woody

There is a link on the front page of edugeek at the moment with an article all about office365 Office 365 Education Special Report Worth a look to answer some of your questions

We are using Lync on Office365 for desktop video conferencing. Lync for Mac works great 1:1 but when you invite a third person into the conversation, you lose audio and video with the message 'You have left the call' although you can still IM to the participants. We have tested this on an iMac and a Macbook pro both running Mountain Lion. Any one else come across this? Can't find anything on the web. Thanks

Its funny isn't it. I have just got the exact same problem and searched on Edugeek. Hey presto. Shame there is no easy answer. The question is, if I put that HD which has a password set into another Toshiba laptop, the password remains. I have completely wiped the disk and all partitions by connecting it to a Linux machine but the Tosh still picks up the password protect. So where does it store the password on the HD? Presumably there must be some untouchable part of the disk - it is a Toshiba drive.

I too can vouch for the K9 web protection. Also used FreeDNS a while back but can't remember if you can have your own blacklist as well.

There is a lot to think about (not just which MDM to use) as I am sure you will be aware when it comes to rolling out mobile devices (tablets) across the network. It would make sense to work with a provider who has experience of this but at the same time, do your own research as you will certainly be able to save money in certain areas. For instance, the MDM that Meraki offers is free but you will want to check it ticks all the boxes for you compared to other products such as the lightspeed one.

If you like Promethean and their ActivInspire, I've heard they now do a touch screen. Haven't seen one up close though.

When we transferred from a tech college under the LEA to an Academy, we were told by the LEA that the data didn't belong to the Academy because it was separating from the LEA. Capita were given the job to archive the data on behalf of the local council. However, something went wrong and the council came back to us 6 months later asking if we still had the original database. Good job we decided to keep the vdisk for w while just in case! But technically, any requests for historical data had to go to the LEA after the date of the transfer. I should qualify this by saying that we moved to Academy status under the Labour government, so I don't know if the same situation applies to new Academies today, or whether this was just our LEA being awkward?

Log in here https://login.microsoftonline.com/ with the account you signed up with and you get access to the office365 management console there.

It's been a few years now and we had a biometric solution for our 6th form. At the time, it did the job although we had the usual issues with biometrics. I think LiveReg has come on a lot since then but I can vouch for them as being a decent enough crew when we were using them. Stopped using them by the way only because we had a new build and different kit was installed as part of the contract.

I'm guessing the reason for not doing this is because storing lots of video to a shared network drive would require: 1) A large amount of disk space over time 2) A very fast SAN to cope with the amount of I/O 3) A very fast and possibly dedicated network attaching it all together. It's the same problem for most schools who can't afford a dedicated network and storage solution to making video editing on many Macs work at a reasonable speed. Much easier to use local storage and back this up to a NAS or something on a regular basis.

In that case presumably if you delete the link file created in /Library/WebServer/Documents/ then that should fix it?

I don't know enough about Munki really but it's difficult to see why the commands you have mentioned above would stop the web server from running. All you appear to have done is create some directories, apply permissions to them and create a soft link (shortcut) in the Munki directory pointing to the Webserver directory. Was there a Munki installation you went through? Perhaps there may be someone better qualified on here to help?

It would definitely be worth your time figuring it out - it will do a much better job and once you have it set up, it's ace. You would need to have an admin iMac to run as the server though. Otherwise it is likely to be a manual job to do the binding etc. Depends on how much effort you want to put in for 23 machines.

Are you using Deploy Studio‎ to do your imaging? For the date and time, point it to an NTP server. Deploy Studio will bind for you as part of the imaging process.

900 students. 2vCPUs. 8GB RAM. No issues.

Hope OP doesn't mind me chipping in here with a question, but I think it is on topic. Can you manage OSX clients alongside Windows clients from the same console?

We had a demo from them and Star Lesson. These seem to be the only two that I could find doing classroom recording for assessment. Main difference is that IrisC stores recordings in the cloud, whereas Star Lesson give you a server to put in the rack. Also Licensing: Star Lesson is a one off payment and you get all the licenses you need whereas IrisC you pay for access licenses in blocks of 25. Star Lesson works out considerably cheaper for us anyway based on going for the portable ipod solution with two cameras. To be honest, I was much more impressed with the presentation from Star Lesson, not least because the guy remembered to bring the equipment with him to show us, and turned up on time!!! Afterwards, because we are a federation of two Academies linked with a leased line, the guy at Star Lesson agreed to allow both Academies to use the single license saving us a fortune!! Still, I would recommend you get both in and make up your own mind.

Hi, we do it and it works quite well although it is not heavily used by all staff. Just install onto your image as you would on any client. Each of our desktops have 2 vCPUs 2 GB RAM We have compression set so that it works fluid enough but does not compromise on streaming the pixels too much.

Basically as I understand it - (we haven't yet migrated and we will also need to learn powershell), with a local Exchange implementation, you have the choice of using the Exchange Management Console (UI) or Exchange Management Shell (Powershell). With O365, you don't get the full Exchange Management Console, you get a cut down basic web interface. Therefore, to access the more in-depth features of Exchange, you will need to use Powershell. As I said, this is on our list of things to learn, but someone else who is already using it may be able to elaborate.

Definitely O365 if you have the choice. We will be migrating to it hopefully over the summer. You will need to brush up on Powershell if you want to do anything beyond the WI that Microsoft give you.

For our helpdesk and asset management, we use GLPI which is open source and very comprehensive. Really ties everything together well. LDAP also works well for SSO.

We are looking at using Yammer which is now owned by Microsoft and will be linked to Office365.

Hi thought it would be best to resurrect this thread rather than create a new one! What does everyone do if there is no Till caching? Or even worse, if the power fails? Do you go back to pen and paper? Make note of the student names and how much they spend for charging later on? Extend lunch time to allow for the additional time it will take to get everyone through? Export accounts and balances each morning into an excel so that at least there is some infromation at the till? Or does the school just foot the bill and offer a basic lunch to everyone? To be honest, I am really looking for what others do to confirm my own thoughts - it's just that trying to get agreement between the academy and the catering provider is proving very difficult because in the event of failure, neither want to lose out financially, and neither want the added work it will cause if sales had to be recorded manually and charged later on. If you do know of a 'plan-b' that your school / academy have put into place, it would be great to hear about it. Thanks

I've been with SKY for a few months on ADSL but I thought they only allow you to use their Hub? I've certainly tried getting my TP-LINK to work and it just won't. The problem I find with the Sky hub is that you can't change the DNS which means I can't use OpenDNS for example. Real pain as it was a convenient way to have web logs as well as decent filtering.

My headteacher brought this back from BETT: www.examinvigilator.com Might be worth a look