DavR

Sadly staff don't have iPads here, the shared iPads we do have are always in high demand! I think we should be OK, I'm going for the option of 'prompt to encrypt', which the user can cancel and still read the drive, just not write to it. Needs to be tested though.

Ah crap. About to implement USB encryption here, but had not take cameras into account. Especially given the new online safety policy says only use school cameras to take pictures, never your mobile! Ta for the heads up, need to factor that in!

Oh yes! There it is. Fairly neat I guess, as long as they haven't taken it away from anywhere else yet

Yup, that's the one, under user config and enabled, working for me!

Upgraded one test machine to 1803 here and so far no major concerns. Performing well enough. The only thing I changed was the the new People feature on the taskbar, can't see a use for that in our environment so updated my amdx files and turned that off. Original poster mentioned something about sound controls moving into the settings app, seen no evidence of that here?

Well, maybe I have got that bit wrong. But the logic appears to be once for every new profile, and surely each new device would be a new profile. Why they felt the need for this to be a pop 'Accept and Continue' box at this point I don't know!

Oh really? Interesting to note. With it being so hard to actually view the storage on Chromebooks, and how much each profile takes up, I've erred on the side of caution. Even with that setting off though, each student will still be asked once per device they log on to, and rarely will they be using the same device. I've killed of Google Sync for now and I'll see how we go.

Anyone else noticed this new "feature" with Chome 66? https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-education/uzrm1GEX5us If you've got the "Erase all local user info, settings, and state after each sign-out" setting on for devices, you now get the "You've Signed In! Accept Google Sync etc" at every login:mad: The only way around this is to disable Google Sync, which means bookmarks, apps and extensions won't sync. So let the device fill up with user profiles, or disable syncing bookmarks etc, bit of a no-win choice that one! Very badly thought out design decision on Google's part, really doesn't take into account shared devices. We've only got fifteen Chromebooks, which could theoretically be used by 120 students, so we need the erase setting in place.

There's a name from the past that gives me shudders.... It'll probably be something to do with the database, either the clients need to be pointed to it, or the permissions are wrong on the database location. Have you had it working on Windows 10 before? Not sure I've seen that one working beyond 7 myself.

The North-South divide is a powerful thing! I'll PM you...

UPDATE - if anyone is still looking, I still have 20 old battery packs going spare. North London pickup, available until half term hols, when they'll go out with my electrical waste!

The big headline on this for us is AD INTEGRATION! Bye bye stupid 30 minute USO authentication box. Details are sketchy, but the general idea seems to be a login script that passes your AD group and authenticates you that way. Also an interesting proposal for many may be a bulk buy deal for Neverware by Cloudready - reuse your old Windows devices as Chromebooks! I've used the home version before and it's pretty decent. Details are yet to be finalised, but LGfL do get some good bulk buy deals, so could be very cheap / no extra cost.

Ah, fair enough, I thought you might say that! Education version is a pound cheaper per device, but doesn't have integration for cloud services and a bunch of other stuff. Very useful conversation though, thanks all. Will run this by a few people and see where we go.

The Filebrowser products look more like our level. I did play around with Filebrowser Go, it will do the sort of things I want, but I left it as setting up the network shares would be a nightmare. If we could configure that by MDM however, that sounds more promising! Is there a reason you went for the Business imprint @steveg, rather than the Education?

Ooof, yeah, those sort of prices are definitely out of our price range! We're really after a free / pocket money solution, otherwise we'll just have to make do with Feem.

Foldr seems popular! But as @Arthur has hinted, what sort of prices are we looking at, and is it one off or ongoing?

Interesting! How does it work, is it something you install on your fileserver to make a share available, and then an app on the iPad? I think I did install this for someone once, but I forget the specifics now!

Can't help but feel that all a bit more than we need, and priced accordingly. Is it something you've used yourself @Arthur? Ideally I think I want just a good cheap/free app for browsing and uploading to Windows shares...

Apologies, this question has probably been dealt with before, but wondering what the latest thoughts are - how do you transfer files from your iPad to a Windows desktop / server? Has anyone implemented a file browser type app that can access SMB shares? Is WebDAV still a thing? To date, we've been using Feem v3, but it's not always very reliable and I've had complaints. I was hoping to just get the kids to upload to G Suite, but the webpage is limited on iPads, and the app assumes 1:1 where ours are shared devices. I see Microsoft have released an app called Work Folders for this, but reception seems poor. Ideally I want something as simple as possible, as we're a primary, just wondered if anyone had any good suggestions.

Just in case anyone was watching this question, or someone runs into the same problem... fixed this today. Never did get the firmware downgrades working in the end, it seems you can't roll back beyond a certain point, I suppose to stop you removing the 'original toner only' check they instigated. So I got drastic. I still had the carcass of the old Samsung CLP-680 lying around for parts, so if I couldn't downgrade the firmware, could I just swap the newer ROM it lives on with an older one? Answer, yes, and it's not as difficult as you may think. Take off the side panel, and just swap the mainboard (newer firmware) with an older mainboard (older, more open, firmware). Quite a few push plugs, but only four screws. Warranty probably invalidated, and printer registering incorrect serial number and page count, but it's halved the printing costs for this device

Good call, haven't tried it with another account in testing. But the fault is the same as reported by other users so I expect it to fail. I guess it must be hardware. I think I'm just more used to Windows devices, where I can diagnose the fault myself and then pass that down the phone to support - it's a little frustrating not knowing exactly what's going wrong!

Ok, bizarre twist.... It only seems to be certain website that cause it to freeze? Eg, BBC News is fine, Ultimate Guitar crashes within a few minutes!

Recently deployed a set of 15 Chromebooks in our juniors, and these have been very well received. I do have a strange fault with one of them though, it's persistently freezing. I've powerwashed, and done a reinstall from recovery media, neither seems to have cleared it. I've read a few threads suggesting extension sync is an issue, but still happened with that turned off. Anyone got any ideas? It feels OS based, so want to rule that out before I hang on the phone to Dell trying to troubleshoot. Thanks!

We have a local admin user that I put in our Win 10 build. It's a non-standard username (ie, not 'admin' etc) and has a basic password on it, so it's about as secure as a network user login.

Hi all, So I'm very cross with the above printers at the moment. We have four of these around the school, ageing, but they're on an extended warranty. One of them failed, the engineer couldn't fix it, so they just sent us out a new one. Bonus, thinks I. Wrong. I've just come to change the toners from the freebie starters it came with to our high yield budget compatible ones, and it won't have it! Complains the toners are not compatible. It seems Samsung have slipped some verification in their firmware to only accept genuine toners, which we can't afford. This is galling as I have other printers exactly the same that will accept the cheap toners. There is an option to up/downgrade the firmware on these devices, but of the two I've found, one downgrade does nothing, and the other won't load, must be too many steps back. Anyone got any ideas or experience with these? Tips and tricks to bypass the verification, or achieve the necessary firmware downgrade. Thanks!