jemal

Same here, external display and maybe also charging stops working from the dock, but things like USB 2 devices and network etc still work fine. Changing the USB-C cable to the dock, even with the same brand, often brings it back to life, like the old cable has given up on the higher end USB protocols. The original HP cables don't seem to be any better than the 3rd party cables we've purchased. We also have issues with the USB-C port on our Probooks where they start getting loose from the motherboard and loss of external display is the first symptom before everything else starts failing. We've had loads of our HP Probooks have their motherboard replaced under warranty because of the USB-C port starting to fail, and some teachers stacking books etc under the usb-c cable to help angle the connection better to their probook. All our teachers use Probook x360 440 G1, with the HP USB-C G4 dock. Aside from the usb-c being fussy, we've not had problems with display from various other laptops and chromebooks we've connected to it, aside from some Asus chromebooks not playing sound via the HDMI external output from the dock.

I didn't use those myself, but I'd imagine it'll be safer doing one with the /leavers tag instead on a 2nd run, as more likely to have problems with that one if your list of leavers was anything as large as ours. I'm also wondering if the /loadbyyears switch will have issues if running it with all pupil types or leavers, given it's ambigious what year they should be classified as. If you are moving to Bromcom, be wary you probably don't want to upload leaver docs, as you only get limited space on the cloud provision, and I understand some schools fill it up very quickly.

Best to contact Bromcom as they've offered, but a few times I've had CTF files given to me and required manual checking or editing in something like notepad or notepad++ (eg replacing odd funny text character, or seeing that the file is unfinished or corrupted). CTFs seem to be based on XML, some IT techs or anyone with strong web skills should be able to view the code and possibly identify the root problem, in conjunction with those error messages you had.

I've just looked up my notes as we moved from SIMS to Bromcom in March, and I used Salamander to move linked documents. I think the switch in the command referring to converting word to PDF might be what you want. Seems I did a run just for reports, and then did another run for all other linked documents, likely because I wanted to keep the .docx format for things that weren't reports. The Pupil in Document Name switch was to allow importing to correct students on the bromcom side (although I still had to rename files using regex to simplify the overly long filenames). DocumentExtract.exe [user] [password] [output folder] /splitByDocType /pupilInDocumentName /convertWordToPdf /documentType:"AM Individual Report"

We also use computer recycling companies that'll do it for free providing there's enough equipment being disposed to make it worthwhile. We've used PRM and ICT Reverse. In my last job I had a recycling company over in the neighbouring industrial estate where I'd sometimes drive up for small adhoc jobs, and they'd put the drives in their industrial metal shredder and allow me to watch... very satisfying. Think it was somewhere between 75p to £2 per drive, albeit that was 10 years ago.

We had to dispose of over 50 IWBs (old promethean ones that were used with projectors), and couldn't find anyone to do it for free, for that many. We paid around £7 each with one of the big national weee recyclers, filled up most of a luton type VAN I think. I'd imagine if we'd only had 2 or 3 then we wouldn't have had to pay then.

I never got a DfE router, but at the start of lockdown got 3 TP-Links from Argos (think the M7350 model) and they've seemed good. Been able to set them up to work with our chromebooks, and hide the credentials and ability to add other devices etc once logging into the device as admin. The students could potentially factory reset the device but it'll be obvious then when it's returned. Initially used them on GiffGaff as was easy to stop and start the monthly provision as and when needed, but we since had a load of Vodafone 4G sim cards from a school covid campaign they did which are still good till November 2022. We try to only pair them up with school devices as we sometimes get all the quota used up for non educational reasons, and to reduce potential pressure from others in the household who may want to use it themselves. I would advocate making sure the router isn't locked to any network, as the main ongoing cost will be the SIM data provision rather than the upfront cost of the router.

I'd imagine that one might be students forced to sit at a certain desk (eg due to a seating plan) but preferring to use a mouse or keyboard from another computer, possibly because something is wrong with theirs, so they swap them over if they can, and the front ports just being easier to reach, or if they fumble with the back it's more likely the teacher will notice. Then next lesson it repeats again with the person sitting on the computer, so the bad mouse or keyboard ends up doing a round robin rather than getting reported as faulty.

Our Dell chromebooks were 65watts (and induce notifications on 45w chargers saying it's charging slowly). we got a load of official Dell chargers from VeryPC a lot cheaper that what Dell quote on their website. We're having to be fairly strict though, I know students claim they need to 'borrow' chargers etc that ended up powering their Nintendo Switch or fast charging their mobile phone instead (and still come in with flat chromebooks wanting another charger). Got to the stage we won't lend chargers, we'll charge the chromebook in our office and they'll borrow a spare chromebook instead for a couple of periods (which we can then track/disabled if it's not returned). If they lose a charger we'll charge them cost price for a new one. If they claim they have a damaged charger we insist on seeing it (75% of the time we never see them again). It definitely seem the USB-C chargers are more desirable to a lot of people rather than the chromebook themselves.

we've used these mice in the past. The cable is braided, and the mouse buttons aren't on the outside edge to tempt those who want to pry them upwards out of boredom (unless they are really intent on doing so). We noticed less vandalism with that mouse around. Keyboards we never really had much luck with, especially with students prysing off the large keys and removing the metal brackets or damaging the rubber dome underneath. We had some chiclet style keyboards come with some PCs which were ok, but I don't think they are cheap to buy independently. https://www.crusaderav.co.uk/easy-2-use-rugged-optical-computer-mouse-usb-black-braided-cable/p-16564

We are on 1-to-1 chromebooks now which I gather works well for google translate, but we only have front facing cameras on the chromebooks so photo features are a bit hard to use. Previously we had single purpose iPads set to kiosk mode for the google translate app that was specifically for various google translate features, including the using the camera to translate text on a computer screen or interactive whitebard, and I gather that worked very well.

Not the cheapest but checkout https://www.roombookingsystem.co.uk/ We used it as not many systems showed cover room changes like this system. Plus it's nice to have reoccuring bookings based on a format like every Week2 Wednesday Period 3, etc, rather than just every 2 calendar weeks etc. There's an extra add-on for external lettings with a billing tool of some sort, but I can' t comment on that part. We're dropping it as our needs have changed since replacing computer suites with 1-1 chromebooks now, so we're moving onto a simpler system to save costs. We're using schoolhire (I think) for external lettings which isn't linked to our timetable, which is very expensive but I think there's an element of advertisement there etc so in theory it should be generating additional interest.

Just to add to this thread in case it helps anyone else, Bromcom didn't really suggest how we did this. As Bromcom wouldn't migrate linked documents from SIMS, we used Salamanders document export utility from their website (think it was another thread on Edugeek that signposted us to that). It's restricted to 3 students at a time but if you pay for Salamnder anyway hopefully they'll just give you the license details. From memory I had to rename the files using a bulk file renamer tool and some regex to clean up the files names as it includes a unique ID and I think sometimes duplicated the student admission number. We had quite a few outlook msg attachments which wasn't accepted with Bromcom, so I downloaded another converter to turn them into PDFs. Some people also saved html copies of emails which also wasn't a supported file format, so they were PDF'd too. In Bromcom, using their guidance for bulk file uploads, first uploaded just the Reports, in order to mark them as being published on the parent and student apps. Then I did all the others without them being published. I had to limit the amount I uploaded in a single task as too many would cause it to hang. I think I did 400 at a time, but there were over 10,000 docs in total so took some time. All the uploaded documents were dated with today's date so it did look a bit messy where a year 11 would have documents from year 7, and you hope it's obvious when viewing the doc contents. In terms of attendance data for that missing week before going live, we had a report from SIMS and the data was manually entered by hand on Bromcom.

We just moved to Bromcom this month. Edulink doesn't connect to Bromcom but they advised me this month that they are looking into it. I think they are planning to work with Arbour first. With SIMS, Edulink was fantastic and well worth the money. Bromcom does most of the features but I think I'd like to have stuck with Edulink, the features we used were implemented very well with Edulink and was a nice UI for students and parents, also their support is fantastic. Edulink's video based parents evening was a godsend during Covid, and if we'd stayed we'd probably have used it's integration with the Goverment's notify SMS system which seems very cheap. Hopefully most of the issues with Bromcom are still teething, one real shocker though was that Bromcom doesn't show 'detention' information to students or parents, they have a feature request for it where they say they are considering it. Also we seem to keep having to delete students single-sign on fields and set them up again in order to work with the iOS or Android app, which is bit of a pain. Setting up new accounts for parents on Bromcom is a bit more cumbersome as well.

Just wondering if there's anyone on any leased MFD setup who's actually had proactive response from their supplier where they told customers of the toner shortage at the start or keep customers informed of any stock delay without having to be chased up first? Delays with the national shortage of some types of toner cartridges I can forgive, but it seems if there's any leasing provider who's actually been treating their customers well through this, they deserve a shout-out as so far it seems they're all as bad as each other.

I've lost the habit now as trying to move away from office365, but I used to heavily use OneNote as a journal. Start a page for the day, and then anything I need to write down like tasks I've promised to do over the phone, code snippets, website addresses about odd issues that might be useful later, etc. Normally an unstructured mess that I would often type while talking to people and 99% of it would never be looked at again, but then if trying to remember something several months later, a generic search often shows me my original nonsensical notes to try and interpret back again. 10 years ago the Journal function in Outlook was great, get a phone call, hit something like ctrl+j on outlook, and a blank timestamped notepad entry would instantly come up ready for me to type while I talk... I was gutted when that feature was taken away.

I wouldn't say it's as bad as it was 3 or so years ago shortly after the community brands acquisition. Groupcall xporter and groupcall messenger support (via email or submission form) I've made in the last 1 or 2 weeks have been dealt with within 24 hours 'ish. I don't think I recall seeing any phone numbers though like there used to be in the past.

We had some black Kyocera toners arrive last week for our 8000 and 9000 series printers. We're not sure how timely the next refill's will be though, fingers crossed it'll start improving now, but I don't have any knowledge either way if we're still expecting long delays with our toner supplies for our larger printers.

I only used it for a few days for a personal raspberry pi project but Twilio sendgrid worked nicely for me and was entirely in the cloud. Free if less than 100 email a day I think. We've used Twilio's other services for our covid era video parents evenings with Edulink and it worked great for that too. I can't remember the protections on the email server side, but there was something so it wasn't a free-for-all smtp server. At work we use google workspace (and office 365 before that), I'd imagine that should be your first port of call for anything important unless you specifically need it isolated from that.

I subscribed to their status page alerts a while ago, and there was a phase I was getting emails almost daily about the niggles they were getting a couple months ago, but yeah I haven't received anything today (or even possibly for a few weeks), like you said. However when I log in to their status page it's also saying All Services are Active, so I guess there's something misconfigured on their end on how they raised today's incident.

we've had an influx of students today with this issue. just to add to the reports here (as not all of it has been consistent with our observations in fixing it). If the problem is on a chromebook, google classroom seems to always be affected. however we've also had a student with the exact same constant reloading issue with Tassomai which isn't using any google login/authentication. resetting profiles hasn't worked for the ones we've tried, but for the vast majority it seems powerwashing works (but again it's not 100% consistent, some still persist after the powerwash). Theres reports that the chromebook started acting up halfway through a lesson; i.e. there wasn't an update or restart that seemed to have induced it.

For us we have various Kyocera printers, it's the TaskAlfa 8000 and 9000 series that are very problematic and have been out of order due to toner for the vast majority of the last few weeks. All the smaller machines (ecosys/4000/6000 series) have been fine so far. We've been told it's because it's the larger ones suffering from the global computer chip shortage in their toner cartridges. The trajectory of how frequent the toner issues have been seem to be getting worse and worse so expecting this to be a long while still. Our reprographics team who need the external finishing options on the large MFDs can use up these massive toners in a day or 2, so when it does eventually come in, we'll be out again soon after. Same feedback as 'colly72' above, we're the ones chasing this up because we're not getting supplies in without any prior warning, just piecing together different explanations on the issue when we bring it up ourselves, and one had comments that the problem is our doing because a printer that's already been out of toner for several days has then been powered off at the wall, albeit the last couple of weeks has been more consistent with apologies etc. At least there's probably a few trees out there having some longer life than expected (providing they aren't re-assigned for the global cardboard shortage).

Has anyone who's sent notice to ESS to terminate their contract had any confirmation in writing yet that they've acknowledged the termination request? I emailed ESS in November, had a salesman call up early December from a mobile phone, went through the motions about why we're leaving, and was told we would be getting confirmation back about the cancelation, but not heard anything since. Chase up emails to the annual entitlement address haven't resulted in anything either apart from the automatic reply of allowing them 2 days for a reply.

just a word of warning, AV doesn't always work across some combination of devices and docks. For example, we have HP usb-c docks everywhere, and seem to work nicely with HP and Dell windows laptops, and also Dell, Lenovo, and HP chromebooks. All using just 1 cable for power, AV, USBs, and network. However we've discovered that asus chromebooks (various models) don't pass the sound through over the dock HDMI like the other branded devices.

I know this is an old post, but I came across it when having a similar issue today with a Lenovo, repeatedly re-installing the OS with no improvement. On my issue, turned out the serial number wasn't registered on the chromebook. This was missing when doing alt-v on the sign in screen, and also when viewing chrome://system. Seems to have been an oversight as sold as 2nd hand / refurb but recognised as valid 12 month warranty support from the manufacturer, then discovered it was keyed but all messed up with a blank attribute name instead of 'serial_number'. I entered the correct serial from the chromebook sticker using guidance from https://support.ctl.net/hc/en-us/articles/115006019887-Change-the-Serial-Number-on-a-Chromebook and enrolment worked fine after that.