djrscally

Yes, Drive is a secure method of transfer. Make sure you double check the recipient is right though.

That is correct, you absolutely do not need parents permission to use SIMS, or any other software. The justification for processing is tool-agnostic; if you can justify using an exception (such as fulfilling a legal obligation) to process data, then you can perform that processing with whatever tool you please.

Yep, we're doing the latter. Where they're not compliant, we've just contacted them asking for refreshed terms. Haven't found a company yet that isn't already on it.

We just made them read-only. Speakers can still bring their USBs and read presentations off them, you just can't write to them unless they're encyrpted.

Closest thing to that is Bitlocker as far as I know. It will not automatically encrypt them but you can configure it to a) deny write access unless they are encrypted and b) open the "encrypt this usb" wizard when they're plugged in. I would argue automatically encrypting them is a bad idea anyway; your probably looking at a world of hurt if they get anxious about the weird dialog and progress bar and pull the stick and lose all their personal files or something. It's sufficient to have a policy that states staff must bring them to IT to be encrypted. Edit: Actually maybe it will automatically encrypt them, without even giving them a dialog if you configure it to. The language is a bit ambiguous so not sure on that but: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-R2-and-2012/jj679890(v=ws.11)

Bah. OK I'm done trying to help you now. If you're gonna just roll with the PDF forms idea because "Google Forms is as trustworthy as my site so nobody will use that either" when that's blatantly not the case then good luck, have fun. EDIT: Google sheets supports scripting!? You could literally do all the validation in there.

I know, you'll need to do that part externally. You can use bash or something to grab the spreadsheet nightly, and validate any new responses.

Personally I'd write a script to run the validation that google forms can't do, and that script could also handle chasing schools for corrected answers. This isn't that difficult - if you can set up a website by yourself then you can certainly figure that out.

At this point I think it's clear DODICT is right.

You're ignoring the fact that Google Forms IS a trusted website, and yours is not.

Come on, it's daft to insist that there's not a difference between your personal website and websites that everybody already knows and trusts. Obviously Google Forms are more trusted than your site; insisting otherwise is just deliberate awkwardness. You haven't solved your problems with a form; people will very reasonably reject that for security reasons, I guarantee it.

It doesn't really present the same objection. THe problem is your website is unknown and untrusted, whereas Google Forms clearly is not. Far more people will be happy to open that link than would open the one to your website. You point about the validation is of course correct. Some validation is possible but not the example you've given; you could use a nightly script to automatically perform that validation though? And even send a follow up email querying the problem to the school.

Data uploaded to Google Drive or O365 is encrypted during transfer and at rest - the only problem is the company having access to it, but unless we're all gonna start using NextCloud and Collabora or something that battle has long been lost.

Do you actually prevent them downloading files from Google/O365 then? And just make them use the online editors?

The risk is unacceptable without encryption, but some people do legitimately have reasons to use them. The vast majority can be forced to use Google Drive/OneDrive with no problems.

Their work laptops are, personal equipment no (not even me, but linux rather than Mac in my case) but they have to use OneDrive or rdp into school to work on those anyway, so nbd. We told them they have to stop using USBs and use OneDrive instead, it was indeed about as popular as a fart in a lift in the announcement meeting but since then only 2 people have complained and gotten USBs to use instead; both legit (the Tech team need USBs to transfer files from Autocad to the machines and a SEN assisstant needs to update an images-to-speech tablet) so it went over pretty well all told.

ARGH IT BURNS! (Yeah fair one, we are a windows only establishment. I wonder if they work on Chromebooks either, I'm betting no)

We just Bitlocker ordinary ones generally. Not sure of a reason to buy the ones with keypads or whatever.

Why not just a google form? As people have already pointed out, the Adobe idea whilst technically clever is going to result in a lot of responses along the lines of "we don't open attachments from unknown sources".

Realistically you can't guarantee they're only picking participating people. Even if they do do that (which is certainly possible) their access level would allow them to fetch everything if they wanted to. You can now define "core" and "non-core" API services in Progresso, and restrict the students that are exposed to any non-core companies but it doesn't work on a per-company basis, so they'd have access to any student who you wanted to be available to any of the non-core services. Edit: By which I mean to opine; if they say they're picking specific students then they must just be filtering their API calls to a list of people you've given them.

Our old CMIS db is over 10gb even without the docstore!

Well, wasn't expecting that. A school's database is unlikely to be a large thing of course, but 10gb still seems like a really low limit.

It's a ridiculous amount, check your contract for any mention of it. Seems so obviously a "nope" to me that I'd be surprised if it's in there.

Does this mean we won't have to fork out the extra £5 for private registrations soon?

The apparent complexity of what should really be a simple task for an MIS is a trifle worrying here! At bare minimum surely you can atleast export a list of Learners and their mother (or a null if they don't have one recorded)? You could fetch another one with their father and just use VLOOKUP in excel to see which Learners were in one list but not the other then. Kinda ought to be easier than that though!