DavR

Heya, can probably help. Are we talking ActivBoard 1 or 2?

August 23rd was when I last heard on my Capita support call about the MLSConnect software we bought for Junior Librarian, but has never worked properly. Requests for updates have been met with a stony silence. Well, they won't be seeing a penny of their invoice money til it's resolved.

Someone did try to explain this to me once that a lot of companies selling through Amazon are using older / out of date stock, but I'm not convinced myself. I assume you're taking into account the difference between compatible and originals. We use Highgate IT, not always cheaper than Amazon but often on a par, reliable and we have a good rapport with our man there. I'd love a link to the two-for-£46 toner btw, just bought a HP402dn ourselves.

Oh, I'm sure. As would Impero and however many other paid for remote support / management agents. I was just rather hoping we could do something with the CentraStage that we can get for no extra cost from LGfL - but you get what you pay for I guess!

Although, to give them their dues, if we were to invest in the product, it would be massively discounted versus the retail cost.

Has anyone else taken up the LGfL CentraStage offering - https://support.lgfl.org.uk/public/docs/lgfl_services/SF_CentraStage.pdf ? I've been trialling it this week, having used the full feature CentraStage product in the past. Was all looking great, until I got the sales phone call that outlined what was and wasn't included under the LGfL deal The LGfL deal includes On Demand only (which I knew) which is incredibly limited (just finding this out). If you want to use the remote support features, it relies on the end user initiating the session, which is a bit naff for remote support internally, and useless for servers etc. The On Demand is pretty much a home solution, not an enterprise one. I knew it was limited, but got excited as initially all features were available (trial license only). A pity really, I might keep it for auditing machines, but beyond that it's not much use to us without further investment.

HANG ON. I will now retract my previous dance. I've just re-read, 30 months is two and a half years, not three, isn't it? So that's ten months testing, sixteen months service. Oh bobbins, that actually changes sweet FA for us, we'll still need to re-image every $%^ summer to stay in support. Oh well, since we went to 1803 I get next summer free at least, as two and a half years on that should hold us til Sept 2020.

Anything in particular that was a game changer for you? We went 1703 to 1803 without any real problem over the summer. Not contesting your point that version upgrades should be treated seriously and with utmost suspicious, just curious to see if I missed something!

Wooohooo! *does a little dance* Shame they chose to give the 30 month cycle to the 09 release, BUT, assuming re-imaging over the summer, that gives ten months testing, plus two full years in service, before we have to re-image again. We've been running with the 03 releases, which meant upgrading every year to stay supported.

In that case, I would say your best bet is to find the registry settings that control colour / BW, and push out the correct settings by GP prefs. They're usually under HKCU\Printers\Connections if I recall.

GDPR requirement is that you have to have a contract in place with a certified WEEE company for disposals, BUT, I would argue that this is a donation not a disposal, so WEEE rules don't apply. WEEE would become an issue for the next guy. As long as you've securely wiped the data, the only issue I would see is liability, I don't think there is a GDPR issue. Get a disclaimer signed and record the serial numbers of what you've handed over, and I wouldn't think it was a problem. Better the kit be reused as spares than scrapped. Make sure you get management approval though, just in case it is against school policy.

If you don't have SCCM, I would warn that it's not a step to be taken lightly, or cheaply. It's a big system that is designed to deal with OS and software deployment as well as updates. Office can be installed with a command line along the lines of "setup.exe /adminfile Custom.msp", which should be fairly easy to put into a startup script, or whatever your usual deployment method is. It's a long install though. With regards to O365 and OneDrive, we use the following group policy settings to disable access. I found I couldn't remove OneDrive from my build no matter how I tried! Block signing into Office Show OneDrive Sign In

We are a big primary and have SCCM, frankly having come from a bare bones WDS + Group Policy background I have found it very much overkill (it was installed before my time). Everything takes longer and is more complex than it needs to be, I find the whole thing sluggish and unresponsive. Mainly I just need to update programs or applications, and that was so much simpler using GP assigned software / startup scripts. The only bonus is that, when it is running correctly, software updates deploy seamlessly in the background, without adding startup delay. I will admit that Task Sequences offer a lot of opportunities too.

Hi all, An odd bug I found today that I thought I'd share here as its Education specific. Currently preparing to roll out 1803, I've made a new build which is working well (side note - just edited the WIM offline, no deploy and capture this time! ). But, after a bit of testing it turned out that our new 1803 build won't update reliably from our 2012 WSUS server, not even to report in. If I remove GP settings, it updates online just fine. After much testing, I found out that the following GP setting was the culprit: No idea why, as this is just a power policy override to allow laptops in carts to update overnight. But, if this policy setting was enabled, I could not connect to my onsite WSUS server. I've junked it as it wasn't important, but I'd love to know why it was a problem...

This one was always a bit of a pain to manage Paul, but in my experience, you cannot change printer defaults AFTER a printer has been deployed. If it was deployed as a full colour printer, then people who already have that printer will continue to see it as a full colour printer. You can change the defaults to BW, but that will only take effect for new connections. When I've had to do this, I've either deleted and recreated the new printer with the BW defaults, OR, found the correct colour settings in registry and deployed these by GP prefs. People can usually choose at print time to turn colour on in their Preferences, but when set up correctly, this should be for a single print only (excepting Publisher which is a law unto itself...).

I'm using SCCM, and found I still had to add an unattend.xml with the skipOOBE bits in to avoid this behaviour, even though it does claim these are deprecated. It was literally just the following entries for me though:

I got this working over WSUS, but found the in-place upgrades so slow, I just gave in to the fact I'm going to be making a new build and re-imaging now every summer :/ To get it working in WSUS you need the Upgrades category enabled (beware, big file storage hit) and add the esd file type in IIS as mentioned above.

How so? Still working for us on Win 10 1703 as far as I'm aware...

Just trialling NetSupport Notify at our place.... it looks fairly straightforward. @Tom_NetSupport, I don't suppose there's any chance of getting a trial key that allows more than 50 clients? We're definitely interested, but we want to do a whole site test first to see how good the coverage is going to be.

Interesting point re Bitlocker and cameras.... I've just tested, and while it does prompt to encrypt when plugged in, Bitlocker fails to encrypt because the cameras are write protected. Cameras I tested with were Panasonics. I'd rather exclude the cameras from Bitlocker policies altogether, but this doesn't look to be possible using just group policy, so the fact they fail is a handy safety net against accidental encryption I guess.

Annoying when that happens huh! But, perhaps the long overdue nudge for replacement...

Pheeeeeeew. Automatic uploads and sharing, another reason to not allow staff to use personal devices!

I *think* it was these settings, it's a while since I ran testing and like a fool forgot to write it down! Computer Policy | Admin Templates | Windows Components | Bitlocker Drive Encryption | Removable Data Drives Deny write access to removable devices not encrypted with Bitlocker - Enabled Configure use of passwords for removable devices - configured and 'Require password' ticked. You'll want to go through and configure various other bits of the Bitlocker policies, but these two settings should cause the 'prompt for encryption, otherwise read only' behaviour discussed.

Theoretically yes, but staff shouldn't be generating confidential data at home anyway, and if they are they should be looking after that USB stick. We're quite good here in that we have a minimum of people working at home. That encryption policy doesn't cover all bases, but it's the best fit for us as a primary.

School policy. I did initially argue against it, because why supply staff with cameras when every one of them already has one in their pocket? But then the very good point was raised of what happens if a teacher is ever brought to question and that's on their phone, or they lose their phone with those images on... Basically safest not to, for the liability it could place on staff as much as anything. Not national policy, but seems to be the norm in schools in our area.