woody

Just making everyone aware who might be interested in a Kickstarter for a new board game based on retro computers. It's called Computer Junkyard and looks like it will be amazing. Check it out 😀 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/computerjunkyardgame/computer-junkyard-game I've pledged for the basic boardgame, but there are add-ons you can go for as well. They will deliver to the UK for about £15.

Hi everyone. We are using the Onedrive Sync client and redirecting documents to Onedrive via GPO. Generally we haven't seen any issues with reports. The tempSimsRpt folder is created as normal and people are editing / creating reports with macros etc. The only issue I have come up against is when outputting to a Form Report (RTF). If I try to edit an existing template on a report, or create a new one from scratch, word opens and then I get an error pop up from Microsoft Word as follows: "Error 52: Bad file name or number" Has anybody seen this? Our support partner (not Capita) has taken an initial look but doesn't have an answer as of yet. There is nothing on the Capita knowledge base apart from a community post, which is where I found the link to this thread. It may or may not be related to Onedrive but that sounds like the most likely culprit. This is what Microsoft have to say about the error. https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/964585/error-52-bad-filename-or-number

Correct, there is no way to set a policy using groups. I had to do it with powershell. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/skype/grant-csteamsmessagingpolicy?view=skype-ps

Oh yes, not the best typo is it? I meant to say 'now' as in it has taken effect over the weekend! Thanks for spotting that one!

UPDATE: The changes I made to the Global policy has not taken effect over the weekend. So at least it works as it should. Now to create a policy for staff and manually add staff accounts to it!

Hi all I had Teams settings nicely configured for staff and students here: Office 365 Admin Center > Settings > Services and Add-ins > Microsoft Teams > Settings by user/license type. Here you could select license type such as 'Education - Faculty' and 'Education - Student' and then turn off things such as private chat. Now when you go here, you are told that 'Messaging settings have moved to the new Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business admin center.' Ok so I head over to that and start investigating. It appears that now you set up policies for messaging settings and that there are already some policies created in there, including Faculty and Student ones which appear to be a migration of the original settings I set up. The problem is, these policies are not applied to any of the staff or students! All the users are set to get the Global policies which in my tenancy by default where a lot more open. I tested logging onto Teams as a student and I could private message, call, the whole shebang! Thankfully although students can access teams, we are not using it in anger so now to frantically change the default global policies. However, I have made a change pretty much turning everything off in the global policy but this hasn't applied as of yet (2 hours later) on my own Teams account. What am I missing? Thank you MS for doing the migration and not retaining very important settings in Teams particularly for Students!

For anyone who has Sophos UTM9 as their web filter, you can vote for the option to allow based on referrer header here (please do so!): https://ideas.sophos.com/forums/17359-sg-utm/suggestions/18539521-allow-web-filtering-exceptions-to-use-the-referrer

We currently use Spiceworks on-prem, but need to move to a cloud based solution which will also do assets and provision users from Azure AD. Problem is, Spiceworks hosted solution does neither and still doesn't have a lot of the features the on-prem version has! Shame but then it is free. Looks like we will have to either make a case to go to a paid product, or compromise on features.

Creating users in bulk from a CSV out of SIMS is a good opportunity to get into Powershell. We started basic and now we have a script that is very customised to our needs and pretty much does everything, including groups, home drives, office365 and licensing etc. Probably not a lot of time now before term but it is something that could be worked on over the course of the year for next time. Plus once you get to grips with Powershell, you can do a lot of other cool stuff too!

Not necessarily - as Katy said above, you can hard-wire a connection from each door controller to the fire alarm which will release the mag lock independent of the Net2 software.

Ok, thanks for putting me right on that one!

Looks like we will be going for 4 65" interactive screens to refit a performing arts block that was flooded. As mentioned much earlier in the thread, I am still looking at moving the touch to the teacher device with wireless projection to the screen, but at the moment a decent 'commercial' 75" screen or even a 65" 4k is not that much cheaper than a 65" 4k touch with the 5 year warranty as well. Plus the touch ones tend to have a freeze on the remote, something we would need if we were cloning the display of the teacher device. I'm looking at the M-Touch which is I believe a budget version of the Clevertouch and is coming in just under £1500 ex VAT. Has anybody got experience of these, or could anybody recommend an alternative in that price bracket?

If I were going for 65" then it would be worth having a look at the M-Touch which is a no frills version of the Clever touch. They are considerably cheaper: https://www.avpartsmaster.co.uk/p-68794-m-touch-65-interactive-touch-screen.aspx?gclid=Cj0KCQjwm6HaBRCbARIsAFDNK-g2P2c-Zm6ZdBt1JdZGRz1-lSXZk9bn3CeESMBRKywIzh7oUHjFn5IaAn5sEALw_wcB#fo_c=1083&fo_k=124414ec1daadd27558de0221fba64eb&fo_s=gplauk But you would want to trial one first I think. I don't have any experience with them.

This isn't going to help, but I really think Parentpay (or anyone else) shouldn't be using the UPN as the UID now. There is no need as every MIS will have alternative identifiers that could be used which will not count as personally identifiable information in the real world. Equally, some service providers who sync from SIMS use the Admin number which is useless if you have MATs using a single service as there will be duplicates. I think for SIMS users, the 3rd party field, External_Id is a much better option nowadays. I'm sure other MIS providers will have something similar.

The point is, we don't have interactive screens, we have interactive boards, and they are coming to the end of their life - particularly the 10 year old ones where we cannot buy new pens. In the other Academy, the projectors as well as staff laptops are needing to be replaced soon although the boards probably have a few years left in them. So we have a decision to make. Either way, we will need to provide training, but I feel bringing the interactivity to the teacher device rather than the board offers better value for money over time (for us), fits in with the strategy for where we want to go, and has less of a training need since the jump from using Office -> using Office with a pen requires much less of a learning curve.