supportman

Virtually all those laptops mentioned are at least £750 with the SSD option. I just dont get anyone spending that much on a "budget" laptop these days...

Ahh the Capita version of the cloud! lol

Ahh yes this is what I wondered... reading their marketing material they seem convinced its "cloud" but just moving a legacy system into a virtual environment isn't cloud to me. I think that Xero software mentioned earlier looks like the only native ground up Cloud system I've seen so far, very interesting...

Oh that's a new one on me! Looks fantastic from the screenshots. I think financial systems are ideal for cloud based stuff, one of the easier systems to move I hope assuming the finance department are able to run things in parallel for a while.

We are looking into options of moving to a cloud based finance system. What is everyone else using? Who is market leader these days for Academies and Trusts? I've heard PS financials have been gaining market share but can't work out if they are natively cloud based from their product brochures. Currently we are using Correro which is showing horribly its age.

Have not seen any bluescreens on the LTSB version so far.

It was general spam emails of all kinds, mostly over 200 sent in a single night from their accounts. Some were viruses and others with adult themes. Microsoft quickly restricts the accounts, but its still annoying. EDIT: Another one I have seen is the accounts being sent their password in plain text and a bitcoin reward asked for. The credentials clearly come from one of the website hacks mentioned earlier and people have generally changed their passwords since then, but its still quite unnerving for the users to see their passwords posted like that.

So on speaking to most of our students it seems that all of them either signed up on Edmodo or 000webhosts websites, both of which have been compromised in recent years as confirmed on https://haveibeenpwned.com

If you have a read of the blog, this is absolutely not the case in terms of the FLICKR service. Its explained very well in the article, the change is a result of Yahoo selling the business to a new owner and them going back to what made FLICKR great in the first place, its community. They even admit in the blog that yahoo's direction was totally wrong to become a storage site rather than a community/sharing site. Basically this has nothing to do with cloud companies taking advantage of users, its about taking the site back to its roots. Its a fantastic new direction in my opinion. Yahoo were a shocking company, good riddance to them.

You guys expect a lot from a free service! I could understand the complaints if you were paying but Flickr has explained the changes in their blog post really nicely.

ITIL seems to be the one that employers want these days, its pretty easy to be honest.

Great! thats what I was missing... Strange there is nothing on the front portal page about this, I had 9 accounts disabled and its simple to unblock from the compliance center when you know where it is! EDIT: found this article burried on google about the procedure https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/Office365/SecurityCompliance/removing-a-user-domain-or-ip-address-from-a-block-list-after-sending-spam-email

I've had a few users report their Office 365 accounts being hacked recently, generally when they used the same password on other services (I suspect the Edmodo hack has something to do with this). I've got them to change their password and removed the spam emails. Microsoft has puts a temporary block on their accounts. Does anyone have any information on how long this block lasts or how to unblock them? Normally its been students in the past and we have just waited, but recently a few teachers have experienced it and of course they would like to know when their email will start working again!

If that is true, then its pretty shocking... Outsourcing systems production overseas has been proved to fail many times (just ask the electricity, water and banks with their creaking legacy systems designed in India that nobody really understands how to modernize). Agile local development is the future and has been for a number of years now. Just look how Microsoft or Monzo do it these days! I'm generalising of course, but it would explain why Capita ES has failed to produce a working system for secondaries in the 5+ years we have been talking about this. Especially when the market has moved towards MATS who are crying out for this cloud solution between schools.

See the problem with delays on huge projects like this is your technology stack very quickly goes out of date. If I was personally writing a cloud MIS system today it would be a no-brainer to use Node.js or Laravel but I guess those technologies were not available when Capita started this. Now its been delayed they will have to indeed go back to the drawing board when they hit barriers each time which is incredibly slow way of developing. The key to cloud system project management is to build a simple base product, get a dedicated group of early adopters to onboard it then iterate quickly in small developer groups. That's what successful web systems do these days and I doubt Capita has the culture for that... Of course I am just guessing though. Maybe they do have a bunch of millenials staring at Trello boards in Shorditch working on this

I see the roadmap has been updated and it looks like the start of developing new Sims 8 secondary features were delayed until Q3 because the team were still working on Primary school bits, according to an update posted. So another delay http://imageupload.co.uk/images/2018/11/02/roadmap.jpg As far as I can work out, thats a 6 month delay meaning it won't be done until at the earliest the start of Q4 2019.

Thats good news, Flikr had turned into a photo storage place rather than a photo discovery and sharing site. They finally get it after the Yahoo mess.

We have used both LTSC and the fast track 6 month releases. Must admit I much prefer LTSC its been rock solid since install. The faster releases have had all kinds of issues from the upgrades so i'll be using LTSC from now on. There is a poll somewhere on here that shows the majority of admins have chosen LTSB/LTSC I believe.

I like the new model of release early, release often as its given some great new features such as dark mode. But they should have a parallel LTS release. I know LTSB/C is available and use it here in school, but Microsoft should promote it some more and actually give us some confidence in that product rather than saying its just for certain specialist customers.

Thats a great post @park_bench, i'm going to take a good look at bromcom during BETT this year. Their website looks interesting already if a little amateur with that horrible scrolling text! Bromcom Computers Plc | Cloud Based Management Information Systems

We use amazon these days, soo easy and always in stock

Just set this up on our office 365 with a message rule, its actually incredibly simple and works very well. Just create a new mail flow rule for "the subject includes" text containing the word "ENCRYPT:" and make sure its applying microsoft office encryption as the action. Just choose 'encrypt' from the templates. Basically the user has to go to a website and login with a microsoft account or get a 1 time passcode. Works very well in my tests.

We've been using a separate DHCP scope for over 10 years on our guest network, no complicated VLANS and never had any issue. Its been totally secure in all that time. I'm rather pleased we did it that way as it was very easy to configure and gives us the security we need.

I like Ubiquiti and would definitely move to them if we had any new license fees.

This is so true and I'm guilty as well. I've changed and upgraded everything in the school to modern technology and "best of" systems. But the MIS is the single thing I am actually too scared to change. The monopoly position of Capita and the fact other systems work so well on-top of Sims has contributed to us not looking at other products. I'd love to change though.