crispybits

Senior IT Technician » Monk's Walk School This is my current job (I'm moving internally to become the school's Data Manager). It's a very friendly team with plenty of character. Lots of chances to get involved with infrastructure and server-side bits and bobs alongside the day-to-day PC fixes for someone looking to work towards their own Network Manager role in future. Happy to answer questions by PM here, but really you should just email Justyn (contact details in the ad) who is the Network Manager. Also we have fish and chips or pizza or something most Friday lunchtimes

As far as I know (and of course I am not a lawyer) signposting to already published information is fine as long as it's relatively straightforward to access (as in give them the links directly to the relevant pages rather than the school website homepage maybe... it achieves the goal of making them work for their supper without being really obstructive...)

It's not quite that simple howartp, GDPR also states that a SAR can be made to anyone at any time and by any (reasonable) method. I don't know if it could be enforced or not but a parent bumping into a teacher on holiday in Spain at the start of the summer holidays and asking for some information on their child would technically count as a SAR being raised. OK that's an extreme example and probably not one the ICO would strictly enforce, but a parent emailing a teacher on the first day of the summer holidays would definitely count, regardless if that's not the email address you specify on your SAR policy/website.

Or make damn sure out-of-office replies are set up for any term-time only staff with an alternate email address for urgent queries. Don't know if there's a technical way of enforcing that though or if it's just trying to bash it into the users' heads.

As I understand it we can. The school staff can do every single little bit of work and the DPO can act as basically an audit/compliance officer with the power to say "go back and re-do this or that because it's not good enough" and in an advisory role where needed. The DPO isn't personally liable for breaches or anything like that, they are not ultimately responsible for anything legally, they are a safety measure against everyone else getting it wrong. Edit - they are also a point of contact, but I've seen nothing in the rules that they can't delegate requests from data subjects to the relevant person within the organisation. For example DPOs won't be going into your systems at a technical level to perform records erasure (if appropriately asked for), that will be the Network Manager or other IT staff, the DPO will just ask for it to be done (and probably check afterwards that it's been done right).

So to check I have this right, it seem like if 3 schools are working as a loose consortium (mostly for offering a broader range of A levels to sixth form students) school A could provide the DPO to school B, school B to school C, and school C to school A, with any dual school issues resolved by whichever is the uninvolved school? That way there isn't even a suggestion of any "you scratch my back..." conflicts of interest as each school is monitored by a school they themselves are not monitoring. Would that sound fairly OK to those who have a good handle on the topic? Also, while the DPO is responsible for ensuring compliance, I assume the actual task of implementing all compliance measures can still be given to the Data Manager (who I strongly suspect can't ever be DPO for obvious reasons) with the DPO simply supervising to ensure it's done properly and signing off on that aspect? Edit - that's before we even start thinking about the poor primaries in all of this, who haven't generally got specialist data managers. I suspect there could be a kinda internal market developing in some places between the secondaries and their feeder primaries with the secondary DPO also working with the primaries to ensure they have their ducks in a row...

https://futurism.com/scientists-have-discovered-this-drug-fixes-cavities-and-regrows-teeth/ Hopefully this gets to market fairly quickly - like next week would be good as I think I'm gonna have to go get a filling fairly soon - got a little toothache developing...

So looking at getting a new ISP at home, just wondering what the general thoughts are on here about the various providers. With Virgin at the moment, it's OK but speed isn't great. Had Sky before who I liked for speed but when I moved Virgin were significantly cheaper. TalkTalk are offering some really tempting deals but I don't know if they're trustworthy enough yet given all the problems they've had in the last few years. Any recommendations peeps?

We just added the site team as an extra team on our existing IT ticket system (OSTicket) and gave them a "site tickets" email address. If you're already running a ticket system for IT stuff that seems a much simpler way (if possible with whatever you're using) than a whole new package.

25th provisionally sounds good to me - will double check my DofE commitments and confirm later

Yeah only really useful if you have multi-monitors but 90% of the time I don't need both screens (there's only a few jobs where I want 2 windows open and visible at the same time and they tend to be fairly quick copy/paste jobs) so I thought I'd have a play. I've learned a lot about image editing (from a knowing zero start) and how to use GIMP in the course of getting it all customised though

Been playing with Rainmeter recently (mostly at home and bringing ready-made stuff into work to just install) - ended up with this: http://i656.photobucket.com/albums/uu285/crispybits/Desktop_zpsock1vks3.jpg Clock and calendar bottom right, Volume and Google bottom centre, the arrows down the left are program/folder links and the single arrow on the right is the start of a set of RDP links into each server, moved taskbar to the top as well just to make it even more fiddly to get used to.

I think you must have misread the number on that microPC ticket - it definitely had my name on it ;-)

Looks like my originl plans are going ahead so I won't be there - have fun peeps

Just tomorrow (Wednesday) for me - I'll be the one sprinting from stand to stand blagging freebies and avoiding sales pitches :-P

I've put my name in the hat for Wednesday but I'm only 50% sure I can be there as I'm incredibly flaky and unreliable ;-) (More specifically I have something else on that night that's already in the diary but not sure if it's happening or not as the friend I'm meant to be meeting is down with the lurgy for the last coupla days so I'll come to this if that doesn't happen - will update this post tomorrow once I know for sure either way)

Wow thanks for all the replies guys - muchos useful titbits to ponder on. Especially the above quote, which has definitely reset my sights onto thinking about what THEY want instead of what I can offer (which hopefully overlaps a lot, but the focus is important)

Yep this was pretty much what I was thinking - a VM that can be snapshotted and reverted if things go bad or used as a reference if things go well for any given change. Nice to know I'm not talking nonsense then, I think it was probably just a combination of heightened nerves at the interview reading things into stuff that wasn't there) and limited school experience with the one school I do know not doing this. Thanks both

Looking to move into a data manager role and I was wondering if many people have a sandboxed copy of their MIS for running test configurations and changes without affecting the live database? I ask because I went to an interview last week and when I mentioned that I would probably like to do things on a test database before going live to ensure that I didn't disrupt school operations I think I got a bit of a sideways glance as having said something unusual, however in some (but not all) of my previous data roles (I'm currently doing a second/third line general IT role in a school) I had a test database/dataset so I could roll out config changes or run experiments on that safe in the knowledge that if I fubar-ed everything I could just roll back and never affect business operations. I know we don't do this at the school where I currently work but I would view it as best practice if and when it's possible. Is there a reason for this beyond the "nobody ever asked to do it before" such as licensing or similar that anyone knows of or is it just that school data management is a fairly late entry to the overall data sector and they're still catching up to common practices whilst working with limited budgets/infrastructure compared to corporate?

Brilliant - a new Metallica album!

That's what I've done for the time being but she still needs to log into the other inbox and delete them after she sends them on to whoever they need to go to so that can't be the permanent solution unfortunately. More info: She's having the problem on more than one computer and other staff are able to work normally with that shared inbox. So it's gotta be something either on her profile in O365 or on her network profile.

Hi all Got a strange problem and google isn't playing nice today so I thought I'd see if any of you have had anything similar and how you resolved it. One of our admin team keeps getting the message pane freezing when she forwards messages from another inbox. This causes her to have to close the tab down (in IE or Chrome, both seem affected) and reopen the mailbox again. The message is sent immediately, but on her browser the spinning wheel of doom and "Sending" appear at the top of the email and you can't click away from it back to the inbox or anywhere else. However long it's left like this it stays in that state and the only way out is to close the tab and start again. We get about 5-10 emails an hour into that inbox so she's understandably getting very frustrated with all the extra gumph she has to do for every message. Any ideas? Ta in advance for any assistance. Edit because it's useful info - I've tried clearing cache and cookies to no effect.

This was a regular thing for me, a strategy in fact! I used to write coding for various applications (mostly VBA but some proprietary bits and bobs and some SQL in there too) and whenever I was working on something that just wouldn't run or wasn't behaving they way I was expecting it to, I'd lock the machine, go outside, and smoke and walk around for 10-20 minutes trying not to think about the actual problem. Without fail by the time I got back to my desk I'd figured out what it was that was going wrong and had the fix ready. Sometimes you do need to step back and allow yourself a fresh approach, even on very short timescales like that.

Good luck Joanne - and take it from someone who has now lost 80lbs you really feel the difference once you get down to a healthy weight!

Got under 93kg today - weighed in at 14 stone 9 lbs. And my moobs are gone! (noticed when I got out of the shower this morning that if I stand up nice and straight - which is also much easier now I've lost 5st 5lbs - that my chest and stomach make a fairly straight vertical line - that vertical line is still a coupla inches too far forward as there's still a bit of an overhang at the waist but every little victory!)