supportman

Out of interested which one is best? Bromcom or Arbor? Since you have now tested both. I don't understand the Bromcom clunky statement. Setting permissions is 1 click to apply to all for things like admin permissions. I find the bromcom interface very nice to work with to be fair. But I've never used Arbor.

You can also use salamandersoft for this, its what we do with Teams.

Print servers things like papercut MF hosted in cloud or Papercut NG. We use Kyrocera cloud print here. Desktop monitoring move to senso. Its very cheap compared to Impero and they just released a new version which fixes a few annoyances. Fully cloud. In terms of intune, you can test any setup really in hybrid before moving.

Just archive the data to the cloud of external disks. Job done.

I liked Sims as well, it did a job and I didn't know any different. Until of course we got 4 different companies in to compare and we realized how much better the competition was. That was 5 years ago now and their competition have only extended their lead in that time. I really don't understand anyone staying with Sims, it really has been obvious for a long time that they have technical debt issues such as this which are only going to get worse. EDIT: Just as an example in Bromcom, you simply click on "Help and Resources" menu item to get into the support portal, ideas portal or Bromcom community. Its all pretty much single sign on and really useful to all users. Sims just seems so backwards to me. Just a load of different services bolted together with no cohesion.

Just found this registry key very useful to remove the context menu option to "Open in Terminal" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Shell Extensions\Blocked] "{9F156763-7844-4DC4-B2B1-901F640F5155}"=""

Use this registry patch to remove it from the menu. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Shell Extensions\Blocked] "{9F156763-7844-4DC4-B2B1-901F640F5155}"="" You can also block it with applocker or software restrictions.

Just run into this as well on our Windows 11 install. Same issue that Group Policy not "Don’t run specified Windows applications" not working. What are you specifically blocking in Applocker?

I'm sure I read somewhere that you could encode the credentials in some text format but I don't remember where. Personally we just join the domain manually once installed.

NTLite and the autounattend.xml file works very well for us here.

We use bromcom payments which replaced tucassi SCO, its been brilliant since they updated the payment provider last year. Works seamlessly with MCAS and our cashless catering Biostore. We still use evolve but would love to hear anyone who has moved to bromcom for trip functionality. We're just moving our HR performance management from Bluesky to Bromcom, seems to do a job with a few little things missing. Data analysis with do in PowerBi and moved from 4matrix. I haven't heard their are any issues.

Loving the new folder "set colour" feature. Really nice to organize things.

Microsoft Lists has both asset and job ticket templates which I used when I set it up. Power Automate flows is really simple once you find the wizard. In our case we just wanted an email template to be sent each time the job ticket was updated.

Honestly, Microsoft lists is just perfect as an IT support system. You can extend any workflow with Power Automate as well. Its free forever and SSO integrated. I used freshdesk while benchmarking other software and it was horribly bloated.

Papercut Hive is not ready for schools yet for exactly the above reasons. This was highlighted a couple of years back and is still the same today. Good to hear they are working on it though but I do wonder why this hasn't been done in the last few years. A computer based installer is basic stuff really in a school environment with shared PC's.

We just bought extra P1 Licenses for Full Time Staff count. Think it was about £600 extra. Seems to include conditional access which I urge everyone to enable for UK geographical only filters on office 365 logins. Basically stopped hacking our accounts completely.

Has anyone been able to shrink the size of their Hyper-V VMs? I know I have to shrink it first in windows using the partition disk management console. I have a 3.2tb file server which needs to be moved, so I need to shrink the disk space down to something more manageable. I've removed loads of files and am now down to 200GB but I cant seem to shrink the disk due to an unmoveable files. I've disabled hibernation, set the virtual memeory to zero etc. But still get unmoveable file errors on shrink volume command. Has anyone managed to get around this? Event viewer tells me the file is which seems to be a windows system file: - The last unmovable file appears to be: \$BitMap::$DATA

Actually, since we virtualize, I would simply move the server to another host What's worth mentioning, is that RAID actually doubles or triples the chance of a disk failure straight away by its very design. Also the RAID card, as well as any software issues can also corrupt storage. Particularly if they lose power at boot time or during a rebuild. I mean in the old days of spinning rust and small hard disks, RAID was a useful technology. But these days its been made redundant by newer technologies and recovery strategies. As an example you won't go into a data center and find every server with RAID 5 setups. I've just found over the years that having a single reliable SSD disk with a good backup strategy is a far better choice.

Never used raid after having a RAID card failure early in my career. Basically we use fast virtualised machines on SSD drives with daily backups to veeam.

Out of interest, What payment system are you using and how do students authenticate at the tills?

And minimizing "Older than a week" emails would be awesome as well. I only seem to be able to minimize "Today" and "Yesterday" which is a bit annoying.

Been using it school wide for a while now. It has a few scaling issues and crashes sometimes when viewing inbuilt PDF's but otherwise I think its fantastic. Love the modern look, the smiley reactions, easy setup, dark mode and overall simplicity. You soon get used to it.

Yep exactly. You can of course use rufus or other methods to bypass, but then your computer is not supported by Microsoft and you would also fail Cyber Essentials certification.

Nice summary, I enjoyed reading it and interesting what topics you're asked about from potential customers. For us, we are just about to do our 5 year renewal with Bromcom (or move to another MIS). So going through the whole sales process again, but from a bit of a different point of view: We've been asking these questions from all the suppliers: - Parent app features and engagement - Running Online Parent Evenings - Timetabling software integration - AI and chat bot integration - Room bookings features We are also still using 3rd party products for: Parents evenings, Trip management, HR, Finance and Room bookings so have been asking potential providers if they can match the features of those 3rd party systems yet. It looks like all the MIS providers have caught up a little, but are still lagging a bit behind in some areas. Bromcom has done well with HR, finance and the new timetabling features, but still lacks in room bookings, AI and parents evenings I think. Its been an interesting journey. Great to see all the progress from Bromcom and other suppliers. The speed of innovation has been awesome with a competitive market finally. One day I will finally have an MIS which doesn't need Add-ons and different logins. Maybe in the next 5 years...?

We have 1 physical DC and 1 virtual. I will move the physical one to the a virtual host soon as I don't see the point in keeping it physical really.