supportman

Yes change the students policy in teams admin console to disallow video calling.

One thing that interests me is having an SSD based appliance, do all the companies offer this now? I know someone mentioned smoothwall were doing this soon.

How do they differ on pricing? I've got to make this decision soon as well.

Just echoing this myself as we moved in September, best decision I have made after I think going cloud email. Pretty much every teacher and SLT member agrees and has adapted with ease. For teachers especially taking registers, doing behaviour recording and and room bookings are so much easier with an App or web based system. It really has been amazing to leave the outdated Capita Sims system.

General conensus from the other recent thread on this was to move to a proper cloud MIS. All 3 main competitors are now native cloud, those being iSams, Bromcom and Arbour.

We've noticed the cover admin takes a lot longer on Bromcom than Sims used to each morning. Here is the feedback from our cover supervisor. Any ideas how to improve this @DanSears?

Glad I don't have to deal with this anymore!!

I see why this is happening as I guess they are trying to make a point to other academies to have an open process. I really don't understand the fixation on cost though, schools should look at a range of factors when choosing an MIS. Personally having researched Sims, Bromcom, iSams and Arbour during our process we found Bromcom to be the best, most comprehensive system. All the prices were pretty similar if you add in 3rd party Addons that can be replaced.

My Mum who has a PHD in virology and was high up in the old Public Health Lab service before she retired told me something that really shocked me the other day: "Children under 18 are more at risk from the Flu than Covid-19". She supports all the measures in place as she herself is a 75 year old at risk... But it really does put it into perspective all the people being told to put their lives on hold for what is essentially an old persons issue.

I don't see any reason why not, we are moving to Onedrive for personal files and Sharepoint online for a shared drive. Seems to work well so far. I wish our SLT were as forward thinking as yours to be honest

Going to just stream the audio and powerpoint over teams as we did during lockdown but in class. Bought teachers wired microphones if they need them.

PDQ inventory will do this

Looks great but would it only really work over the entire school having the same policies rather than by group or OU. We have different rules for teachers and schools here such as blocking or opening YouTube

HCSS if you just need finance, seemed the best as far as our research could tell as it was true cloud. Bromcom(which we moved) and Bromcom finance is also good although we didn't take up their finance product as we use Sage.

Thanks I changed to %OneDrive% and it does indeed seem to work just as well, should really have tested it as it was a guess

@DJ-1701 thanks for this just what I needed. Can you explain some of the registry hacks in those GP settings? Also am I right in thinking students have access to the C: drive in your schools? How does that work out?

OK now I want to know what KFM stands for do tell...

Thanks that helped me get to the solution, I ended up using this and it seems to work so far: %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\OneDrive\OneDrive.exe That pops up with their files in an explorer box! Very cool, no more mapped drives!!

We've moved some teachers over to Onedrive for their personal files and it seems to work well using the inbuilt Windows 10 client. Has anyone with a shared desktop managed to create a shortcut on it to the users Onedrive files? Is there something like %OnedDrive% that you can use similar to %appdata% in a shortcut? A google isnt turning up much....

We just buy direct on their European website, seems to work well and be the cheapest and quickest. I've used 4Gon in the past but they don't carry much stock levels when I was looking mid lockdown.

I looked into this recently and its way out of price range, quite ridiculous in fact Education/Non-profit Price - $3,600 USD ($12/node) / year

So some more positive stuff to report, as I get round to it.. 3rd Party products we have recently cancelled as Bromcom has the in built functionality: - Schoolcomms - Roombookingsystem - Tucassi Payments - TASC insight parent portal - 4 Matrix - Medical tracker And replaced software - Groupcall exporter (We have moved to Wonde for some other products) - Ruler.co.uk (We moved to Salamandersoft) All of those add up to a substantial saving in total, so great work from the Bromcom team for making those available! Its not just cost either, its the synchronisation issues we used to have between the systems and time spent fixing them...

I've written about it before on these forums, but we looked at Bromcom, Arbour and iSams. Eventually went with Bromcom and its been excellent. Really can't believe people are keeping Sims, the market has moved on massively in the last few years.

Did you go ahead with this in the end? We are looking to do something similar.

Network manager or outsourced company not doing their job properly basically! Running an end of life operating system is just irresponsible.