RLR

We're currently using thycotic secret server as it's free up to a point. I'm hoping to move all staff or at least all support staff to bitwarden if we can get the budget for it.

The whole company seems to be terribly managed. It took us month to get confirmation of the new terms of contracts because we've heard different things. It's like no one wanted to give us a straight answer or maybe no one knew. Not to mention their awful Reading Cloud system that hasn't had any changes since it was launched. I look forward to moving away from both these systems. SIMs tried arguing with us that they're investing millions of pounds of their own money into updating the product but couldn't understand that it isn't their money as customers are being tied into a 3 year contract so it's effectively the customers investing into it.

Cheers! We seem to have exams all through the year these days. Our bank of laptops that was initially for booking out for classes turned into ExamWritePad Laptops! Even for internal assessments we have requests for laptops which I guess it good for the students to get use to it. We have quite a few exams (IB, IGCSE, GCSE, A Level, internal ones). Seems like exams last all year round.

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If you're backing up to a NAS you can possibly use the NAS to backup the VMs to a third party like Backblaze or Wasabi.

Are you using powershell for your scripting or something else? We are soon moving to iSAMS and I have quite a few powershell scripts at the moment pull data from SIMS via CSV files (commandreporter) but from what I understand, getting data out of iSAMS will need to be done via their API or SSRS.

I've noticed that if you make a change to your file and go to print straight away, the changes you made in the last few seconds don't appear on the print out. It's as if you have to wait 10+ seconds before going to print.

We use a GPO login script at user level to run a .bat file that copies the exam write pad software to a local area on the machine and then run the exe.

If you use Chrome then you could setup uBlock origin. You can push extensions out via GPO but I'm not sure if you can create a allow/deny list locally without some sort of script running. There might be another method with Chrome though and that's using the Google Admin console to manage Chrome Browser. I believe this has more functionality and may allow you to create the allow/deny lists.

Is it possible there is a rogue device somewhere that is setup with DHCP. We had an issue once where some machines would get wrong IPs and we found there was a temperature monitoring device connected to the network that had DHCP turned on.

Sounds like some sort of group policy not being able to complete. I'm sure Group Policy times out after 15 mins if it can't apply. Run a gpresult on the affected machine to find out what GPOs are assigned to it and see if any are denied.

There are no files to share. It's a click-to-run setup so you download the office deployment tool exe and run the commands to install office: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/ltsc2021/deploy You can choose to run the /download command which will download the files needed locally so when you come to install the software you're not using internet bandwidth. If you've got a decent connection you can just choose to install office directly from the internet using the /configure command. setup.exe /configure "\\location\of\xml\file.xml"

Ours is fairly straight forward: Channel="PerpetualVL2021" >

Your best bet would be to ask the developer in this large thread: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/educational-software/193723-examwritepad-130.html Very active and always willing to help. Although I've not had any issues printing the exam documents.

We moved away from Office for exams and started using Exam Write Pad. The developer is very active and releases updates frequently with new features/bug fixes. More info at http://www.edugeek.net/forums/educational-software/193723-examwritepad.html

Do you use an MDM at all to set the iPads up? Might be worth wiping one and starting fresh to see if you still get the same error. Are there an IOS or app updates available?

What message are you seeing. There was a similar thread on here a few days ago with issues with logging into a website and it turned out to be the time on the iPads was not set correctly.

We've just made the decision to move to ISAMS from SIMs. Been quite a lot of talks over the last few months in regards to whether it might be the right choice or not but we've finally decided to make the move. I expect a lot of bumps on the way but hopefully in time it will be the right decision.

Note used it myself yet and might not be as granular as you'd like but worth a look. https://support.google.com/a/answer/7491249?product_name=UnuFlow&hl=en&visit_id=637850201651278180-2293458749&rd=1&src=supportwidget0&hl=en Another option might be using GAM advanced but not sure what commands you'd need.

Not too involved with the teaching side of it so not entirely sure how well the year 10s/11s cope. I've not heard anything so I imagine it's going okay. They don't get keyboard cases. We use to have issues with teachers not using iPads but we've been doing this for 8 years now and the majority are now using them every lesson. I think a lot of the older teachers that didn't want to use them have since left and the newer teachers seem more enthusiastic with using them. Finding the right apps to use is key and having a VLE environment which everyone uses helps. For example, almost everything is now on Google so we have shared drives setup for departments to store their own department resources in. Google Classroom is populated with all the teachers classrooms so they can use it straight away. Some other apps like Notability and Explain everything are also good to use. We use to use a local company to repair our iPads but we had so many come back with a bad repair that we found it just wasn't worth it. We now send them back to Apple which they don't repair but allow us to purchase a new one at a discounted price. We will also be putting screen protectors on all our iPads within the next year to try help with damages.

They released new terms and conditions on the 1st of April. It should prompt you when you sign in. You can always check by going to Settings > Enrolment Information > Terms and Conditions > View History.

We have iPads from Year 1 all the way through to Year 13. We use shared iPad mode from Year 1 to Year 5 (2:1 ratio). From year 6 to Year 13 we are 1:1 with iPads. All teaching staff are given iPads with a keyboard case and an Apple Pencil. We are a Google school so everything is done through the Google apps and Google Classroom. There has been talks about possibly changing from iPads to Chromebooks or something similar for KS4/KS5 but this is just talks at the moment. Some main concerns is staff possibly requiring an iPad and a Chromebook. Also, all our classrooms have Apple TVs which makes it easier to share screens. We find a lot of KS5 students bring their own devices in (usually a windows laptop or Macbook) and rarely use the iPad we issue them. 1:1 devices does increase the work load significantly but are usually fairly simple solutions. Another thing to be aware of is the damages. We are constantly having to process a pile of iPads to be repaired/switched out with Apple.

Is it possible you might have fine grained passwords setup in Active Directory Administrative Centre? (https://activedirectorypro.com/create-fine-grained-password-policies/)

This will depend on the number of Apple devices. I think 32 devices is probably okay to not have a caching server but once you start getting any more devices then a caching server can really help. Our caching server has served 420GB of data in the last 7 days for one of our sites. Another site that uses shared iPads has served 825GB in the last 30 days.

They released an update for the Google Drive app that fixes the issue: Google Drive 4.2022.12400