DrBeaker

Went through similar ourselves back in 2016 with our whiteboards mate. Will try to give more details when I get 5x mins but try these. https://banxia.com/identify-your-pen/ This will hopefully save you the many MANY hours I tried researching these from 2013 until 2016 to get replacements.

Yeah I think you need to think short-term (fire-fighting) and long-term (pro-active). E.g. for me It's only now after being here for nearly 2x years I can even start to be proactive as we've been in fire-fighting mode since I started due to the sheer number of issues left by my predecessor. You need SLT and the Head to decide on which approach they want you to take as it's a management decision at this point IMHO. Then go from there with the technical bits.

This ^ +1 We've had similar discussions about changing bulbs in classrooms where glass shards may fall on kids, the projector may fall etc. Those sort of hazards. I always got moaned at and made to seem/feel like my concerns were silly. Well tough, they need to take it seriously.

Best one we had the once was going up to the top of the school, to find the laptop trolley open, unlocked.... With the key in the lock. I give up.

This is something I always look for.... Pre-sales support. YMMV but IME, if they're not bothered to call or speak with me BEFORE any cash changes hands, I'm gonna have one hell of a time afterwards.

Do you mind if I ask how have you found these? We had a few Epson's with the laser unit above the whiteboard in one place, but the feedback was mixed and I didn't see if get used much as it needed a special pen which always got misplaced. The projector craze seems to have gone and it's the TV craze instead.

To be honest I've only ever seen them use it as a glorified "webcam on a stick" as a previous colleague called them, in both schools I've worked in. Never seen anybody ever annotate anything etc, only to use it to show hard-copy stuff on the screen/projector/TV.

The one I got for a trial works with the camera app in Windows 8.1/10 and also doubles as a webcam. Which is useful!

This. We had very similar with random wireless dropouts of the wireless on Fujitsu laptops years ago. Turned out to be driver issues, install a very specific driver version from Intel and it worked. Might save you the 6x months of stress, pain and hair-pulling I had until I fixed this (the senior techs and manager etc had given up).

The magic (but dirty) word there is "personal responsibility." For whatever the reasons behind it, it's not the done/popular thing these days whether in the workplace with quality of work or outside of work with kids, parents, kindness towards others etc. The idiots jumping off the cliffs last month https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-52864454 proved that.

Surely this logic applies the same way as kids shouldn't be in a physical classroom until the lesson starts. Same as a science lab, same as an IT lab etc.

We've heard nothing yet ourselves on this either.

Done. Would be interested in the results too.

I've had Groupcall do it one way, Cunninghams/Biostore do it another way, one company just install an app which runs as a service, and numerous other types of these things. Nothing seems consistent with their approach. It seems they've done this purely so they don't have to pay Groupcall any fees etc if they use their own method of collecting/extracting data.

The amount of plugins, data connectors etc on the SIMS server pulling data into other systems is what concerns me. There should be a far easier way to get the data out from SIMs with simple export/import type systems without me having to contact about 12x different providers to get everything back up and running on a new SIMs server.

Maybe during this start to allocate storage quotas for staff/departments and say they need to justify to the Head etc why they need more space. It's not just ££'s for storage it's also ££'s for backup or archival.

On TES news this afternoon.... https://www.tes.com/news/coronavirus-frustration-dfe-free-laptops-arrive-locked

Hotkey issue, check it's enabled in BIOS, any weird power-saving issues perhaps? Or possibly faulty unit/hardware

The few we have of ours are configured with a cached AD account so only that staff member assigned to the laptop can login whilst offsite. If their kids are using it, that's against the acceptable use policy right there surely? As they can only use it whilst logged on as that staff members account in my example?

We have them at our site and the sheer amount of traffic and overtalk means I end up turning mine off as they don't utilise separate channels so kind of pointless for me. These appear to be public ones as there's often interference from taxi firms and a local firm on ours as well.

I think there were some issues yesterday I had it flag up on my phone. Didn't get chance to read the notification but working fine today.

As per others..... Massive can of worms here. As IT pros we'll all have a different idea of what we count as a minimum spec. Make recommendations, not specifics.

I have a Logitech webcam with in-built mic and Logitech spekers in my office. That setup works fine for my Teams meetings.

In my homelab I've got it running on a physical Windows 10 Machine as the server. With a separate Windows PC as the client. Both on wireless as it's my homelab. No reason why you couldn't do the same at work.

I didn't want ours to become public/open to all because after the crisis is over, it could open the floodgates to all and sundry sorts of people and requests.