that usually works out

"Group policy fundamentals, security and the managed desktop" by Jeremy Moskowitz is a great book on gpo, it's just so flipping useful page after page, In fact I would rate it as one of my favourite IT books, it's a good read! God that sounds sad... I went from "gpo zero to gpo hero" with this book and a virtual dc in a few months, highly recommend it

"The speed isn't really an issue,mum happy to fire and forget once we get it working. I'm more against having a seperate device (be it a flash drive/HDD) just for a specific set of laptops. " Yep, getting your mum involved in the builds will help speed things up for sure...

Closing date is Thursday the 25th September. thank you

Hello, My job is going to be listed on the website of the school shortly: www.willingdonschool.org.uk so thought I would post on here as well. Its a nice school with a good IT team (6 people including the NM) and a fit for purpose IT Network, support staff are respected and we receive reasonable funding for the IT resources, we also provide a IT support service for two Primary schools as well. The starting pay would generally be at the first figure and there is a yearly review of the scale\role.Person spec and standard LEA application form attached, these can go to: [email protected] If anyone wants details of the technology or anything else please PM me. Manager of ICT Services Single Status Grade 10/11 pts 26-31 (£26555 - £32124) 37 hours/52 weeks per year An exciting opportunity has become available to manage our school network and strategically develop our ICT technical department, working across a number of sites. The successful applicant should have highly developed technical expertise, be innovative, pro-active, flexible, personable and have the ability to manage and motivate staff, as well as able to work independently. Managing budgets and further developing our client base, is a key part of the role. Person Specification - Manager of ICT Services.docApplication form for Support post.docx

Did they mention a particular patch that they suspect?

For us it's just plain slow, before end of holidays we migrated it from our sims server to a standalone vm we could bump the resources on and allow access to emerge from home to it. Some staff- the techie ones mainly - won't use it as complain it's slow, I agree with them, but it was not me that chose it and I'm hoping it will go this year. Doesn't matter if it's on site over LAN or coming on on Internet they are both as slow as each other. The server is speced for this, we have no issues with other web/self hosted performance but the long winded syncing kills usability. Other than that it stays up, don't get lots of crashing or anything, I just don't think it's very good for more than a handful of staff who will bear the wait for the flexibility to check sims from the sports field.

If their licensed you can run powershell commands to remove that licence and apply the new one, you can also break down a single licence to only apply sub parts like only the lync licence and not the others. I had a group of students that had the basic exchange licence and I couldn't script the replacement of that with the more advanced license for exchange, lync, sp etc So I made it so that it first removed the old licence and the applied the second one afterwards, didn't cause any problems for me. I'm barely able to use ps so there's probably a more elegant way, but it worked,

I think you can do a Get-MsolUser -Unlicensed Not sure of exact code/syntax as I'm having me tea, but we run a script to pick up new unlicensed users and assign licenses.

Big question for one thread, perhaps you should post each on its own, as soon as someone offers solutions for one not others your thread will go off on that tangent and the other questions won't get answered anyway?

All over this when I get back to office, thanks

Ah not the password, password for what their device?

that info is listed on our ruckus controller when we use a captive portal, to direct kids to a page with authentication to place them on a byod WLAN, what kind of wifi kit do you have?

We have 3 class room sets of iPads that are booked out and used all day everyday and managed by a resource department who make sure they are back each day and charged. We handle all app requests and updates, we restrict as best we can and re image to fix issues. Staff have lots of education/department specific apps on them, I'm happy with them and so are staff. We also have a scheme for staff to get a cheap iPad if they sign up to bringing it in each day, 80% ish of teachers now own one. We actively monitor then using meraki and provide and support a number of services to support them in classroom use, emerge, foldr, mobile print, air server, email, one drive, Remote Desktop etc They seen to find these very useful and a good service and I am happy with supporting it, the school spent a Lot of time looking at one to one and we are not Planning to introduce, but we are looking at introducing byod to support student devices for those that wish to bring them in to support their studies - the tech is ready but everything else is going to take a lot of planning. Overall, I'm happy with where we are, the school has listened to our advice and invested making a part time tech post a full time technician role so that they largely handle all mobile device / service issues as well as our other mac kit for the media dept, they have provided some funds to also improve on infrastructure and services, origins of these schemes have developed over 2 years, but i still think things are developing all the time but that we are working hard in trying to introduce and support this stuff to enhance the it services available to teachers and students, which is what my job is supposed to be about I think So In answer to the does anyone actually like this stuff, err yes, I do actually - spent time looking at android, windows, chrome and for us ios/ iPads seems to work okay. Sure there's stuff I don't think is great, quirks, learning curves etc but by and large it mostly works most of the time, like most of my other windows stuff.

We use xen server hp machines as our hosts, there's 3 of them on shared storage. Have found it to be very reliable. I pay the licenses for support and features, but I use the free one at home, I wouldn't want the hassle at school though tbh. As someone said, if your getting new servers I would look at running hyperv on the server os - or look at the hyperv server only os - still free I believe. It used to be that you could buy windows data centre licenses for unlimited hyperv hosts on that box, but not sure if the that's the case with 2012/r2 still, but with academic costs that's a pretty cheap option if it is. Sounds like planning your host infrastructure should be one of your starting points? IMHO staying physical, especially if your investing in new hardware now wouldn't be a good idea both in terms of the speed and flexibility you will get for testing and setting up your new network and for the long term management.

When we did this we built up new domain on new hardware and tested during term time. We had a third party come in and supply/build a virtualisation host and storage system for this. So we could clone vms from production and test migration options and do test builds of new services etc, by the start of the summer we had most server stuff ready to go. This allowed us to get everything ready for using WDS/MDT to deploy our desktop images and setup all gpo etc for desktops, then come the summer we had plans in place to migrate or rebuild severs/services and we used basic robo copy scripts to migrate use date to new home servers on new domain once everything was done. I wouldn't say it was easy but I do think it was worth it to allow the school to develop services that it wanted and it made us become better technicians and in turn be better skilled to support our school and network, IMHO. With the normal caveat that I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with working on CC4 etc if that's what works for you I was a cc3 guy for a looooong time. Pre staging your hardware and doing desktop prep with a migration over a summer is very feasible. We did that as well as other large projects - re cabling, copier deployment, 500 new desktops etc in one summer. Are you running your cc4 stuff on virtual or physical?

Are you planning to repurpose severs or move to new? second option makes life a lot easier.

Same here, I'm looking to upgrade my server Certs to 2012/r2 from 2008/r2 but I am not going to do anything around 8/8.1 until I see what comes along with 9.

Very good

We use it, generally happy with it. See it as a stop gap allowing us to better support mobile devices without having to give up our reliable file server infrastructure to the cloud. The app and streaming works well and staff and students have taken to using it well, we had a remote access setup using rdp access to rdp servers which we still have, but this is better in my opinion for general file access. One thing, not an issue for our size of school but I'm not sure how well it would scale as a service for large schools/colleges etc, as as far as I am aware there's nothing built in in that area.

Can you explain why you have to, someone might have suggestions of how to work around it. Ten plus years in secondary schools and I have not had to do this, have installed things for them like alternative browsers for better compatibility with a finance app etc but never given anyone outside it access to install anything on their own - shudder