DavR

We used to do our Windows desktop and Office licensing through the same method, the "DsktpEdu ALNG LicSAPk OLV F 1Y Acdmc Ent" product you mention through OVS. I was always told that this licensed your desktop user with everything they'd need - Windows OS, Office Pro Plus, and server CALs. So yes, using this, you should be licensed for Office 365 Desktop Apps, or, MAK/KMS deployment if you prefer. We make use of both - KMS licensing for Office, but also, Office 365 Desktop Apps licenses for staff, to allow them to install Office at home. As an aside, a while back we reassessed what we were using and got rid of the above product, in favour of buying Windows (Edu/Ent upgrade only), Office and CALs as separate items and saved a lot of money. But we were mostly getting our kit delivered with base Windows OS, so you probably wouldn't make the same savings. Interesting to see there are others out there still using OVS, though. I remember going to a Microsoft event maybe five or more years ago, confidently predicting the end of OVS and M365 being the only route 😂 We've consistently been told otherwise by our licensing guys. We're OVS + P1 + InTune at the moment (and have always been told this is cheaper for us than buying full blown M365 A3 licensing), might be interesting to see how OVS + EMS A3 compares at next renewal.

Thanks for that, @Fazza. Yeah, I try to do every repair possible in house here, but some things like iPad screens or soldered components, I have to concede I don't have the skills on. Much as I should probably get back into practice and learn again.

Well, that's encouraging. I've fired off a message, see what comes back.

Cheers @timbo343, may well give them a go. Have you used them yourself? First place I tried wasn't very promising - said they'd have no problem doing the repair job, but, can't source the particular variant of USB C port needed for the job 😕

We recently bought a batch of ASUS CZ1104 Chromebooks, as they came onto the market at a very good price. It's not taken long til the first damage - I've got one with a broken USB C charging port. It's damaged, rather than failed, so warranty support won't help me (or they will, but initial assessment and shipping is a non-refundable £45, and only then will they quote for the repair). Anyone got a lead on a company that can repair USB-C ports on Chromebooks? Ideally a mail in company that takes school purchase orders. Reading around, I'm pretty sure the port can be replaced, but there's no way my soldering is up to the job. Thanks in advance!

As far as I know, the native OneDrive client relies on sync technology, regardless of your line speed. Depending on your settings, it can sync just placeholders, so the files only sync fully when you open them, but it's a sync technology all the same If you don't want to do that, don't use the OneDrive client, use the OneDrive web front end. Or, just open your files direct from OneDrive using the Microsoft O365 client programs.

Oh fun, that'll be something to look forward to.

Yup, same here. Mildly annoying deploying via group policy, as the main installer was an MSI, but the Desktop Runtime is a one line command. As a result I ended up doing CDM v3 and Desktop Runtime both as startup scripts, instead of using the MSI deployment, so I could be sure I was managing the order of the installers correctly.

Interesting idea, that good quality SSD and rapid recovery would now supersede traditional hardware RAID. For our part, for the first time in a decade, we've just had a disk fail in our main production server, spinning rust from the main RAID5 storage array. I wouldn't have known, if the server management hadn't raised an alert to tell me. New drive is on order for tomorrow. So, hardware RAID working just as it should for us. We only have one server, so for us the redundancy has to be in the disks. I wonder if we had a cluster of at least two, would we just use high quality SSD and let the whole servers be the redundancy? It's an idea, I suppose. I'd probably still be likely to do hardware RAID with SSD plus redundant servers in an ideal scenario, belt and braces, but that's out of habit.

I think Flex is pretty much the agreed way to go on these now. They're barely Windows capable, and not upgradeable, so I can't see what else you can usefully do with em. I haven't tried one recently to see if any of the bugs discussed above have been resolved, though. It's defo worth a go with the latest installer to find out.

Wow, what's it like working at that sort of scale, if you don't mind me asking? Does your team work on large enterprise scale stuff shared across the schools, and is there room for specialisation? Or is it more a case of managing all the usual small stuff, just multiplied by 60.

Large single LA primary over two sites 880 children 120 staff 100 Windows Devices (staff, mostly) 150 Chromebooks (students, mostly) 50 iPads Small onsite server estate, majority cloud Website content manager Social media manager Anything with a plug manager One person, four days a week.

I know it's a bit of a hack, but, when we discovered that one of our models of desktop was only TPM 1.x compatible, I just turned off the compatibility check in our builds. I might turn it back on when that model gets retired, but I'm not really sure what that will gain us!

It was OK for us, overall. One of the pluses was it was pretty easy for parents to set themselves up on the Portal / App - all they needed to do was login with the email address on their parent profile. No messing about with link codes or anything like that, which we had with our previous system. Carrying over balances, as above, was a bit laborious, but, that only happens once. The one thing we fell foul of was the different account types. There are some e.g. Clubs where the parent selects an item, puts it in their basket, and purchases in the normal way. But, on the lower Arbor subscriptions (e.g. whatever we're on) you can't create "shop" type accounts for anything else, you have to use pre-pay accounts, where the parent pays in a balance, and then deducts from that balance when they buy things. It's not insurmountable, but you need to be clear in your mind which accounts are setup in which configuration, and make sure you relay that to parents when requesting payments. We've been happy enough with the card payments side of things. There isn't an inbuilt mechanism for transferring funds between accounts (eg from Child 1 to Child 2), so if you're unsure I'd suggest always refunding the payment and asking the parent to pay again. This costs more in fees, so you can fudge things by refunding a parent as "Cash", and then paying that "Cash" back into another account (as long as you're confident you know what you're doing).

Simple, and low maintenance, what's not to love

Are you sure it doesn't wake up the monitors? We use it at our place, and I thought it did. If it doesn't, you can also program it to play a loud alarm-type noise with the message, ours is set to use a classic burglar alarm tone. Scares the crap out of people! You can control the duration of the message, so how long til it times out, if that helps. We manage the problem of ending the lockdown by sending a second message, which pops up on top of the last message, to say alarm over. For all the fact that we've got this system though, our SLT still don't trust it, as there isn't a PC in every room and corridor. We're about to spend £2k on air horns that people are to sound manually as an alternative, would you believe!

The mind still boggles that someone ever approved the manufacture of these devices with 64GB storage. I can only imagine they couldn't get the parts and re-used Chromebook spec stuff instead. We have a few of these sat in their unopened boxes, I might put ChromeOS Flex on them one day. We do have the variant of these with 128GB storage, and they work OK, just about, as standalone Windows 10 or 11 laptops, I have a stack of them which I loan out when teachers need to do work from home. But I wouldn't use them as domain joined devices. ChromeOS Flex all the way for the 64GB model I'd say!

Do you have the Macbook and the iPad on the same WiFi SSID and/or network segment? I don't know exactly how the networking behind AirDrop et al works, but I seem to recall crossing network segments (ie, different VLANs) being a limitation for some functions.

I haven't generated a serial number for ActivInspire for a while, but IIRC, it's just a case of taking a serial number off a screen, and then running it through a serial number generator to create an activation key. If you have an activation key straight off the bat, even better, With this activation key, you can now install the software. You can install the software multiple times with one key, so you don't need to do 1 screen = 1 license key, you just need to keep your number of installations broadly within the license agreement. Last time I spoke to Promethean, you could have the software installed on the computer attached to the screen, plus a couple of others for prep, so it's a pretty broad license. They're less keen on you using their software on rival vendors screens obviously, although there's no restriction or watermark in software. How to generate an activation key, if you don't have one - https://support.prometheanworld.com/s/article/1266?language=en_US How to perform a Network Install of ActivInspire - this way, you need only enter the activation key once, for a "keyless" install - https://support.prometheanworld.com/s/article/1808?language=en_US

We have kept OneDrive drive sync, set up automatically, AND we have CDM deliver a mapped Home drive (H:\), plus the traditional mapped drives. OneDrive sync performs OK for home folders, and, we point our folder redirection there. There are also a very few cases where things won't work via a CDM mapped drive (mail merge for instance) so it's good to have the option of locally sync'd files to work from. That said, if I were starting fresh I might try and go pure CDM. I've had an invite to start using v3 but haven't had the time yet to trial it, or work out what the upgrade path is.

There are a few command line options to open the Outlook app without an associated email account. This article gives one option, but there may be others - https://www.companionlink.com/support/kb/How_to_use_Outlook_2016,_2019,_2021,_and_Office_365_without_an_associated_Email_Account

We've got a whole box of cheap laptop sleeves here, left over from the DfE COVID devices - I can't see us needing to buy any more bags, any time soon! If we did though, my preference would be for sleeves these days. Looks more professional and less bulk.

Currently setting up a trial of DMARC Report (dmarcreport.com) which looks like it's got far more options and better analysis capabilities than Postmark. Unfortunately though, it doesn't allow MTA-STS Reporting in the free tier. What are people doing with this, or are you a) confident enough in your MTA-STS setup to not bother reporting, or b) never got as far as setting this up in the first place? We could probably just dump the reporting side of this, as I'm fairly sure it's working correctly. But that does make me a bit nervous, in case we ever make changes.

It definitely still serves a useful purpose - I was on the lookout for suppliers for a coming project, and not only had a chat with suppliers, but also met the hardware manufacturers. In one day, I learnt a lot about what specs I need to be looking at, and found my three potential bidders. And got a bit of advice from fellow techs that I met along the way, thanks! I've been going for most of the last ten years, minus a few. I haven't worked out whether it's got a bit more "meh" over time though, or if I'm just getting older and more jaded....

I've just signed up for Postmark DMARC, but, it looks like it's actually just a weekly email digest - I don't think you get a console to view data and trends on.