DavR

This is an option, and would no doubt be a very popular one, iPads still have that desirability factor. I'm not sure I can justify the costs just for the cameras, though. Maybe if we were in the position that we were retiring some, but we work our iPads into the ground before they get that far.

Never really had much trouble with TT, other than it needs updating quite often. Unzip the exe to get the MSI, we deploy with a NoDesktopShortcut.mst that I made. As with others, we put the license file on a mapped drive, and give staff a link to the license file. Opening the license file opens the software.

It's an option, I guess. We'd probably be buying a few, though, and I'm not sure I want to get into managing another fleet of devices, with all the OS updates and security considerations that come with that. I'd rather have discrete devices, without all the extra phone faff and distraction.

As part of the general fallout around GDPR, a while ago we changed policy so that staff could no longer use their personal phones in the classroom to take pictures. This is a sensible move IMO, but, it does mean that staff struggle when they need to take pictures. I'm looking to buy some digital cameras for the classroom, but, I have to say the last batch were really disappointing. I thought, given how much camera tech has moved on, we'd be able to get away with some cheap no-name brand cameras, but the feedback hasn't been good. Does anyone have a recommendation for a decent digital camera at around or below the £100 mark? I can get a cheap smartphone for that price with a great camera, but I can't see anything in the standalone camera market to match.

We've running 1 job for all VMs here, but, we've only got half a dozen VMs on one host being backed up, so it's no biggie. In our previous, more complicated, server solution, we had one job running daily for all front line VMs and data, and one job that only ran on a Sunday to backup archive data. This was to allow us to save storage on the backup repository, as we only needed one copy of the archive data, not a two week history and multiple copies.

We recently replaced an old Behringer PMP-6000 with a Mackie ProFX16v3 16-Channel mixer. No complaints, and can connect it to the PC as a USB sound input, if you wanted to record the audio from the desk. We looked at the Soundcraft Signature series as well, but found they were coming out as quite a bit more expensive. The guy who runs our sound desk for events and productions was dead set on getting another powered Behringer, but we couldn't get hold of one in the UK. I'm not displeased we went down the unpowered route tbh - people here have blown far too many speakers up with powered mixers in the past.

Ugh, I really hope that Windows 11 can work with MDT. I only built and perfected my MDT setup last summer, having downgraded from the overblown nightmare that was SCCM. I don't want to go back there!

I had this conversation with a licensing reseller recently about Azure AD P1. Yes, if you buy one license, it opens up the options for the whole tenant. But, my understanding is that every user who uses the functionality should be licensed, so in this case, everyone covered by the retention policy should have an A5 licence. O365 A5 could behave differently to AAD P1 of course.

Also, just looking AB Tutor up - it's a classroom control app. Could it be that AB Tutor is actively preventing the install of unauthorised apps?

I've not had this exact issue, but I've had similar scenarios in the past that have been caused by software dependencies. In our scenario, SCCM client would fail if IPEVO Presenter was installed, because IPEVO mucked around with the versions of MS Visual C++ that were installed. Could it be that something the AB Tutor installs or reconfigures prevents the install of Adobe CC? A good thing to try would be, on a PC with AB Tutor installed, try and manually run the Adobe CC installer. If there's a hard error preventing the install, it might give you an error message you can use to troubleshoot.

Hmmm, looks like I'm going to be limited to Option 1, regardless. You need O365 E5/A5 before you can target your retention policies by mailbox or group. E3/A3 and below, looks like you can only have one retention policy for email across the board.

From my experience, language packs need to be installed per user, not per machine. Off the top of my head I don't remember where the language packs come from, though. Do they need Windows update access to fetch them, somewhere along the way?

The question is, do you have any Ukrainian language keyboards? You'll need some Cyrillic alphabet inputs I think. I've done this for Russian before using a PowerShell script per user, see below, just swap "ru" for whatever the Ukranian is. $UserLanguageList = New-WinUserLanguageList -Language "en-GB,en-US,ru" Set-WinUserLanguageList -LanguageList $UserLanguageList -Force To only apply this to computers with a relevant keyboard, I used 'Configure user Group Policy loopback processing mode' and applied a policy with the user login script to those computers only.

I'm currently looking at setting up email retention policies in Office 365, as per recommendations from our last data protection audit. We have an agreed retention period of up to 3 years on email, although in practical terms we've never put any measures in place to enforce it. This is because some emails will contain financial, personnel or SEND data which might need to be kept longer. My plan is to enforce deletion after 3 years as the default policy on email, but I was wondering how others have dealt with the exceptions for emails with longer retention periods. From what I can see, my options are: Creating labels and educating staff that they need to use these on emails/folders that need to be retained beyond 3 years Different policies for different mailboxes dependent on job role, eg, Finance Team 7 years, SEND 31 years, etc. Option 1 strikes me as the most accurate, but also the most time consuming, and most likely to fail as users inevitably don't use the labels correctly. Option 2 would be far easier, but, a pretty broad stroke. Anyone care to share how they've done theirs?

Just a quick update on this one. We've been speaking to Millgate the last week or so, and not only were they happy to help, they've actually saved us money on our licensing renewal, when I was expecting it to go up. Very pleased with the outcome. I suppose I should thank Trustmarque for dumping us!

Not a solution but a workaround, could you run the two non-touch monitors off a splitter? That way PC only sees two screens to choose between for interactivity, which it can usually deal with. I appreciate this comes at an extra cost though.

May give EnviroElectronics an email at some point as well. Our current contractor just whacked us with a load of new charges, not amused.

I use Meraki, no Mosyle, but I'm pretty sure it's Remove lock Passcode.

The second one appears to give you different options of 'From' addresses? I would guess that they've put the SEND button up top, next to the 'From' email address field, so you have visibility when you press SEND, who you're sending as.

We use a company called WasteCare to shift our old interactive whiteboards - https://www.wastecare.co.uk/contact/ They do charge for whiteboards, £15-20 each I think. A lot of companies do now though, as they're a pain to move and don't have much scrap value. We're North London, so Hemel shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

Does anyone want some old-style BeeBots? We have 9 (+1 dead for parts) older BeeBots that run off 3 x AA batteries each. They're a bit knocked about, but they work. We stopped using them because it was a pain making sure that they all had working AA batteries in, we upgraded to the USB chargeable ones on a docking station instead. Would suit a smaller school with no BeeBots that wants some, and a teacher/IT lead who doesn't mind battery management Free, just cover postage (approx £5).

We use basic Nokia 105s for our trip phones. Cheap to buy (approx £15 + VAT), great battery life, and don't cost much to run as they've got no data connection - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nokia-105-Dual-SIM-Black-unlocked/dp/B097MSDQ3L/ We did have to buy a smartphone for one teacher, as they had special permission to use WhatsApp to talk to parents and take and send photos. Android is your best bet here, not as many MDM options, but a tenth of the price of iPhone. We bought a Ulefone Note 6P 32GB for £62 + VAT. That model doesn't seem to be available any more, but similar ones from Ulefone and others are under £100 on Amazon.

Years ago we used Softcat to quote for some iPads. Eventually, I had to quite firmly tell our account rep to stop calling us, it was just relentless. Still they kept calling. That said, I've seen others speak well of them in other threads more recently.

Last year we replaced our hall projector with an Epson EB-2250U @ 5000 lumens. We stuck with a ceiling mount on a pole. It's still a traditional lamp model, not laser or LCD, but we just didn't have the budget. It's worth noting that a lot of projectors are coming at 16:9 instead of 4:3 now. We got around this by dumping our projection screen and using the whitewashed wall behind it. Some models you can adjust to run at 4:3 in the options, some you can't.

Have you considered joining your local ANME group? They have regional face-to-face meetings once a term, which are good for the sort of conversations you're considering. Disclaimer - yes, I am a member Between them and good old EduGeek, the networking and discussion opportunities have been invaluable for me.