supportman

Great! Welcome, We looked at Arbor and found it overall a great product. It would be good to hear about recent features you have implemented and future roadmaps. I think a lot of people are moving away from Sims and knowing what MIS providers plans and pace of innovation is incredibly important to the purchasing decision. This forum gives you a good platform for that.

Ahh nice, I went to this college, its a great campus

Thanks yes I think thats the way we might go. https://www.planetestream.co.uk/accessories/room-capture/ There is a nice person tracking camera at the bottom and good mic. I was just worried the 4 input HMDI encoder would be a bit complicated for staff but I guess we will find out

Nope Microsoft, but we do also have Planet Estream.

I've been asked to setup a dedicated video conferencing classroom for our partner school oversees. Budget is pretty healthy so I want to get the best quality stuff. The classroom has nothing in at the moment so I guess I would need a screen, fixed camera at the back of the room and good quality microphone. Has anyone done this before?

The answer will vary from person to person but I will say having used both that they are both excellent. Google wins on sheer ease of setup and use while Microsoft teams is quite advanced now and has lots of cool features. Both systems are free to schools so cost really isn't a concern, although you can upgrade to higher licenses which might be worth analysing. Basically either is great!

Great! We've entered the basic data now and Salamandersoft has auto generated the user accounts. All very good so far.

The new owners actually said in their takeover pitch that they were "investing significant resources" in development which basically tells you Capita didn't. They probably have to start from scratch again. Problem with development taking so long is technology shifts and overtakes the project and the framework of 3 years ago wont be the framework of choice today, let alone the future. You get bogged down horribly and its probably worth starting from a clean slate.

Yes we block CMD launch, but anyone with year 7 Python knowledge knows how to get around it Honestly I think the days of harshly locking down workstations are over, we did the same years ago but have slowly loosened the security over the years without any major issues. Of course we get the odd machine that's been fiddled with, but we can re-image in a 20 minutes remotely. I think in our job its important to create a balance of security vs teaching. It can depend on the school of course.

No not at all, our students are pretty good to be fair. Never had any issues with that, we removed a lot of the old restrictive policies when we introduced Computer Science many years ago now.

We don't block it here or python.

Yes you can set it up in the project settings to use different runtimes.

Yes we use it for all our CS department, it runs well. It needs various access rights to do things but all depends what they are working on really. I've not come up against powershell here but we allow python 3.8 access from the c: drive.

How is everyone doing the pre admissions on Bromcom? Is anyone using MCAS to collect info?

More to do with the chip shortage I would say than crypto currency. Simple supply and demand.

Flat network with Unify Gen 2 switches should be fine as well as wireless all integrated into their management interface. Migrate to a Cloud MIS, loads of good ones these days even for Primary I think windows server has just introduced something for cloud printing Cloud Internet filtering is a no brainer really Azure login and intune if using Microsoft or Google Login and chromebooks, both work well.

Your right the data for the morning would be lost as the backup is only done nightly. I've heard of people doing it hourly, but to me that's overkill in a school scenario. This has only happened once in the last 7 years when a mechanical disk went on a host after an air conditioner caught fire. I can only speak from personal experience where it wasn't an issue for our finance department at the time. They were actually very thankful to be up and running again so quickly after a disaster scenario. It would have been quicker if I had done an instant restore on the backup server, but I choose to do a full restore to a new host. I guess you need to balance uptime vs cost and simplicity based on your organization.

We backup all VM's every night with Veeam, so just restore a VM to another host if it ever goes down in a disaster. Our 3 Hyper V hosts and Veeam server are in 2 different physical locations. I sleep far better at night knowing I can restore a server in 15mins to any host in the school than having a complicated hyperconverged setup in a single location. I can even restore the server temporarily to the Veeam backup server in seconds if needed in an emergency, then migrate later in the day when people go home to a permanent host.

Sure it goes down... but with a good backup system you can recover in minutes. I've done it myself with our finance server and hardly anyone even noticed.

Hyper-Converged = Over Engineered in my opinion. Just like Sans really. Local SSD storage + a Hyper-V or Vmware and a good local as well as cloud backup solution should be all you need to run any size school really.

Doesn't that need the extra Office 365 defender 2 subscription?

This is cool, do you offer yearly or 3 yearly pricing?

We've decided to remove Remote Desktop Entirely this summer. With our MIS being cloud based and user files saved on onedrive, sharepoint for shared files there is no real need to keep it other than staff training.

We costed Bromcom, Arbour and Sims(plus the 3rd party tools we needed to match the others) and all were about the same, in fact over time we have saved a fair bit I think when retiring old systems that are no longer needed.

Edulink or Pars is the best "sticky plaster" to get on-top of Sims, but I would be knocking on the MAT IT strategy directors door about moving away from Sims. Its very outdated now.