Cat_Jam148

When? (time to necro this thread)

I'm sure LGFL has a team for this but with just how big the internet is, I feel that all providers will fail at this in some form or another. There are millions of pages created each day, with probably thousands of new domains, and categorising each and every one correctly is never going to happen...even with ai! I mean look at how many youtube to mp3 converters pop up every day, we block them here, but there is always a dozen which sneak through for awhile. If you go deep enough into an innocent Google search, you will always find content which might not be suitable for schools. All we can do is hope our keywords, and LGFLs filters, are up to it. At a point the tech can only do so much, if you have a user who is determined to access certain content, they will find a route to it. We can only try our best to prevent it.

While there are concerns when it comes to AI content, I don't think there is a need for it to be blocked by default. We allow it in certain situations and environments. If there is a site serving adult AI content, then it should already be blocked under the various other adult filters LGFL has.

This isn't something we've ever done but I do seem to recall our old Business Manager mentioning that if we sold our old equipment to staff, they would also have to pay the VAT on the original cost of the item? Due to it being VAT exempt when the school first purchased it? I don't know if that is correct or not, not my field!

I would recommend giving Classroom Cloud another go. We've been with them for 2 years now, running it on around 300 iPads and have been pretty happy with the whole package. They do have 3rd party authentication now, and the alerting is pretty good! Our DSL is very happy with the system as a whole, and with our renewal coming up, found that it still is the best for what we want to achieve with our monitoring software. You'll still have to look at another provider like Securley for the filtering side, as CC only cover monitoring.

It's based on Windows 11 24H2 or whatever the current LTSC version is

What's new in Windows Server 2025 | Microsoft Learn Windows Server release information | Microsoft Learn

Ali Guryel, Managing Director at Bromcom, says: "We weren't driven by financial gain" Bwhahahahahahaha...yeah right. It's only when Bromcom received flak from the wider community that I reckon they back peddled and decided not to seek costs from the trust.

Mosyle free is great for small deployments. Once we went past 200 devices though, it was decided that we needed more than what it offered and moved to Meraki. I would've stuck with Mosyle but the LGFL started offering the licenses for Meraki as part of our subscription, and well you can't beat free?

Well I'm sure you'll be taking Arbor to court over this then just like Bromcom did to that academy trust... Never forgetting that one. Bromcom's handling of PR is something to be studied. Better off keeping quiet.

None of the primary schools in our area run RADIUS. Mixture of 1 & 2 form entry. While it is industry standard, I reckon it's not as common as you think.

Hi all, Has anyone experienced OneDrive duplicating files upon saving? We've got a lot of users reporting this happen, and I can't seem to track down the cause. I’ve followed Microsoft’s advice by clearing the credentials in Credential Manager and deleting the user profile from the computer, but the problem persists. Only recently started happening about a week ago. Any suggestions on how to resolve this?

Yeah, a regular update would've been ideal, or a little bit more of a description. At least their status page acknowledged there was an issue, unlike some other service providers...*cough* Bromcom *Cough*

We, and a few other schools in the local area, were having problems earlier. Seems to have cleared up now though. Their support page does indicate that there still might be issues. https://status.raptortech.com/

I think that's a very short sighted take on all this. We have SSO hooked up to as many services as we can but... There is still a strong argument to be made for traditional usernames and passwords. Yes, in an ideal world we'd all be using SSO and MFA on all accounts, but there are many schools out there who just don't have the resources to get even something as simple as SSO working. Let alone maintaining it. SSO should always be an option these days, but there is still a place for a username and password (with the option of MFA)

We've been running Sign In for a couple of years now. More than happy with it. Easy to administer and keep on top of compared to the old Inventry system. We don't use it for students, only staff and visitors. Regarding evacuations, all of our SLT have the app. It works pretty well. Anyone with the app can start an evacuation, which sends a notification to all devices running the app. All staff and visitor photos appear on there, so makes it easy enough to work out who is who if you are unfamiliar with the name. The only issue we initially had was with mobile signal, as we are in a pretty rubbish area for signal, the app would struggle with keeping everything up-to-date. Not the apps fault, but something to bear in mind. Since we had new WiFi with connect the classroom, we now have outdoor wifi which solves this issue. (Yes, if there was a fire in the server room and the internet was down, we would have a problem...but SLT decided we could make do with the spotty phone signal in that instance.)

If you have a Mac around, I find disk utility and it's erase option pretty useful. Gives a few different options when it comes to overwriting the disks.

Our headteacher has recently been wow'd by someone using a Remarkable and has got me looking into this. For those who use a Remarkable - Are there any reasons why I shouldn't just hand her an iPad with an Apple Pencil? I'm finding it hard to justify the price for a remarkable when an iPad can do so much more Obviously, battery life is something to consider - I assume being an e-ink it lasts a good while

Arbor here, moved a couple of years ago. They provide a weekly roadmap which lists the steps required to transition, all nice and easy to follow. The main job is to get your SIMS data in order as that will reduce a lot of headaches when the data is moved into the system. Using the housekeeping feature and getting rid of duplicate or inaccurate data is a must. The training sessions they held were great, and the training portal really helps with the day to day operations. I've probably only had to speak to our 3rd party support half a dozen times since switching vs a few calls each month with SIMS. Not having to worry about keeping the clients and the server updated is another big relief. I do not miss the days of wrestling with Solus...

Points to the Chromebooks our LA purchased without any prior consultation. We're a full Microsoft 365 & Apple iPad school... they don't fit in to our existing IT estate at all! Getting back to topic, our 6th Gen iPads will not be getting the iPadOS 18 update later this year. They've had a good run though Still got security updates for another couple of years.

Same as Steveg here. Keeping in-line with what the DFE recommends, we retire any iPad that is no longer supported by Apple with security updates, which is usually a year or two after the device receives it's final major iPadOS version.

I feel like I'm going against the grain here but I've had the exact opposite experience. Primarily a Lenovo house here, haven't really ever had any issues with the support. All cases raised have been dealt with, and repair work has been good. I can't fault the machines either. We run a fleet of ThinkPads and desktops, they've always been great. Drivers are easy to get a hold of, and I find the Lenovo update software straight forward enough. Staff like the machines, they feel premium and the build quality is good for the price point. Now Dell...we made the decision to branch out and run Dell a few years back. I regretted every second that those machines were in the wild. Battery life was poor, build quality was questionable (Broken hinges, power connectors detaching from the motherboards, etc...). Support cases were unnecessarily convoluted and frankly useless at times. I did like the driver support, and technical docs available, but nothing which blew me away compared to Lenovo. Just my two cents.

Still seems like they're having issues. We've got intermittent access and Copilot is completely down.

Whoa...blast from the past. I spent far too long as a child going through the various themes each time I loaded it up.

Only had MTA-STS left to do out of that list. Much easier than you think! Got it set up in testing mode, and will switch to enforce soon. Not sure why I put it off for so long. According to what I've read, it's meant to fail open so website uptime shouldn't be all that much of a conern https://www.security.gov.uk/guidance/email-guidance/mta-sts/set-up