DavR

We've had this a few times this term, but, have found it to be browser dependant. I.e., it wasn't working for me in Chrome, but then it did in Edge. Reset Chrome profile, worked on Chrome again for a bit, then crapped out again. I'm fairly sure the problem for us is a setting or file in Chrome somewhere, but I've no idea what.

This is an old problem, that is fixed by upgrading to the latest version (3.1 last time I checked).

Excellent news, glad to be of help! Tbh exercising my MDM knowledge helps me remember how the thing works, same as yourself, it's very easy to set it up and forget.

You should still be able to use the settings in here to clear the activation lock. My understanding is that the activation lock exists on Apple's activation servers, not on the device itself, so you should be able to clear it regardless of the status of the device. It's exactly the kind of scenario you're facing, that these features are here to resolve. You may need to use a bypass code, if the clear lock doesn't work, it's been a while since I've done one. So, that's where things get a little complicated. There is a user mode activation lock, set by a user registering an iPad against their Apple ID, and an MDM activation lock, which you can set from within your MDM. Sounds like you've got the former enabled. You'll find this page a useful read - https://documentation.meraki.com/SM/Monitoring_and_Reporting/Activation_Lock_for_iOS_Devices

You should be able to override the activation lock from Meraki. You can either do it individually from the device's page, same section where the wipe commands are. Or you can do it en masse from the Devices screen. You may find it helpful to add the activation lock column to your view.

Pretty sure every mailbox covered by the retention policy is going to need the enhanced license, if you want to keep on the legit side of things. Just because one license unlocks the feature set, doesn't mean you only need one licence to use it, has always been my understanding. Every mailbox that benefits from a feature needs to be licenced for that feature - anything else is wishful thinking IMO.

This was a known problem with version 2.x, as far as I've seen, it is fixed in version 3.1.

I've just had a conversation with someone from Microsoft support about this issue. They have confirmed that it is a licensing issue. At one point, the Compliance Admin Centre was open and allowed creating policies regardless of license, but they later tightened up on this, which is why we have visible policies in there, but, can no longer edit them. The support agent confirmed that on his own test tenant, he recreated the problem, and then resolved it by adding an A5 license trial. Not sure where this leaves us tbh - other than facing a hefty hike in our licensing bill next year!

Could you not get your helpdesk sending mail over SMTP via the LGfL Mail Relay? As an example, we're using the mail relay to send email out as [email protected] from the scanners on our photocopiers, plus any other device that needs to send email. No USO accounts required, just a little config at the Adept end.

Tbh, there are a lot of different solutions for putting exes to MSIs..... 7Zip to open exes works well, if indeed the installer is based on MSI underneath. There were a couple of tools over the years that allowed you to wrap the command line "setup.exe /silent" or similar as an MSI, but I never found them to be very reliable. I use Advanced Installer to create my own MSIs sometimes, but that's not a straight exe conversion, it's more creating an MSI from the ground up, specifying what files, registry entries and shortcuts you want, and where. Back in the day, there were a lot of "snapshot" tools, that would watch your exe install, and create an MSI off the back of it. Again, not always very simple to use, and have somewhat gone out of fashion. In short..... it rather depends, I'm afraid!

It's the one described at this link - https://admx.help/?Category=Office2016&Policy=ppt16.Office.Microsoft.Policies.Windows::L_DisableSetTopology

We use the GPO user setting "Do not allow PowerPoint to automatically extend the display when presenting on a laptop or tablet" to guard against PowerPoint doing this, if that's any help.

I've had a few of these lately, although I've put it down to user error, as it hasn't exactly been a flood, and there's always one or two. Just today though, I got bored of being asked the question, so I put a shortcut on teachers' desktop that switches the display to Duplicate mode: C:\Windows\System32\DisplaySwitch.exe /clone We're Win 22H2, Windows Updates automatic, but driver updates blocked.

Has anyone else had trouble with the version history feature in OneDrive / SharePoint causing files to take up massive amounts of space? We're finding that, in some cases, version history is multiplying the size of our files - for instance, one 200MB PowerPoint had 48 historical versions, and was taking up over 10GB of storage! This is particularly problematic for us, as with the coming re-think of O365 storage, our users are going to be capped at 100GB storage quotas in their OneDrive (still winging it on A1 here). I've been banging my head against a wall for a day or so trying to reduce the number of versions kept for a particular user that was over the limit, and by disabling minimum version history for our tenant (MS guidance is 100 save points should be the minimum), then setting a max version history of 5 revisions on the users OneDrive, and running some PowerShell scripts to remove old versions, I've managed to get the user down from 108GB to 47GB. But it wasn't exactly a neat process. Has anyone else tried to tackle this? Or have we just accepted the storage hit and moved on?

Huh. I wonder if that's a new change, or, whether it was always so, but they're just now shutting down our access to the policies in the GUI. If this is the cause, then it's very poor show, as we've still got (potentially unlicensed) policies in force, that we now don't have GUI access to remove and comply with licensing. I wonder if as a test, adding one A3 or A5 license would re-enable creating and editing policies in the GUI?

Ah frag, I hope not. We're A1 Plus. My previous understanding was A1 et al gets basic retention policies, but you couldn't use adaptive scopes, it was a simple include/exclude. If they're taking away even that, that's really annoying. Although, we've got policies live and in action, without having any licensing above A1 Plus? If we'd gone beyond our licensing I'd expect a big red warning, or for the whole thing to disappear. Not just go read-only in the GUI.

A1 Plus licensing is being retired from next year, 1st August - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/office-365-a1-plus You will be left with the basic A1 licensing, which will cover you for web, but not installation. I'm in the same boat, my tenant is built on A1 Plus. I'm hoping that we can just load the Office Pro Plus licensing from our OVS into our tenant (I've seen it done before, resellers used to be able to do it) to cover the installation aspect. I don't fancy the extra whack to upgrade to A3.

Hi @kennysarmy, I've not had to create a policy, all I've done is add and remove exchange mailboxes from the various policies. Here's the code that I've got, all using the Exchange Online PowerShell module. To connect to in PowerShell to edit compliance policies: Connect-IPPSSession List current mailboxes included in retention policy: Get-RetentionCompliancePolicy -Identity "[POLICY NAME]" -DistributionDetail | Select -ExpandProperty ExchangeLocation | ft List current mailboxes excluded from retention policy: Get-RetentionCompliancePolicy -Identity "[POLICY NAME]" -DistributionDetail | Select -ExpandProperty ExchangeLocationException | ft Add mailbox to retention policy: [font=Consolas]Set-RetentionCompliancePolicy [/font][font=Consolas]-Identity "[POLICY NAME]" -AddExchangeLocation "[MAILBOX [/font][font=Consolas]NAME]"[/font] Exclude mailbox from retention policy: Set-RetentionCompliancePolicy -Identity [font=Consolas]"[POLICY NAME]" [/font]-AddExchangeLocationException "[MAILBOX NAME]"

I've got a copy of this I can share, drop me a PM.

Latitude all the way, they're designed for education and are more robust. Inspiron are designed for light home use. There have been some real horror show Latitudes in recent years, but recently seem much better. We last bought the Latitude 3380 and out of a batch of 15, I think the worst I've had is a few damaged keyboards.

This is interesting - we're having the exact same problem with retention policies. Can't edit or create new ones, the whole thing is read only in the GUI. We've had a support case open for a month or more (give or take a few weeks of holiday), they've done a shared screen session and taken logs, but nothing useful has come of it yet. In the meantime, I've been able to make the changes I need via PowerShell, but it's always a steep learning curve (for me, at least), learning a whole new batch of PowerShell commands, when the GUI is *right there*

Just a bump, if anyone else has any ideas of good budget digital cameras? We did eventually find a model that we liked, for around the £100 mark, the Kodak FZ102. We bought a couple, tested out fine....... and then they discontinued them Nearest equivalent Kodaks now seem to be £140-£200, which is well out of budget.

You'll need Azure AD P1 licensing to do conditional MFA. If you've got Office 365 E3 / A3 or above, you should have this as part of your package. We had to buy it separately, but, it was only a few pounds per user license per annum. There are conflicting opinions on how many licenses you need to buy. If you buy and assign just one AAD P1 license, then the functionality will be available for everybody, but my understanding is that to do it properly, you should buy licenses for every user who is using conditional MFA functionality.

We had a network connected UPS, and ran the APC network appliance as a VM, which shut down VMs and blade servers when power runtime started running out. It's a bit fiddly to set up, but it was the only way for us to shut down multiple blade servers with a single UPS.

We used to have one of those (well, still do, because I'm loathe to scrap that much storage). IIRC, I had the blade servers themselves set to shut down gracefully after UPS power expires, then start again when power is restored. VMs shutdown / start up with the servers. I may have put a 180s delay in there, to guard against intermittent power faults, but I'm not sure now. The chassis itself didn't have any useful power control options that didn't involve scripting, so I just left that on ungraceful shutdown when power runs out, and automatic start when power returned.