Aldmi

Who owns the Whatsapp Business Account? (The school or the indivdual). The school own the device and sim card, number etc Why was "work inapproprite" communication taking place on a "work" account. Is it a safeguarding risk? It was inappropriate in the sense that it included overly critical comments about senior leadership—definitely not something that would been shared via email.

Hi everyone, I’m looking for advice regarding the use of WhatsApp Business in a school setting, specifically concerning GDPR compliance. As a school, we primarily use Office 365 (Outlook and Teams for some parent meetings) and iSAMS to communicate with parents. However, for the last six months, our admissions manager at our independent school has been using a business phone with WhatsApp Business to communicate with prospective parents. In some cases, the communication has continued even after the students have joined the school. At the time this was introduced, I raised concerns as the school’s Data Protection Officer. I felt this wasn’t appropriate due to the lack of central control over the data and the potential GDPR implications. Recently, we had a data access request from a former staff member who had communicated with the admissions manager via WhatsApp. Some of the messages exchanged were not work-appropriate, and they even asked if they could delete certain messages before I reviewed the device. This highlighted my initial concerns. Now, the admissions manager wants to continue using WhatsApp Business, but I’ve been asked to report back on whether it’s compliant and, if not, why. From my research, most information seems to focus on personal WhatsApp, not the business version. However, my understanding is that GDPR requires data to be centrally managed and easily retrievable for access requests or audits. This is straightforward with Office 365 and iSAMS, but WhatsApp doesn’t seem to meet these requirements, meaning it likely isn’t compliant. I’ve also spoken to a few other schools, and none of them seem to use WhatsApp for parent communication. Has anyone else encountered a similar situation or have any advice on how to handle this? Thanks in advance!

It seems like something has been partially set up, as Smoothwall is connected to Active Directory and is filtering based on the groups students belong to.

We recently had a Smoothwall firewall installed, replacing our previous Fortinet device. One of the engineers set it up to replicate our previous configuration, including alerting myself and the safeguarding lead whenever a student attempts to access restricted content (e.g., pornography). The issue we're facing is that these alerts only provide the IP address of the device. To identify the student, I currently have to: Check the onsite DHCP server. Block the device. Wait for a student to report that their internet isn’t working. This process is time-consuming and inefficient. I’ve heard that Smoothwall can be configured to require students to log in using their Active Directory accounts, which would make identifying individuals much easier. However, I haven’t been able to find any guidance in the help section about setting this up. Does anyone know if this is possible and, if so, how to configure Smoothwall to require AD logins for personal devices? Any advice would be much appreciated!

We have terminated a etachers contarct with immediate effect and they are no longer allowed on the school site. In clearing out their office we have found a USB stick which has a mixture of their personal stuff (family photos, bank statements etc) and also school related stuff (student reports, tracking data etc) The school uses 365 so all data is stored on onedrive/sharepoint so we have never had this issue before. Anyone had this situation before and how have they addressed it? Its their own personal USB so not school property but feel it would be a data breach handing it back. The member have staff has ingagaed a solicitor who has demanded it back

Thanks for the advice everyone, had the remote support session and touchwood it is now working. Looks like it was a combination of the advice you all gave: the issue here looks to have been a combination of bad cached info and DNS throttling. I added in additional DNS servers to avoid the DNS issues and also cleared the DNS cache. Also, I cleared the Guardian caches and then disabled them so that the HTTPS and Proxy caches will no longer cause problems.

domain has our internal domain there but hidden it

ARP Table size is 16384 and SYN backlog queue size is 65536 I've just rung and said the head is close to making an official complaint and it is now been escalated so hopefully get something sorted

I'm really dissapointed as well, we had Fortinet for 8 years and one of the reasons we moved is because Smoothwall said as they are UK passed and understood schools we would get much better support

Had a smoothwall S9+ installed over the summer and not had any major issues until a couple of weeks ago Randomly one day all users either wired or on the wifi couldn't get onto random sites or took ages to load and both getting the error message conenctions timeout. I rebooted the firewall and that seemed to fix it and logged it with Smoothwall. They said because I rebooted they couldn't see the cause! Tuesday morning same thing happened again and I logged a high prioity support ticket, The only update i've had since then is that its been passed to second line support. It causing major issues here as we can't access iSAMS, office 365 and some online exams had to be cancelled today. I've added a few staff as exceptions and theirs are working fine. I'm new to smoothwall so not sure if there is anything I can do other then keep chasing the support for an update. I've run the Functionality test and atatched the results if anyone has any ideas on anythign I can try

We moved from a Fortigate firewall a Smoothwall over the summer and seems to be going ok so far We have the S9+ and just wodnered if anyone else had this model and could comment on the noise of the unit? Since the start of term the fans sound like they are going full speed and like a jet engine. Just wondered if this was normal as you could hardly hear the old fortigate unit

Just wondering what other people do or any advice. As the information I am finding online is a bit mixed. Most of the student info is kept in iSAMS. Some things such as uniform agreements, ICT agreements etc are printed, signed by students, and then put in a paper file (never to see the light of day again) I'd proposed using Microsoft Forms for these sorts of agreements, but management insists they want an actual signature As a compromise, I’ve said why don't I just scan the signed documents in and add them to the pupil record in iSAMS and then we can get rid of the paper copy. In terms of data protection is it fine to destroy the paper copy after it’s been scanned in and would the scanned version still be valid?

We currently have Fortinet firewall/moniutor and moving to smoothwall this summer. All our students have byod iPads and we have never used the deep packet inspection so haven't needed syduetns to install a certificate. However with smoothwall we are going to be doing this, so will need them to install the certificate. How does everyone who does this get the certofocater to the devices? With papercut we emailed all students a weblink to install that profile

Wondered if anyone had seen this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-64939558 Our Head has asked me to contact them and look at applying for one Does anyone know much about it? My first thought was if its getting that hot its going to be using a lot of data and will absolutely hammer our network. A lot of our switches are way best the recommend life cycle so big concern it would cause an outage

FYI I asked our account manager a few weeks ago about the new curriculum manager as we wanted to use it for activities and music lessons. The response I got was You are correct that eventually Activities Manager will be replaced by Curriculum Manager. However there has been a very significant delay in Curriculum Manager meaning that it will not be available for some considerable time. So, I would advise looking again at Activities Manager