AlanD

We were surprised how much energy was wasted on lighting...which could often be turned off without anyone noticing - especially in classrooms with tall windows (which was partly why they were designed that way). Even fluorescent lighting - which is much better than incandescent lighting uses surprising amounts collectively when left on for hours. And while replacing this lighting with LED lighting can save significance costs - recouping the investment - and the labour to do it - makes it harder to justify. I recommend making a nuisance of yourself and just turn lights of in classroom - and express surprise when they are surprised ...and say something like "well you can manage fine without them on can't you". Its surprising (a) how quickly they come to expect it, (b) start doing it themselves © how much (and it will run to thousands) how much can be saved.

You might well decide to stagger the WOL, especially if you have hundreds of desktop computers. I think I would set it to switch on around 25 every 5 minutes or so. The problem is that all the Machines GPOs will load....and Antivirus updates will install...and your network - and those stations that have booted...will grind to a halt possibly to the extent that some may experience timeouts and fail to complete the operations you were expecting them to do. ...and WSUS updates...and maybe you would like the AV scan to complete before the PCs get used. Laptops are a particular problem - because they often don't support WOL. And if you don't start these...they will be in every practical sense unusable for the first class of the day...because turning on what wight be a slow laptop with GPOs, WSUS and AV updates all appearing across wireless can easily take 20 minutes or more for a class set. And make sure they don't sleep or shut down when lid is closed...(screen can go off though)....and make sure everyone knows not to press shutdown on them. Class can often have a very poor experience of using laptops unless someone is tasked with turning them on before the start of the day.

You don't say if this is for a primary - or secondary school. While timetabling may seem to be rule and constraint based....its extraordinarily involved....having to deal with variable lessons in days, part time teachers, room restrictions, departmental requests, etc etc. Simply gathering and understanding all the information required of it at the outset can be impossibly hard...only for it to later vary when students drop out of sets, get poor marks in summer exams and so change their options, and staff unexpectedly leave. Small school timetabling can be harder than large schools ones because one small restriction can have a massive impact. At the end of the day - its likely that your final and best timetable hasn't met various of the original "contraints"...you might well have two lessons of maths on the same day for a group, or split a double lesson across a break...or negotiate a different day off for a part time teacher... So expecting to find anything for free...is probably asking for a miracle....especially if you expect it to create the timetable for you. It may well be that there are various tools (and its amazing what you can do with a spreadsheet if you are good with lookup and search in formulae) to produce teacher timetables from a master timetable, and/or check for double entries.... Those who are good at timetabling will have shadowed an experienced timetable for several years before gaining enough experience to do the job well. You pay for your MIS system right? Of course you do...because its complicated and you need it. So you will need to pay for a timetabling program too....and just like MIS systems...you will still moan about its shortcomings and inadequacies.

I see nothing wrong with allowing multiple (but restricted) users to "read" from a mailbox such as this. You might consider advertising several such mailboxes for different purposes and accessed by different staff. ...but I wouldn't be allowing anyone "send as" permissions on that account - so it can be clearly identified who replied - and what they said.

So ...on the core switch....untag the VOIP vlan on two ports. Set the PVID (primary/default/whatever) on those ports are set to the Voip Vlan..and remove the default/main/all other Vlans from those ports. Plug phone router into one port....phone in other.

There always seem to be a good selection of remote controls for school stuff on ebay.. I hesitate to suggest that students hoover them up and market them... We don't have those panels - still largely projectors - but we always network them. You can then provide links to the projectors (or embed a projector contraol page in a web portal page using an html frame or something). And provided you control access - by keeping them on a VLAN or something - staff can turn projectors on/off and change input settings that way.

...So call SIMS support. You probably pay a fortune for it. Let them earn their money.

Are you sure drivers "actually" went on and are working. I'd take a good look at the VGA driver to start with.

I'd be wanting to expand on VLANs..... I'd certainly want to keep my wireless traffic off my PC network - especially if its any BYOD devices - because you have no guarantee what "nasty" might be inadvertently installed on a BYOD device. Then I'd probably want to keep my printing traffic off the PC network - because that is always noisy... If you simply flatten your network by "resetting" the switches - you will probably need some work to do to reconfigure core switch routing (or gateway routing) so you have work to do anyhow....

OK, so I admit I'm a little surprised to see "fixed"/assigned passwords. Yes we do allocate initial passwords to students - and they are "managed" during their first/early ICT lessons by those teachers who get students to change their passwords. Changing their passwords is pretty much essential - because that process triggers the "sync" between our AD and office 365 and google. (How do you manage that if they don't change their password?) . And yes, some students do forget their password - but part of the early lessons are about passwords, what makes a good password and why...including the ability to choose one that can be remembered. Its seems to me this is a pretty important part of the IT education these days (...and is part of our annual training for staff too....who are largely ignorant of why a dictionary word, film quote, or using the same password for different systems is a bad idea. Its not as if students don't already have passwords - often good passwords - that they use with a variety of social media and games platforms. They just need to come up with a way of being able - perhaps - to use a common base password and modify it for different systems. We did use RM's system that allowed any class teacher to change/set a student password...but stopped telling teachers about it - largely because they used it so rarely they forgot it was there. It wouldn't be rocket science - if writing portal/app to put something together to allow a member of staff to set a password - assuming the back end had sufficient administrator privilages

Password viewer? I can understand how you might provide a a password "reset" to a registered mobile phone - or external email address...but to provide a password viewer would...have to be quite clever.....or else you stop them changing their password and assign one. Well...you could intercept the password change on AD as Google and Office 365 Sync does...but the best you would end up with is an encrypted form of the password. Not entirely sure how you intend to use Javascript to interface with what has to be some kind of filing system....it would seem to me that this requires some kind of server sided code - like PHP or .net..... And having written code that interfaces with MIS systems (and indeed some commercial software albeit years ago) it would seem to me that each of these things are a pretty major investment in terms of effort - especially if you want to make the robust and comprehensive. And when many of them already exist - at least to some extent ...in most MIS systems I just don't see the point. Your time costs money...and if you succeeded in producing a really wonderful "portal" the question would arise as to who would maintain it? Because the last thing you would want is for your schools to become dependent on a system you might walk away from at any time. Yes, I know 6th formers produce coding projects for A Level every year that tackle such things - and while some of their solutions show promise, its rare to see one that wouldn't need a lot more work to make it robust. Just think your effort would be better focused into doing other stuff....

...I've never quite understood Microsoft federation services and ADFS....but have looked at the links...and as well as an ADFS server in school - you also have a Reverse proxy server which faces the outside work for clients to connect to/authenticate against. Where does Microsoft Azure come into this? Can you do SSO (for office 365 and other apps) without a premium azure Microsoft licence if you have your own reverse proxy for clients?

In my experience - its really not necessary to go for a symmetric leased line. We have a 300Mb/s business broadband line from Virgin (£80 a month). Tests regularly show actually speeds well in excess of this - sometimes 350Mb/s - but upload is more limited at around 15 to 20Mb/s - which in practice seems fine for us - and does VoIP and Office365 just fine. We have also been toying with the idea of replacing our FTTC (backup - and goes into load balancer with Virginline) with FTTP on demand - which despite its high install cost would start paying for itself after 3 years or so. There were days, when broadband was 2Mb/s that leased line was the only reasonble way to go, often in the early days to get 10Mb/s. But today....ordinary business broadband delivers the speed with little evidence of contention during the school day (...after 7 in the evening we do notice drops in speed...)

While proxy can be set via GPO - it can be set using DHCP and DNS with wpad ...in fact these are more likely means of setting proxy because then they apply to non PC devices too.

Intune just gets added into your Office 365 console. No it doesn't do all that you can do with GPOs. But it might do enough... I'm not saying its the right - or the best solution....but its a solution to consider. I think you can buy life long (..well 5 year) version of Intune licencing... I'd like to say and think that its a glimpse of the future....but Microsoft always seems to dither and lack real commitment when it comes to some new stuff. I wondered if it was their answer to chromebooks sweeping across the USA in schools - and indeed in some UK schools, but playing catchup is not easy unless they have a real vision.

My daughter moved to - and lives in Australia...and I'd agree with what has been said....that cost of living is probably less...but cost of housing may be higher - depends on where you are moving from and to....The cost of housing the south, particularly south east of UK has become ridiculous....and probably unsustainable....although that sort it self out with some large drops after Brexit. But I would have though the quality of life (and weather) over here has nothing on that in Australia. Certainly in Perth - where my daughter is - she phones me up to complain when they have a cold day. When I ask how cold is cold...she said...oh its down to 20 today. Keep in mind that would be a relatively rare warm summer day in the UK.

Its something like £6 per PC per year. So a good deal less than chromebook ...and for that matter most MDMs.... So yes it costs money (doesn't everything)...but I wouldn't have described it as "_Very_ expensive". And if you are using your local server for storage - then presumably you are paying for some kind of backup.....whereas if you also move to using Office 365 (and One drive) you can "recover" files for some time...and don't need to backup any server. So yes - if you use a cheap box, with near line Sata drives, and do backups with window sbackup to a USB drive and don't pay for support on the hardware...it can probably be done for less than the cost of InTune...especially if you have hundreds of PCs....but then you might want something with more performance.... We are currently using it for staff laptops only (as users get the same experience whether on or off site....and it provides us with "management rights" over the device - especially ability to remotely wipe hard drive to comply with GDPR...and can deploy MSIs and the like without getting laptops back on site) ....but are minded to roll it out for all our computers.

Use Microsoft Intune and abandon your AD if you want to stick with MS? Why bother with onsite servers?

Well...I'd either use a transparent proxy - or use a proxy.pac file/wpad. You will need to put the inspection certificate on the main school web site or on an internal site. And make sure that your proxy/filter doesn't inspect traffic going there....otherwise before loading the certificate they will be blocked from going there! I would include screen shots for PCs/Android/iOS installation....and these will need regularly updating - as each version seems to make changes. Early on in the year we "take over" form teacher periods in a rota to provide assistance to students with problems. Ocassionaly - despite our best efforst we have to "reset" a device becuase it just refuses to work - presumably because something has hijacked the process.

We do airserver and bonjour print services between vlans ..?But don’t use bonjour...instead we use printer apps with qr codes and qr code for airserver...because we don’t want staff or students to connect to any screen or printer apor pick the wrong printer. And yes, we then have rules in smoothwall to alllow selected users and ip devices to talk to particular airserver and or printers.

If these users are BYOD - I would use radius (linked through to AD) rather than a captive portal. So 10.x is your internal network? I don't think I'd be adding a static rule for that - otherwise you would be allowing access for all traffic between Guest and internal network. Think I'd be adding a real or virtual IP network interface to lightspeed and connecting it to guest network. I'm guessiong (because I don't have one) that light speed will cope with multiple "internal" networks.

I always buy a wild card domain *.schoolname.co.uk and then it works externally and internally - and for any and as many sites as I wish to host.

So...the problem is when you have 2 x outputs...vga to a projector....and HDMI to a monitor? And when this happens.....there is no display on the monitor....but if you were to turn it on and look - there would be a display on the projector? We have seen this..although not with that motherboard....thought it was the motniro turned off when then the PC booted....then blamed the monitor and changed it....then rebuilt PC...manually installed latest drivers....and in the end swapped the PC for another. Strangely...the PC seems fine elsewhere....so may be it was a combination of things and/or cable lengths...

Were interactive boards a bad decision? While it remains true that many teachers fail to make the most of them, its also true that a good number make excellent use of them - with pre-prepared material that they can amend and add to year on year without reinventing it from scratch each time. And they share it with colleagues. Did it raise attainment - probably not - because doing that depends on engagement with students and while it might make it easier I don't think there was ever a promise that it was going to make it higher attainment. It certainly as the potential to save time. Like so many things - its not cost of the technology that is the barrier to making something work - its the cost of the training and support, which are often assumed to be absorbed without effort and cost. And not only does that training and support cost money - it also costs time....and teachers have never been as busy as they are today....partly because of the endless checking and reporting systems demanded by everything being controlled by IT run processes. And while cloud based systems CAN save money...they are not a panacea for all evils. Serverless schools are a fantastic idea for reducing the capital cost of the servers.....but then you start looking at your Azure cloud costs, and high speed (possibly gigabit) internet links and over a period of 7 years, you discover the cloud has cost you twice as much as the hardware. Thoughts of saving the costs of technicians and network managers soon evaporate when schools realise they still have to update the cloud computers and install software patches....deploy packages....etc. Yes, if you start outsourcing support and want hardware maintenance contracts cloud computing might at least break even....but only just at best. MIS systems hosted in the cloud always work out considerably more expensive than shoving it on a existing virtual server...and cloud MIS systems are - at least in my experience...painfully sluggish even with a fast internet connection. Has money been wasted....yes, I'm sure we can all think of examples (microbit springs to mind....) but sometimes its only by exploring some of those avenues its possible to determine what does work. It used to take two office staff to pay salaries and collect fees (yes, we are an private school) system and photocopied letters. Today - with a frighteningly expensive computer system with eye watering annual maintenance costs it now takes 6 staff to do the same job - even though the school is half the size it was 30 years ago. This, more than anything is the problem that needs to be solved....because too often IT ends up making work, rather than saving work.

It wouldn't be fool proof.....but you could turn all your DHCP addresses for exisiting devices into reserved addresses...and allocated new devices to a different subnet - or different gateway (or vlan)…..so someone plugging in a laptop or something is not going to work.... (Of course...if they realise what is going on they can work around this....but my guess is that it would stop most)