DavR

InTune really is designed for a 1-to-1 device world, with the intervals between policies applying hours, rather than the minutes we're used to in GP, and not taking into account the different levels of restrictions when users log on and off. It also seems to assume a fairly light touch approach to restrictions, rather than the full lockdown that we're used to doing with children. We've got a bank of loan devices which I want to manage with InTune, but these don't have an owner, until they're loaned out. I still haven't got my head around how I'm going to manage that one!

We use ParentHub. The ideal implementation is that all parents have the app on their phone to receive comms, directed either to the whole school, or individual classes / groups. In the event a parent does not / cannot / will not install the app, it defaults back to email. If the parent doesn't read the message in the app within 24hrs, they also get a followup by email. We also have the option to send SMS messages, but reserve that for emergencies only. As for the question around families who do not have Smartphone access, we currently have 95% of children where at least one parent has the app installed. Although I acknowledge we're in a relatively well off area. I think ParentHub support said 80-85% was average. When we set this up, we tried to make sure that it was our primary method of communicating with parents, to replace a whole bunch of other ad hoc methods. In the end though we ended up with a separate app for our MIS and Payments, but, we're pretty happy we got it down to two, tbh.

That's outrageous. We moved MIS earlier this year, and not one of the systems who link to our MIS charged us for the migration.

Obviously, anyone in a public facing position from either Google or Microsoft is going to be thoroughly steeped in their employers ecosystem, so that's going to affect their recommendations. And I'm sure, if we were starting from scratch, many of us would try and choose one ecosystem and make a go of it within that. It figures that it's Microsoft pushing the 'choose one and go with it' line, though, as they're the old market leaders forever losing ground. When I've met Google reps they've been a little more prosaic, and happy to show you how to integrate the best of both on Google Workspace. For us, the ecosystem divide fell naturally on a Staff / Students, Microsoft / Google respectively, divide. This has been led by the simple fact that we've been buying Chromebooks for students based on cost, and Windows desktops for staff based on compatibility with existing software and practices. Staff are free to use Google Workspace if they like, although email is in MS O365 only, so most tend to stay in Microsoft, unless they're setting work for the kids. And we do still have a login for the kids for the Windows network, although in practical terms for them, there's only a handful of workstations left where they can use it. I keep meaning to rethink and improve our authentication model, to try and get one login for both, but that's stalled until I get time. Otherwise we manage pretty well spread between the two. And then there's the iPads too, of course....

Ditto this, because we're still finding OVS the most effective way of doing our licensing. It's pretty much the equivalent of A3.

Hi all, We're currently looking into a new batch of Chromebooks. We've had a lot of Lenovo in the past, but had a pretty bad failure rate. We've Dells, HPs, Acers knocking around which are all OK. We've been offered a batch of ASUS CZ11 devices at a good price - does anyone have any experience, good or bad, they'd share with ASUS Chromebooks? Processor is the MediaTek Kompanio 520, which while being a cheap brand benchmarks OK. All other spec is fine. They look..... like Chromebooks. Anyone know what the situation is like with parts, in case of out of warranty damage? Thanks!

Have you tried the warranty on those baskets? In theory the trollies are lifetime warranties, we've had a couple of basket bits from their support for free. Not sure how far that can be pushed though, plastic taking a beating like it does!

I'll have to do some reading, to remind me what each of these different things mean - I got my head round them once, to set them up, but now a few years have passed I don't remember! At a surface read, though, I assume that means we'll lose access to DMARC insights, and need to either find a new DMARC reporting service, or just remove the reporting email line from our DMARC and TLS-RPT DNS entries. Oh well, it was a useful tool while we were getting everything set up.

And yeah, bad luck on the resistance to going full O365 with the email. We went from Staffmail to native Office 365 Exchange a couple of years back, I think they charged us between £400-600 to migrate all our mailboxes over the holidays, and tbh, once we'd got everyone's phones onto to the new system, we've not looked back. The only advantage of the LGfL system was better email filtering.

The modular options for the licensing are available where you apply the license - either to the user, or to the group. If you assign your licenses per user, it's M365 Admin | Users | Active Users | (pick your user) | Licenses and apps on the pop out tabs. If you assign your licenses per group, it's in Entra ID Admin | Groups | (pick your group) | Manage | Licenses, and select apps per product.

Do you actually see any start pages listed under the policy when you find it? "Google Default" on the policy suggests you're receiving the out-of-the-box Google Defaults, so unlikely to be the half dozen startup pages you mention. On the near left in this view, you should be able to look at an OU structure of your organisation, you'll want to select your students OU to see what's specifically set for that policy, for students (assuming you've got OUs set up, of course....) Another option - are these URLs definitely being set by policy? They could be assigned as Apps or Extensions, I've got a couple of things that load a page on startup. Check Devices | Chrome | Apps & Extensions and see what's in there.

+1 for the licensing route. I've got a couple of accounts, like supply teachers or third party staff, that I do different group based licensing for to remove email rights. Still provide an O365 license, but not including the Exchange Online licensing application under the details.

Reminds me of the fiasco that was Young Voices, a few years back. The children had to learn to sing a couple of songs, so they could all perform at the Young Voices concert later in the year. Young Voices, however, would only license the practice materials to be used by one teacher login. The resources could not be duplicated, put online, or shared in any way. And yet, the children really needed to practice the songs at home. Publicly available versions of the song were no good either, as the Young Voices versions were simplified, and in an easier key for children to sing. Inevitably, schools uploaded all the resources to their own pages, because the children needed to practice at home. Cue a game of cat and mouse with cease and desist letters from Young Voices, threatening each new school that did it until they took them down again. I won't say how we "resolved" the licensing issue on this, again, I advised against. But in later years, they did finally release home practice versions, I think. At an additional cost, naturally.

This has happened to us before. Our lot tried to get away with sharing a single login (between 30+ teachers), against my advice, and inevitably got a slap on the wrist for it. Our bursars response? Continue to share logins, but, one per year group this time. I continued to advise against and washed my hands of it, but I will say that, so far, they've got away with it. I won't say which site a) in case anyone's listening and b) because I can't for the life of me remember which one it was now

PM me. I've only got a few spares at the moment, but, we might be early retiring this batch if I can get the funding.

This is probably the compromise I'd go for. No, we're not installing the app (insert security / storage concerns here), but you can access the web version if really necessary. Accompanied by chapter and verse to say that any school stuff needs to be in OneDrive / Sharepoint for policy and compliance reasons.

The 300e was mainboard failures, either they just won't take power one day, or they won't boot, I think dead storage chips. Either fault is a mainboard failure, so a write off outside of warranty. For us this problem was mostly with the 300e 2nd Gen MTK. We've also got a batch of 300e 2nd Gen AMD that haven't really given us any trouble apart from accidental damage, so I think it was just the MediaTek variants. I'm still crossing Lenovo off my list for our next Chromebook procurement, though, I just don't need that hassle again.

Would people be happy to share model numbers on the Acer Chromebooks they've been seeing these failures on? We're shopping for Chromebooks soon, and would rather not get burnt like we did on the Lenovo 300e....

We had this problem extensively on the Latitude E5530 a good few years ago now. With those ones they did admit a manufacturing fault and gave an extended warranty. Of course they kept breaking after the end of that warranty, so I got pretty adept at replacing hinges. The hinges were pretty easy to get, the difficulty was getting replacement LCD rear covers.

I haven't given it much time yet, but, as I understand it the paid version is to use CoPilot M365 as part of your cloud based M365 offering. Judging by the presentation we saw, it does offer a lot, but also, looks dependent on users using Office 365 native through the web browser. In theory though, I don't think there's an extra license cost for the locally installed version of CoPilot that comes bundles with Windows 11, although of course, features will be more limited. That's the version I'm going to start trialling when I get to it.

OK, there's two separate issues there I think. If the Feb 2024 version isn't working, then go ahead and download the latest Oct/Nov 2024 version from here - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/new-teams-bulk-install-client#option-1b-download-and-install-new-teams-using-an-offline-installer. That link also contains useful info on deployment, I'd read the whole page just to check. The second point re the behaviour with "Store" apps, do you mean apps you bought via Microsoft Store, or, just UWP/msix apps in general? If the latter, yes, they are problematic to install and uninstall. Again, because they install into users profiles rather than the machine a lot of the time. When I've needed to remove UWP apps in the past, I've used uninstall scripts either at user login or logout - because the apps are installed per user profile.

I presume that drag and drop emails to Sharepoint exports them as a .msg file into the folder structure? It's not the answer you want to hear, but I'd get out of the habit of saving email as msg files. If you want to output files from Outlook, I'd really recommend using Print to PDF instead, you should have a Print to PDF printer by default on Windows 11, I can't remember if you did on Windows 10. Msg files only open in Outlook or other mail clients, and even then, only if they're configured with an email address. PDFs are far more versatile and compatible.

How was Teams previously deployed in your environment? I'm not sure it needs to be removed from every profile before you deploy the new version, just go ahead and deploy it via the bootstrapper. Teams lives entirely in the individual user profile; all the deployment packages for Teams do is put install / update files into a central location on the PC, to then install /update into user profiles. When Teams users try to use their current version, I think it should then just update to the new version.

Our main production server is RAID1 on two SSDs for the OS, and RAID5 on spinning disks for the main data storage array. VMs then sit on that, configs on the RAID1 and storage on the RAID5. I used to just do a System and Data drive on a RAID5 or RAID10 array on servers years ago, but that was pre-SSD when there wasn't such a marked difference in performance of drives available, and pre-VMs.

I've used the Tel HTML function before on the mobile version of our website. The syntax for correct usage of this is: Tel:+442085100200 Apologies if I'm suggesting the obvious, but does your link to the Teams docs contain "tel:" in it anywhere? I'd be really surprised if Teams has created that link unexpectedly, but kinda wouldn't be surprise if SharePoint had.