CyBeRkId2002

Hi all, I posted a thread the other day about OneDrive and happened to mention, for context, that we were still currently using 'Roaming Profiles'. Another Edugeek'er commented on this, and in turn it made me question whether we were doing the right thing. When we last reviewed our Profile & AppData practice (around 4-5 years ago in fairness, before the time of UE-V) there was a general consensus of 'Roaming Profiles' = Good, 'Redirecting AppData' = bad. This is the solution we implemented and, with a good long list of exclusions, it seems to have been working very well indeed for the past few years with very few issues bar a corrupt profile every now and then. None the less, as Microsoft have suggested they are increasingly distancing themselves from Roaming Profiles - instead promoting the UE-V solution-, us having less of a need to roam in general and several posts on here that a 'Mandatory Profile' & 'UE-V' hybrid being a better setup I thought I would review again. After looking at UE-V again more recently I do like the theory behind it of just syncing the bits of profile and AppData that are needed so over the last few days, when I have had a few minutes spare, I have set about creating a Mandatory profile & had a play around with UE-V. The results surprised me in that I cannot seem to create a mandatory profile that loads anywhere near as fast, let alone faster, than our roaming ones currently do. In stumbling around on the net to find out exactly where I had gone wrong I came across this research piece which seems to exactly mimic my experience: https://www.go-euc.com/performance-difference-between-user-profiles/ In our environment when logging on to a computer cold (no local profile already stored) it takes: Approx 22-25 seconds from hitting enter on a roaming profile to be completely logged on Approx 50 seconds from hitting enter on a Mandatory Profile user to being completely logged on Most of this is a delay in the 'Please wait for the User Profile Service' stage of logon where, I presume, the local computer is filling in the gaps in my mandatory profile (created on a fairly clean machine) with the bits it needs from the default user profile on the computer it is logging into. I am posting this in part to start a discussion around why, other than Microsoft wagging their finger saying we should no longer be using it, are roaming profiles so disliked and being moved away from? Does anyone else have a similar experience to us and has decided to stick with roaming profiles? Are there other benefits to going Mandatory / UE-V that I have not taken into account (other than storage space... ours take a few GB for our 1500 users so that is a negligble cost to us)? Did I build our default profile wrong? Should I have done it on a desktop with ALL software installed and if so would this have made a big difference?

Hi all, Looking at setting up OneDrive for our staff and students but wondering how others had got on and what approach / level of adoption you are taking? A little bit about our setup currently: We are currently using Roaming Profiles for staff & students Local Profiles are deleted at log-off We enforce 'OneDrive' Files on Demand OneDrive is currently set to the default location (Local Profile > OneDrive - Tenency) which is cleared at Log-on This seems to work, everyone has access to their OneDrive documents within about 5-10 seconds of logging on. My queries I suppose are: If anyone is doing the above, how are you ensuring large files are transferred before log-off. My primary concern is if saving to a Local Profile (that is cleared) there is the small potential for loss of work. If people are redirecting the full Home folder for staff and students any info you can provide on how you went about this, moving files across, how you syncronise from a share (which I believe is a limitation) would be very much appreciated.

@mavhc - Also, is the report you ran for emails without TLS available in the security and compliance section of Office 365?

@pete - Cheers. We are not big OneDrive users at present (working towards this) so feel this may be a step too far at present. With regards email popping up on computers - I am worried about this externally, not here. We already have the systems in place to prevent this happening but worried if we send a particularly sensitive email outside of the college and their is a breach on the receiving end. Having something like egress would go PART WAY to mitigating this. @mavhc - so have you forced TLS for all? My concern would be that our MIS sends via our tenency. I would suspect out of the 2000 or so parent emails we regularly email to, at least a handful will be regularly failing and not receiving information. This is on top of other random contacts. Good question on threats! My big concern at present is the specific transfer of extremely sensitive information outside of the school environment. I am thinking communication with welfare services, the police ... anything the ICO would deem as particularly sensitive where we must take the highest security measures possible. This is where security in transit, but also security the other end and ensuring it reaches the intended recipient are of vital importance.

Just for clarity, I am Spence_101's colleague and he posted the above on my behalf this morning. Also, another negative I have thought of for option 2 (possibly the biggest) is that egress / secure mail phishing is becoming increasingly common so people will be wary of using the links

@robyholmes - Cheers! @jthompson -With regards option 1, we currently do have opportunistic TLS1.2 configured but are struggling to grasp how to increase security in a manner that provides timely feedback should a message not be possible using this mechanism. NDR's take a day or two to come back which is way to long to consider acceptable if a message is urgent. - Firefox Send isn't something I had come across but does this not itself present its own GDPR concerns? Will need to investigate this further.

Morning all, Looking for some advice on the best way to go about migrating one users email from one domain to another. A bit of background, we are a Secondary Academy who have formed an Academy trust. Both the Academy & Academy Trust are on the same tenency. We are running Exchange Hybrid and the vast majority of staff are still on our local Exchange Server. My question is what is the best way to get a user who has moved from the academy to a role in the central academy trust setup with a new email? For the last couple of staff members we created new accounts, exported PSTs, switched them across... the whole thing got quite messy and I think I may have over-complicated it! This time round I am thinking: I migrate the particular user to EOL I use ADSIEDIT to assign the user a new email of [email protected] (making it primary by putting SMTP at the start) Doing these simple things I believe should achieve the same thing. My questions I suppose are: Am I missing anything? Will the users login remain the same ([email protected]) Will it break the automatic configuration of Exchange from our local domain? Thanks in advance for any and all advice!

Morning all, What AV are you all using for primary schools (NOR between around 70 - 500). At our secondary we use Windows Defender with SCCM for rollout, deployment and monitoring but in all honesty I don't think the primaries have the infrastructure (or support time at the minute) to support a full SCCM install and as far as I am aware this is the only option to properly monitor Defender. Looking for something easy to deploy, dependable and relatively cheap. Rough pricing I should expect to pay would be nice too. Regards, Michael

Hi all, I wondered if anyone was having issues with Smart Ink (and the detection of the smart board over the last few days)? All computers seem to have stopped detecting the board at start-up, and it seems to be related to the Smart Service not starting... If we manually run a scan for the Completely out of the blue and affecting most, if not all, computers! I wondered if it could be related to either a cumulative update that was distributed a few days ago (KB4522355), or a recent update to Windows Defender (KB4052623). Trying to establish if it is affecting others, or just us, to narrow down the cause. Regards, Michael

Hi all, I have been tasked by our head of performing arts to investigate systems to streamline the way they are recording and monitoring student progress, particularly in BTEC Drama. Ultimately they are recording snippets of students performances and would like they ability to quickly and simply record clips, and attach comments and feedback related to this. At present they have Excel and Word tracking documents that are recorded in our staff drive, and are manually recording performances on video cameras, link these etc. which can be a time consuming process. They have asked if an iPad would help in achieving these aims which I don't think will on its own, but wondered if anyone knew of any software that allows you to record videos and comment alongside these. Would also be pretty much essential that they also have the ability to categorise these (by student), back them up and possibly extract them to another system/device should they need to be moderated. Does anyone have any suggestions on ways to streamline this? I am aware of GDPR considerations surrounding this and appropriate precautions will be put in place, just looking for technical solutions at the minute.

Also desperate for an update on this! We are part of a MAT and have 4 schools on Exa, with another 2 due to join in the next fortnight. Have received great service up until this point but this needs resolving as our MIS and voice (in some circumstances) relies on having a solid connection!

@RootsSchImp - Thanks for the thoroughly detailed response. It pretty much detailed exactly what I was wanting to achieve without knowing exactly how (I am slowly starting to get my head around when to use FILTER, when to use CALCULATE etc.)! The data is looking far more like I am envisioning now. The only problem I would still like to solve is how I can add filters to this so I can give staff the ability to just show an AP at a time rather than inundating them with data! Obviously each one of these results is now stored against each Term so adding columns and / or slicers will not work. What would be the best approach for this? Once again thanks very much for all of your help oin this, it is really appreciated.

cheers! trying to work out the implications of this for us and it's usefulness. If I am understanding correctly, alongside our data assessment tracker we would have at least 1 other column on our marksheet called something along the lines of 'Target Difference' This new result would be held as an AP1/AP2/AP3 etc. result so would show on the matrix grid correctly If we went down this route can this column be retrospectively added and calculated for all results currently entered, or would this usually be something generated as a grade is input? I suppose this is just a different way of doing the calculations, rather than in BI

@bfelton - honest answer is I am not sure if our data manager does this at present and, if so, whether this exports to PowerBI. How do you have it in Sims? Another aspect altogether that shows whether the student is on target (and/or by how much? @bobsmith - Yep, agree completely that the point of BI is the flexibility and the ability to manipulate to your needs. my question is around the specifics of how I would manipulate the date in this scenario... very much a BI beginner and looking for some practical advice given the scenario I have

Afternoon all, I am hoping to get a little help and support from some of the experienced data analysts on here, on how I am best structuring data for PowerBI (@RootsSchImp, @elJukes etc.). My query is quite niche and for someone not experienced in data analytics quite hard to explain so please bear with me! I have been tasked with a post-Assessment Point tracking sheet which on the surface sounds (and I think should be!) really straight forward, but when I have tried to create it I have struggled a little. I have attached a mockup of what I would like the sheet to look like. I have also attached a sample of how the assessment data is currently structured. What staff really want is to see, for their subject, which students are not on target at a particular AP and in conjunction with Attitude to Learning grades identify key students for interventions. Mockup Data Structure My main questions I suppose are: Having played around a little I think I am best using a Matrix visualisation for this? Would that be a good starting point? I was thinking Name, followed by Subject for the rows and Term for the Columns. Am I right in thinking to get a matrix visualisation to work I would need to Pivot the Assessment Type column, using Result as the Values? This would, for example, give me a column for all of my different assessment types that I could add to the Values Column? So far so good and I can get it to work to a point and I can show Current TA and Attitude to Learning grades using this method. The problem I have is getting my calculated column to work. The Target Grade is in its own term (TTG) so it doesn't show alongside the AP1 data, for example, and therefore a calculated difference column showing students who are on target TA - TTG, for example) will not work). I am not a fan of entering data against every term unnecessarily so wondered if anyone could see a way of manipulating the data so I could calculate each AP against a single target value I would quite like to also also list students KS2 Banding. Again this is in a result set all on it's own. Even if we did copy this to all AP points, I would not really want it duplicating multiple times in the table as a matrix table would do. Hopefully I have explained thoroughly enough that you can work out what I am trying to acheive but happy to explain further if anyone has some time to point me in the right direction. Please do tell me if I am going about this the wrong way, if I should be trying a different approach or giving up on PowerBI for this altogether.

Really simple question really... or at least I hope it is! Foe those of you who have a hybrid Exchange deployment, how do you create user accounts and mailboxes? It's our first year with students having cloud mailboxes and we are finding the process more complex than it should be! At present we use Active User Manager to bulk provision users, then this year we licenced them on Office Online which provisioned them an email address. We have found out today that the new accounts created this way a) don't appear in the Global Address list and b) don't receive mail from Exchange users as the on-prem server does not no about them. I have got around this by running a powershell to 'Enable-RemoteMailbox' but I wondered if I am missing something and there is a simpler way. How are you creating users (individually and in bulk)? If scripting are the steps you have to: Create User Account Create Documents Folder Create Profile Folder (and set permissions) Licence User in O365 Fill in local AD settings using Enable-RemoteMailbox

Funnily enough I think I have just come to pretty much the same conclusion. Cant be done in Exchange Transport so: One rule in Office 365 for the user doing a forward and informing the sender Another rule deleting the email from the first users mailbox (as they don't want duplicates) Only issue with this, as you say, is sender only gets one message... but its better than nothing. - - - Updated - - - out of curiosity, what did you switch to? Google? How do they compare

Hi Steve, The transport rule is the one I would like to go for... but I can't seem to find how to do it in Exchange Online. Is it possible.

Hi all, Seems like a simple task and something I am sure I did back on Exchange (Local), but I seem to be struggling to recreate on Exchange Online. A few members of our staff are moving from the secondary email address to a trust-wide address. What I would like to do is: Leave the other email accessible as an archive (convert to shared mailbox) Redirect all future college emails to the trust email address (O365 Transport Rule( Send a bounceback for around 12 months that the email address they have sent to is now closed, the email has been forwarded but in future please email ...@... It is the final step I seem to be struggling with. I am farily certain this was possible in Exchange, but unless I am missing something obvious can't see a way to do it in Exchange Online

We had Arbor, iSAMS, Capita and Bromcom in to present. Best thing you could do is get as many in as you can initially with senior leaders, key stakeholders and create a shortlist of who may fit the schools needs. Then the real work starts in drilling down to exactly what each systems strengths and weaknesses are!

Bit of a general question really. In this post-GDPR world should be transferring exam results to follow-on schools via CTF or other methods? I have just found out that our new MIS doesn't have the ability to export exam results via CTF, which has lead me to look into the CTF guidance and found that it is not listed within the official schema. The school have asked if we could transfer this another way, whcih isn't a problem from a technical standpoint. Just wanted to check peoples thoughts on this. On one hand the CTF contains other sensitive data, but on the other if the government aren't suggesting we transfer it should schools be getting it another way. Am I worrying too much about GDPR?

Hi spr, Too busy today to write a detailed reply but, in brief, our opinion hasn't changed. Still very happy with the service and software, results day imports seemed to be a doddle to the point where the exams officer was worried she had missed something. Myself and a colleague have also picked up a lot of curriculum management over the summer (allocating students to classes) due to a long-term absence and despite us having no particular training in the area we have been able to muddle through and get it sorted ... not something I am 100% certain I would have been able to do in our previous MIS. It has it's quirks, all software does, but there seems to be a definite want for everyone to improve all aspects... the change-logs always include genuinely useful features and improvements, and having met come of the developers I can only see things getting better. If you want a more detailed response drop me a pm and I will try my hardest to get back to you asap. Cheers.

ah, ok. I find that strange but that at least explains the problems I am getting. Will look for a tool to auto-populate this. I am guessing it is just the AD email field I need. - - - Updated - - - Also, we have hybrid fully setup and everything else is working. Just not this.

This summer we have moved to Office 365 for our students (from local exchange) and everything seems to go well, except on first run Outlook was not auto-creating the Outlook account, after a bit of trial and error, some double-checking of autodiscover settings etc. it seems to be as simple as users not having the primary SMTP field populated within local AD. Our process is: Create users in local AD This is synced with Office 365 using Azure AD Connect Assign them a licence in Microsoft 365 (via script) The above creates them their email account I had presumed as we have Azure AD Connect the primary SMTP email would be written back to the local AD (which is where Outlook looks for the email address). Is this not the case? How do you manage this? Manually populate the email address field too when creating the account? Or should, as I suspect, it be syncing?

Looks like very mixed opinions here then. Looking at the DfE guidance then, and what would make our administration abilities simpler, we may pre-admit with a start-date on the start of term. This makes the most sense to me, will quickly help us identify who has not attend and be able to contact them to find out a reason. My only concern was whether we were going against admissions guidance on this but looking at the document above this does not seem to be the case.