Alawil

thanks, the problem i found is that the reseller pricing is considerably more than that which was being offered by the Lenovo SMB team (we were seeing 36-41% less). As someone else said Dell is super easy to work with, on the other hand Lenovo has been a nightmare - even trying to get quotes that actually include what we asked for has been challenging. Another problem we had was a quote would be issued and a couple of hours later the pricing would change! Anyhow, we have used ICT Direct before, and i'm glad we had that realization this time.

Just an update on this, after being passed from the SMB team at Lenovo to the Education Team, and back to the SMB team we have abandoned trying to work directly with Lenovo... With that said we took a bit of a u-turn and have just placed an order for some lovely Lenovo devices from our friends at ICT Direct - Dave has been fantastic and we accomplished more in a couple of days with him than we were able to with Lenovo in over 3 weeks! Many thanks for everyone that reached out.

which reseller do you use? I was speaking with them direct but they then decided, after several quotes, that i needed to speak with their public sector and education team, its now gone quiet.

Does anyone purchase directly from Lenovo, if so do you have a contact in their public sector/education team you could share please?

Just FYI - i will only share this information with verified school IT dept employees, i'll do that either by validating existing historical posts or asking for your school email address over PM.

i sent you a message.

PM Sent...

i sent you a PM.

i believe you require the license, best check with locker...

can you please DM me your school email address please...

can you please DM me your school email address please...

done.

responded...

i sent you a message

i sent you a message

i sent you a message

dont worry, i figured it out. Thank you anyway.

Hi We are using Net2 Lite to manage Paxton door controllers, we would like to create some simple API scripts to automate some functions in Net2 but it seems you now need an API license. We have spoken to Paxton and according to https://www.paxton-access.com/integrating-with-paxton/how-to-integrate-with-net2/ they are no longer accepting integrations for non-commercial integrations. Does anyone have any ideas on how we can activate the API service on the Net2 server?

The managed Internet provides gateway AV on the Fortigate Firewall included as part of the annual cost, its not providing anything on the endpoints. We have full admin access to M365 but not the firewall.

I'm looking for some input please as to what you do and/or what you would recommend. We are a Primary School with 315 students, we are fully M365 (A3), autopilot, intune, sharepoint, onedrive etc - we have no on-prem servers just a Dell MFF device acting as MS cache. For the last 6 years we have used eset, used to cost us around £500 per year for ~100 devices - this year eset is much more expensive and we are being recommended TrendAV instead which will be still about twice the cost. We have managed internet with a Fortigate firewall with webfiltering, AV, etc. Given we have Microsoft Defender with our A3 licenses, should we: 1) renew with TrendAV and cover all devices 2) Just use MS Defender with A3 across all devices 3) Renew with TrendAV covering only staff devices (~30) and have only MS Defender (A3) on the other devices 4) Something else? I appreciate your time in providing your thoughts...

Thanks for the responses, we have checked the parent contact and they have one email and PR for both their children. Under Data > Data Quality we have no errors, we did migrate from SIMS quite some time ago to Arbor but don't seem to have the migration data issues you saw RichP. DavR, we are not using merged fields in the message and it is an email message we are sending. Not sure what to try next....

Hi We are following this article: https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/360007834398-Combining-messages-in-Mail-Merges#h_01HE5SY424ZH62RZ7M330D8TMC And selecting "One per recipient, regarding all students" But we are finding that each recipient is receiving one notification per child, so a parent with two children is receiving two messages instead of one. Has anyone else seen the same issue, or are we doing something wrong?

Can you please share your script, and how did you run it - we are using intune?

We were able to get it mostly running but did/do have a few issues: 1) We really struggled to get it working on FortiOS v7, we ended up sticking with the latest v6.4.xx - been running it for probably about a year now. 2) We had to use google.co.uk as the homepage to get the SSO work seamlessly, we tried Sharepoint and the school website but had real issues. Fortinet pointed us at https://docs.fortinet.com/document/fortigate/7.4.0/administration-guide/934626/captive-portals and https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/network-portal-detection/ and explained we had to use any website that supports 80/http to trigger the redirect for transparent/seamless SSO using the logged in user credentials. 3) We found that switching users or user log off did not force the authentication logout, rather if a teacher logged into a device then logged out, then a student logged in they would likely get the teacher permissions. In a nutshell, the firewall authentication via SSO does not register when a user logs off, like FSSO does with local AD. Instead, it uses a timeout value (default at 30 minutes) of when that device last sends/requests internet traffic. Once the 30 minutes is up, the user is de-authenticated and the FortiGate send another authentication request the next time any user using that devices access the internet. The trouble is, even without a user actually logged onto the machine, if the machine is still turned on then it still accesses the internet, for various things, so the timer does not reach 0 in that time. We did look at finding a way to send the logout url (https://:1003/logout? ) to the fortigate via script but got distracted with other priorities. With the exception of the above issues its working pretty seamless for us, this handles all Windows devices. Currently iPads have a standard 'student' filtering policy across the board. If anyone has any inputs/ideas on #2 or #3 that would be fantastic!

Hi, following up on this thread. We eventually opted for MS A3 CSP license for all staff members, this has worked well for the last year whilst staff got used to all things cloud :-) Our renewal is coming up and if possible we would like to reduce our MS licensing costs. We have ~40 staff, for simplicity sake lets say we have 20 teachers, 10 teaching assistants and 10 other staff members. We understand that the teachers and other staff (30 in total) need Windows, Intune, Desktop apps etc and thus MS A3 licenses are correct for them - they also tend to be 1 device one user. All our devices have Dell Windows OEM licenses, we use 2FA/conditional policies and Intune. In terms of the 10 teaching assistants, what options do we have? 1) Continue with A3 - approx. £65 each 2) Move to A1 (free) and add P1 and Intune for faculty separately - approx. £13 per user (assuming the windows OEM license is sufficient) 3) #2 above and Windows 11 Enterprise A3 for faculty - an additional ~£20, so ~£33 in total(assumes OEM license is not sufficient) 4) Move to A1 device based for ~4 of the laptops and have the teaching assistants use them instead of any device they find? - not sure of cost but license seems valid for 6 years? 5) #4 above and P1 for the teaching assistants as they use their own devices outside of school and need 2FA/conditional policies 6) Any other option? Thank you for your inputs.