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It's either Ofsted, or a parent is about to kick up a massive stink about something! Hell, most of the staff have never read the policies....

Arrived today! Thanks very much VeryPC, loving the latest design

I'm fairly sure it specified work addresses only. Fingers crossed mine come in the last Royal Mail post of the year, which for us is tomorrow!

FWIW, if you've got MFA set, there are some occasions where, even with the conditional access, that you'll get an MFA prompt whether in or out of school. Usually only stuff like changing your account details etc. So MFA, is protecting MFA settings, if you like. You shouldn't be prompted for day-to-day usage though.

We stuck with IAM Cloud Drive Mapper. We haven't found large files too big an issue, although yes, large video files don't always open successfully first time, but then, our Internet connection is a dedicated 400MB line. Which is not to say that we're not looking forward to something better than WebDav. I honestly wouldn't consider SharePoint sync for anything beyond a) areas of only a few GB or b) manual syncs for users who know what they're doing. It would be REALLY nice if there was a way of just dropping a list of SharePoint sites into the Open/Save dialogue box for Office, but that option just doesn't seem to be there, which is a real nuisance.

Yeah, not massively intuitive! I haven't looked for activation numbers yet myself, but, it used to be with the license keys, so might be under there again.

Yup, that'll do it!

I think what your looking for is the license summary. You can get that for each of your agreements by clicking on the three dots next to the agreement number and selecting license summary. That tells me, for instance, how many Office, Server, Desktop, licenses I've got on that contract. Direct link - https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home#/subscriptions/vlnew/mycontracts

I had a quick Google - it turns out Veeam B&R doesn't include SQL any more. You must either create a new instance in PostgreSQL, or, install the Veeam database into an existing SQL instance - https://www.reddit.com/r/Veeam/comments/12hab4t/when_installing_veeam_backup_12_fresh_can_you/. I really wouldn't attach that database to another SQL instance, so looks like you'll be needing to use PostgeSQL as per this guide.

@taz - In the end I replied to them by email and asked them to send no more info about Connect @ BETT, and that seemed to calm things down a bit. I'm getting maybe one BETT email a week at the moment though, so it wasn't a total unsubscribe.

We tried setting this up automatically through policy, but our larger shared areas took days to populate, and as a result synchronisation was unreliable. So either files wouldn't be there when they needed them, or, wouldn't sync back up when they logged off a machine, or, we'd get a lot of duplicate versions. We ran in tandem with Cloud Drive Mapper for a while, but eventually had to junk the sync'd stuff, except for OneDrive folders.

We might be going the same way tbh - although there are other parts of the A3 package we want, such as AAD P1 and the full version of Intune. That, and the fact that they're killing off the A1 Plus license. It's all starting to stack up as a necessity.

Which version of Office are you using? I've found the Office 2016/19 doesn't find SharePoint sites very easily, but, that the Office 365 client apps does. As we were obliged to keep using Office 2019, I spent a bit of money and bought IAM Cloud Drive Mapper, which replicates the experience of mapped drives pointing to a file server that people were used to. I couldn't see any other way to sensibly do it for us.

I was looking at Intune just yesterday, just playing around, with a view of moving staff laptops onto there and seeing where we go in future. Desktops and student devices I'll keep on the domain and under Group Policy for now. Like you we've only got A1 / A1 Plus, and I found that Intune really is too restrictive under those conditions. We'll be looking to bite the bullet and go A3, or buy Intune separately, before we attempt to use it in production I think.

I would challenge the assertion the VLSC worked "perfectly well" It's always been trouble for me, and support takes an age. That said, it was setup and workable, by the end..... and then naturally, we now have to change. As far as I can see, yes, going forward the plan seems to be to move VLSC features into the M365 licensing portal, so anyone you want to grant VLSC rights to, will need an M365 admin account for. Note also, much like the VLSC portal, each admin needs to be granted rights on each agreement, I don't think there's a global licensing admin option. After applying these rights, be prepared to wait 24hrs for them to apply (why? annoying!).

Veeam should be installed in it's own instance, so SERVERNAME\VEEAM12 or whatever. Don't install it into an existing instance, unless it's an existing Veeam instance and you're upgrading. I think it might also need a separate instance for logs/config as well, it's been a while since I've installed Veeam. The installer should let you create a new instance just for this, and it will configure it the way that it needs. If for some reason it isn't, do you have the option to clear all existing SQL instances off that server? That way it will force the installer to sort out it's own SQL needs.

You could try unblocking http://www.natwest.co.uk as a keyword, there's probably no harm in it. However, I would also / instead open an URL recategorization request with LGfL, so they can fix this problem for everyone and make sure that all the Nat West addresses are in the correct categories.

The DfE's Get Help with Technology scheme that supplied all of those devices has now closed, including the portal that went with it. In theory passwords were emailed out to all registered users when it closed, but, whether anyone saved any of this info at the time is another matter! The official route to recover those BIOS passwords is now to email the DfE as described here - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/resetting-windows-laptops-and-tablets#step-2---get-local-admin-and-bios-passwords

Our Disaster Recovery Plan is due for renewal in the next couple of months, and I'm considering starting from scratch, as we've gone cloud since the last review. I've never been entirely happy with the existing one tbh, but, I've just kept updating it as required thus far. I don't hear the phrase Disaster Recovery bandied around so much these days, Business Continuity seems to be the more up to date approach (I'm aware there are differences), so I wonder, what are other people doing. Do you have just one of the above, or both? Are they school wide or purely IT based? Does anyone have a separate Cyber Incident Plan? Is there anywhere in, for instance, the latest DfE Standards that dictate what the expectation is, in terms of recovery planning? We're a primary school, with an IT staff of one (1), so I want to keep this as simple as possible. We don't use the RPA insurance so aren't bound by their regs, but of course, we do want to be on the right side of best practice.

We have just this scenario in one of our offices which is woefully underserved by network points. Having done it on the supercheap, we've used one of these (Netgear 5 port PoE GS105PE), which is itself powered from a PoE switch in the server room. If you're running more than one PoE device though, I'd go for a 5 port or 8 port from the 300 series with it's own power supply. Our 5 port Netgears don't have the power budget for an AP and another device, I've found. As others have said, your single uplink up to the main network needs to be a trunk available to both VLANs, so both ends need to be VLAN configurable. Then assign each port it's VLAN as necessary.

Huh, me too! I wonder why they made that change, if indeed it was an intentional change. Seems unlikely they'll have changed the licensing situation.

It sounds like it! I guess it's going to be case by case solution for each instance. Best of luck with it all. Even with management support, no-one likes the IT guy when they're telling them to change "the way it's always been" for security reasons!

I've got a static MSI package that installs VC 2015-2022 in one go. Anything older that that, I use the MSI for that release. I suspect if someone's done a PowerShell script for it, that's probably more advanced than my method. I put Avid Desktop on in the end, on the off chance our music guy wants to log in using his own licensing. I knobbled the automatic startup, though, that was intrusive. We don't have a license server, I've only really rolled this out with the intention of using Sibelius First, the cut down version of the notation software.

Many thanks for this! I had got most of the way with getting the MSI, and am relying on our 2015-22 rollups of VC Redist to cover that, but it was the fonts package I was struggling with. For an installer that's fundamentally MSI based, they don't half make an effort to hide it! Did you bother installing the Avid Link Desktop? I'm unsure, as much as our music teacher only requested Sibelius First for music notation, I think he might have a login to license Sibelius for more via Avid Link :/

This may not be the route you want to, or are able, to take, but my first thought would be to looking at getting the software reinstalled in the computer, rather than user context, if necessary with its own service account. I am aware this might not work in all scenarios, though!