DavR

I think I was just using that newsletter as an example, of the many many mailing lists or notifications we all get added to. Fair play to LGfL, yes, it is an optional thing we can unsubscribe as per mailing list best practice, and yes, it's a different entity to the support desk. IIRC, if you have the 'Contact' role, that means you are a nominated contact, and that is what picks you out as a technical contact. So shouldn't be too hard to alert nominated contacts, or maintain a mailing list of nominated contacts, based on that 'Contact' role, for when there's a service announcement, I should have thought.

Huh, first I've heard of the RedStor thing being a wider issue. Like many people, I spent time today re-trying my backup to potentially troubleshoot, unaware of a wider fault. The Netsweeper thing didn't impact me at all, but if I'd been trying to make a policy change, it would have been good to know. I've always found this; a really odd place to draw the line re email alerts. Just today I got an email from the LRC Team with the "LGfL Curriculum Newsletter", which someone somewhere chose to sign me up to without my asking (it's fine, it's sometimes useful, but as an example). And yet, when I've asked in the past about email alerts about LGfL service outages, which could affect the day to day running of our systems, not only have I not been given an email alert for that, but I don't even have the option to subscribe to one. Like I say, seems like a strange line to draw. Of all alerts, surely these are the most useful? If said alerts bother me, I'll unsubscribe, or set up a mail rule to deal with them. It's not the biggest issue, but, as a Nominated Contact, I've always felt it would be nice if I got an email notification when there was an Announcement on the support site (which could be turned off if necessary, I guess.) In an ideal world, perhaps there could be a Service Status page in the model of https://netsweeper.statuspage.io/ that we could subscribe to, perhaps only subscribing to the elements we wanted to monitor.

This is the route I would take first. If you can't see UNCs at boot, then better to fix the reason you cannot see UNCs at boot, than try and work around it. We've got plenty of scripts running on UNC paths, including those that kick off MSI installers, never needed to copy files to the local drive, or, use drive letters. The GPO setting name is "Always Wait for the Network at Computer Startup and Logon" (also, apologies to OP if this is long since resolved - the original question was over a year ago)

I did a quick Google - turns out 100 is now the lowest you can set version history down to, which strikes me as pretty rubbish - https://sardhianto.medium.com/microsoft-onedrive-file-versioning-setting-4aa7567c48ba Don't know why mine's letting me go below that, or even turn it off completely. Anyone would think it's in Microsoft's interest to sell you more storage space

Sounds more like either a permission thing, or a setting further up the chain somewhere, that's restricting you. I'm on pretty much the lowest possible license for OneDrive and Sharepoint, so I'd be surprised if I had more licensed features than you do. Just to confirm, it is this page you're looking at, and "Keep the following number of major revisions"? I just set one of my users down to 20 revisions without it complaining. Does your head have any Admin permissions at all? I wonder if Admins can't change certain settings on other admins.

I went to M365 Admin page, Active Users, select the user and the OneDrive > Create link to files. Follow the link to edit that user's SharePoint site; Settings cog top right Site Settings More Settings Return to the old Site Settings page Site libraries and lists Customize "Documents" Versioning settings It's the same page, just two different ways of getting there.

PM sent

I can't find a copy of it online now, but not being very au fait with GAM, I use Alice Keeler's Google Classroom "List classes" management scripts. They're built into a Google Sheet and run as add ins. It's made administering our Google Classrooms so much easier, I don't have to be an admin in each class to do things, just an admin in our Workspace tenant.

Ah, same filtering solution as us, that one. I run reports on the filtering every Monday, for our Safeguarding Team. I usually then evaluate any porn hits to see if they're genuine or not - almost always they're not, or like Shutterstock, they're sites that could potentially host porn, but it is not their primary purpose. Interestingly, for a while, we were getting porn hits that were genuine, BUT, we really didn't believe the person in question had attempted to access those sites. This belief was reinforced by the fact that the same obscure porn sites kept flagging up for different users. I think it's something to do with how certain hosting site IP addresses are evaluated (it's always DNS, right?) but I couldn't quite get my head round the theory I was offered. Luckily, this has calmed down now, because it was getting impossible to know whether to reprimand people for their history or not....

I'm in the very early planning stages for Intune, but am already aware that Intune is not really geared towards shared devices. As you've seen, changes of policy aren't evaluated immediately, they're staggered, which is no use if different people are logging into a device. Our shared devices are staying hybrid-AD with regular GP for now. What I'm looking to Intune for is for managing hybrid/off domain devices, that get assigned to particular users long term 1-to-1. That's the model Intune is designed to work with, really.

If you've only got one of two people troubling the limit, you could try going into their OneDrive sites, and lowering the number of versions of files that it keeps - by default, it keeps every version, ad infinitum. I had an art teacher breach 100GB with massive PowerPoint presentations. Each one had multiple save points, in some case multiplying the storage used by an already large file by 10 or 20 times. I manually set her site to keep only 5 versions and that halved her storage usage. May not work so much with video files though, as I guess those would usually only have one version. But just something to think about. We, too, have the Apps for Enterprise/Faculty, so that does give us up to 1TB limits, but I'm choosing to stick to a 100GB quota per user for now.

Came here to say the same as @aac, if anyone is still stuck on the A1 Plus expiry. If you're mid-term on your OVS agreement when A1 Plus expires, as long as you're buying your MS Office licenses through the OVS, you can request "free" Microsoft 365 Apps for Faculty/Students licenses from your reseller. If you add those to the A1 license on a user, you should get a) install rights for Office back and b) a lift on the limit of your OneDrive allowance for each licensed user. This should see you through to the end of your agreement, without the costs of jumping ship mid contract.

Ha! AI can do many things, but it'll be a while yet before it masters English dialects..... Shame about the identity thing, that would be a key feature for us. That being the case we might trial a third party service first, see if it's any better.

This is my concern, to be honest. With a straight Teams meeting, every identity on the meeting has a name (their Teams ID) and is tied to an individual mic. When you've got a group of people all sharing the same Teams ID and the same mic, I do wonder how well it's going to distinguish between people on the transcript / minutes.

Could you argue that, because you're making a saving by not renewing the VMWare license, you could use the £2200 you would have spent there on some external support to help with the migration?

Will you need a new backup solution? When we moved from VMWare to Hyper V, we kept Veeam and now use it to backup our Hyper-V estate.

Tbh, I know VMWare are the original and probably best in virtualisation, but we moved to Hyper-V two years ago and it's been a breeze ever since. None of the weird little problems we used to get with VMWare, no third party updates, zero ongoing support costs, and zero licensing beyond our Server Datacentre licenses. Sorry, I realise that doesn't help you out with your immediate eyewatering bill. Drop support for this year, and port everything over to Hyper-V in the summer?

For sure, that is a consideration, especially given that so many of the AI providers are startups with unproven records / uncertain security. Anything we do use would have to be fully vetted by the DPO before we gave it anything more than test data.

We've used this in Office 365 before, it's not bad. But, we are looking for summarising and turning the transcript into minutes, not just regular speech to text.

Yeah. If you were going to use it in this way, you'd just open Teams, go to Meet Now, and start a meeting with no-one else in it, and record. Teams does have the benefit that we've already done the DPIA on it, and we can be (relatively) sure we can trust Microsoft with the data. The cons are, we'd rather use something designed for the job, rather than a feature tacked onto an existing product. Still, I guess I'll put it forward as one of the options, so how well it tests out.

Thanks for the suggestion! Have you used this tool yourself? Any feedback on how accurate it is?

Thanks for the tip re Teams guys, although really, I was looking for something outside of videoconferencing, as the majority of the meetings we'd want to minute are in person. I suppose in theory you could just have a laptop in the room running a Teams meeting, just for the sake of the minutes, but ideally I think we were looking for a standalone product. It's an option though. Has anyone used this feature in Teams?

Has anyone out there had positive experience of using an AI tool to record and produce minutes of meetings? Our Business Manager recently had a video call with someone who used Fathom AI to create some quite passable minutes of their online meeting, complete with action points etc. Having seen that, we're wondering if there's something that can listen in on any meeting we have, and created a sensible set of minutes afterwards. That's in person, as well as online, meetings. We're looking for something more than just a speech to text tool, we want the transcript tidied up, summarised, minuted, etc. After a bit of Googling, Supernormal looks like it could do the job, and, has a free tier. Has anyone tried it? And yes, before we use any of these tool loose on real meeting data we will need to look seriously into how secure/reliable/etc the tool is. Some of the meetings we want minuted would be the highest level of confidential data. Thanks in advance!

Hi @Gobstopper, I can't advise on shared computer activation, but I'm sure someone here will be able to. Out of interest, what has made your mind up to move to the O365 client on machines over Office 2019? I'm probably sticking with Office 2019 or 2021 here, but, have been thinking about using the full O365 client one day. Regarding licensing though, I think I can help explain. Re the Office 365 A1 Plus license, this used to allow your users to use all the online bits of Office 365 (the A1 part), plus install and license the software locally (the plus part) on the understanding that you've purchased Office licensing though a Microsoft OVS deal or similar. So, O365 A1 Plus was A1 + (OVS or similar Office entitlement). Because this was just so damn useful, Microsoft have, of course, decided to discontinue it. However, assuming you're still buying your Office licensing through OVS or similar, there is a second way to achieve the same outcome as O365 A1 Plus / A3 - the "free" Enterprise Apps you've been told about. Essentially, this is another way of taking your OVS Office entitlement, and translating it into the online sphere. So, Office 365 A1 + M365 Apps for Faculty / Student will create pretty much the same outcome, allowing you online applications plus install rights for no extra purchase. Your normal reseller can add these on for you at no cost - in theory, they should only give you as many as your OVS entitles you too, but most are happy to give you as many as you need. Hope that helps!

We're in the process of migrating to Arbor also. We're sticking with our existing payments system til the end of term, and then going with the Arbor payments system and Meal package from September.