Katy

So... does swing it into the skip while going "Weeeeeee!", or chucking it in a skip with "WEEEE" written on the side count? Got mine going on Wednesday

If they go in and say "I'm allergic to peanuts" and get sold food containing peanuts, that'd be on the restaurant though? Pupils (or parents) have a contract with the school which includes data such as food allergies, it's not for the pupil to have to think "is this in-house catering or outsourced? Do I need to tell them my allergy daily when it is already on the data held by the school?"

We've got the same thing being discussed at the moment, although I'd have expected something like "legitimate interest" to apply for sharing the name and allergy details, to the contracted catering company providing meals for children? (Or as it's contracted out, the one about contracts?) Don't know really, maybe we will have to get a tick box to share food allergies with the catering company on our consent forms. But then what happens if somebody dies over an unticked box?

Just to clear up any potential confusion, my rant about customer service above relates to Virgin - as an Independent school in the North West of England we've never had anything to do with LGfL.

Both - two storey and no skylights on the top floor, plus the way the classroom doors open onto the corridor (sideways onto a sort of leg off the corridor) means very little light makes it through the little window in the doors.

I didn't even ask Virgin for a quote when we left them, the connection itself was fine but as we were direct with Virgin and not via another supplier, customer service was dreadful (e.g. I tried for 3 years to get online billing, every email or call about it just got ignored. Terminating it at the end of the 3 years took 2 letters recorded delivery (ignored), 10 phone calls (everything they said never happened, we still got them chasing us for the following year's bill), eventually managed to talk to someone with a clue a few months later when they contacted us wanting to do maintenance on the line, and I said "what line? It was terminated months ago" - surprise surprise, no it wasn't but they eventually sorted it out.

Ours on a 3 year contract 2014-2017 was about £11k a year inc VAT. Don't know what they charge now, we switched to another supplier at £8k a year inc VAT (again 3 year contract). I was speaking to our supplier the other day about additional bandwidth and apparently the price for 100Mbps lines has dropped again (but of course you don't see the price drop mid contract). So it's pretty much right, especially if you've got AV and filtering thrown in. Edit: We don't have any access to the Cisco router on Virgin, or on Gamma now, but there's no firewall rules or anything set up on them - we have to provide our own firewall for this.

I still can't really see a use - even in new build, 99% of rooms will have power sockets fitted. The extra cost of putting a switch and lighting circuit in for a room with say 6 lights, vs the difference in cost between 6 x $150 panels (plus data cabling, PoE switch and UPS capacity) and 6 x £30 240V LED panels... just doesn't add up. Suppose it's for the odd time where you might need to control the room lighting at a remote site, but I can't really think of any examples that couldn't be done by PIR/microwave occupancy sensor on normal 240V lighting. On the emergency lighting front, we've got quite a few corridors which have classrooms on either side - even in the middle of the day if you turn the lights out they're pitch black.

$140 though... normal LED ceiling tile panels are about £25-£30 so you'd have to have some pretty unusual requirements (or somewhere with data but no power) to make it worth it...

I've got a similar book collection. I can throw equipment out easily but books? I just can't. Only recently got rid of the NT4 and 2000 books... still got all the 2003/XP and upwards ones

Shouldn't happen if you've got your own named admin account though, as it just alters the builtin administrator account password.

There's an API with iSAMS that spits out an XML file with all the pupil details in, and another one which gives you a zip containing the photo thumbnails named by pupilID. As it's part of a larger system there's a PHP script running on a cron job which downloads the data/photos and crunches through it once a day, dumping it out into mysql. Then the card printing program (done in C#) just pulls the list of pupils out of mysql, sticks them in a tree so i can click an individual one, and on the fly knocks up an A4 sized PNG with their name, photo, and (pupilID encoded into a barcode). Then prints this set to "fit to page". (I used to create the pass image the correct size but it printed blurred, making the image A4 then resizing down it's nice and clear). Other feature is bulk print, you just paste a list of pupil IDs into a box and it works through them

We use a Magicard Rio+ 360 printer, think it was about £900. The ink film is about £40 I think, does 300 cards. (There's other models that can do all sorts of encoding but they cost more, and we don't need them as we just buy pre-encoded RFID cards just with random numbers) Edit: For staff passes we print out of Net2 software, for pupil IDs we print from a program I wrote which pulls name, photo etc out of iSAMS and spits out a card.

I've got far too many VGA and power cables but I refuse to throw away unopened cable... they don't take up that much room. The old broke PCs/monitors etc sit in the back of the server room until there's a big enough collection then they all get carted away

We're iSAMS here (moved about 3 or 4 years ago, from Engage), while there's some bits where you go "why on Earth have they done it that way?" generally it's much faster, more reliable and less complained about than Engage (which was a local client like SIMS). All the Independents in our trust are using iSAMS on a couple of shared Azure instances, so it's cloud but managed by our trust IT guys. iSAMS still have access for updates/support etc. I like not having to update it or back it up, not having to do any messing about with clients and also custom reports are all done in SSRS.

I would guess that it's defaulting to per-user install when installed via the GPO (which is why it works with "ALLUSERS=2" done via the startup batch file) so perhaps if you make an MST setting the ALLUSERS property to 2, and apply that on the MSI inside the GPO it might work?

It's supposed to be fixed in the June cumulative update for Win 10, mine started behaving a bit more once they'd had the September one installed. Edit: I've got a mandatory profile for pupils but it's just a direct copy of the default Default User profile off Windows, with absolutely no modifications made to it. (Theory being it overwrites their cached local profile every time, so they go back to a clean setup)

Ah. Our equivalent would be sticking (cost of IPF * 80) / (pupil count) onto everybody's fees and hoping they cough up.

But at the moment in 99% of schools you'll have two choices.. a) "good enough" brightness that you can afford to put everywhere b) shiny IFP with really great brightness, clear image you can see from anywhere in the room in a few classrooms, and the others with 10 year old projectors where you have to teach with the lights off to see (as you spent the money on the couple of classrooms with IFP). Shame really as you just end up stuck in a cycle of replacing like for like.

Same here - went from RIS -> WDS, then MDT, and now SCCM with MDT. Love how now all I have to do is stick a PC in the OSDeploy collection and (if it doesn't do Wake on LAN) turn it on (set to PXE boot first in the boot order but only proceeds if there's a task waiting)

Not sure if it still exists but when I abandoned the domain here and made a new one (too many weird issues from how other people had set it up) I turned all the PCs on then ran ADMT which I think you had to give old and new domain admin credentials and it went round and moved them over. It was in about 2007 though.

To be honest if we only had a couple of printers I'd be binning it for your solution - as it's basically the same ("map this printer twice cause it randomly fails the first time sometimes"), unfortunately it'd take about a week to re-add every printer back in, with item level targetting, twice!

This is similar to the solution I do (which is a loop in powershell attempting to add each printer until it stops erroring) - that always maps on the 2nd run through.

Yes, there was an old GPO setting for back when it was called SkyDrive which was set to prevent it running, got rid of this and it worked.

When we've had this issue in ActivInspire on Promethean board it's always been the USB extenders at fault, never thought to test it on powerpoint though.