mridgway

+1 for Dell here

We have recently started using the Redstor Total Education Bundle to backup our Microsoft 365 and Entra ID. We went for the Redstor product as it covered what we needed (and more), and for us the pricing was so much better than anything else we looked at. Redstor has pricing brackets based on the number of students (we fall into the 71-200 price bracket, and works out good value for us), rather than the total number of accounts you need to backup. The good thing is that it includes various products for the one price, so as well as the Microsoft 365 and Entra ID, you can also backup any servers, endpoints, Azure VM's, Google Workspace should you need to as well. I did think that Keepit and Barracuda offered a bit more on the Intune device backup side in their Entra ID backup products, but the much lower cost of Redstor and the fact that it supported more products in the one price swayed it for us.

Hi Sheridan, Have you tried the chat on this page https://business.bt.com/help/home/ I understand your frustrations, as with us, it takes far too long to get anything resolved as there is a struggle to get the issue to the relevant person. Mark

Yes, we have. Difficulty is that most faults tend to be with their centralised filtering/firewall rather than the actual line itself.

I originally started with Intune for Education, however, it became apparent that although this was simpler to use, I could not do everything I wanted, and ended up using the full Intune for certain things. At this time, we were only using Intune to Manage our iPads, as we were still on-premise AD for Windows devices. When I come to start deploying Windows devices through Intune, I decided that I was just going to use the full Intune from this point forward. I basically worked my through the documentation to set things up https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/intune/ Key things for me were making sure Endpoint Security (Defender), Windows Update, Compliance policy were set, and then moving on other configuration policies based on our need, which I continue to add to / update as necessary. I also did a fresh start rather than copying everything over, as this way I did not need to add any policies that were no longer needed and also configure things that were not in use before, but would now be useful in our Intune environment.

Hello, Our headteacher would like to introduce an electronic method of communicating between home and school. This will be for two way communication messages (text only) between class staff and the child's parents. Messages are likely to be individual and not necessarily to whole class or whole school. It is basically to replace individual physical diaries that each child has that class staff and parents write messages in. The head has mentioned ClassDojo as she is aware of another school that uses it, and it is free, but I want to see what else is around to see if this is really the best solution for us. My questions are: Does anyone use ClassDojo, and if so, what do you think of it? I am also interested in the setup/administration and security side of things here. Does anyone use any alternative products for this that they would recommend? I am aware that you can get parental engagement tools from MIS Providers and Website Providers, and we are likely to be reviewing these in the near future. Does anyone use anything that comes as part of these that will do what we want it to do? Many Thanks Regards Mark Ridgway The Orchard School