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I have always preferred 4 digit admission numbers, surprisingly everywhere we have rolled this one out for the most part the kids get used to it fairly quickly and generally don't forget the username. The current site I'm at uses 18jsmith, which is fine until really long names or very common names occur. Also getting the kids to speak up so you can actually hear their names can be quite challenging. Getting a 4 digit numbers often much easier than dealing with pronunciation of some of the more challenging names.

Yep, that's what it's running on now on a Win10 machine

Is slowness to be expected with Bromcom? Just set a report off to give me the basic student details for a single year group: first name, last name, DOB, email & gender. Currently at 1400 seconds, is this sort of performance typical? Tried designing the report earlier in Safari, but the page just went blank every time a report element is dropped.

If you fancy doing some installation, we quite like Netbox. It's free!

Recently had a demo with Impero for ContentKeeper, which seemed pretty solid especially from the KCISE perspective.

If it helps, I'm sure I could spare some time and take a look with you. We've had to set this up about 5 Smoothies this year, most now have dual connections setup.

Not quite, if you haven't enabled IP routing using the command 'IP routing' then even on the same switch it wouldn't work. The client device will need to have it's gateway address set to be the IP of the interface on that VLAN. For example: VLAN 100 name ***TEST*** ip address 10.10.1.1 255.255.255.0 Then your laptop plugged into VLAN 100 would need an address in that range with 10.10.1.1 as it's default gateway. Tagged vs untagged just tells the switch whether or not to place a tag at the start of the packet indicating which VLAN that packet has come from, not useful for a desktop PC which is just on one VLAN ( so we would use untagged) Useful for a WiFi access point which has access to multiple VLANS (would be tagged on those, also usually untagged on it's management VLAN) Basically it's just a router with an interface plugged into each VLAN on the switch, if the interface doesn't have an IP then it won't be routed. And if the clients aren't pointing to that 'router' address then the switch won't route it.

Fastrak, for our main site. Think I'd give it an award for having the worst support for any product anywhere. I've had experience with a really old version of Cunningham's, which wasn't great but in all fairness the school hadn't kept it up to date. My guess is that it was at least 10 years old. Civica, which they moved to I wasn't very impressed with, gather it was quite expensive as well. We're looking into developing our own at the moment, I don't think there is a solution on the market I'd recommend. Pretty sure Fastrak will be going this year from our main site as everyone has had enough of it.

Personally I wouldn't bother with adding a Dream Machine, They're a bit limited in terms of what they can do when it comes to firewall / routing etc. If you've got something for filtering like a on premise Smoothwall it likely does everything the Dream Machine can (except CCTV recording and that sort of stuff) Their unifi switching solution for layer 3 I don't think is great or very mature in the market. we usually recommend something like an Aruba 5400R in at the core, which would handle all the routing between VLANS and aggregation. Unifi switches / Edgemax switches are perfectly OK for the edge. Cambium is another option, priced a little bit higher than Ubiquiti, but does have propper support if you need it.

Most new builds will tend to use something like Trend, it's expensive! Loxone or Zennio might be suitable solutions, that are a bit more user friendly and cost effective. I'd suggest speaking with Chris from Bee Automation. Currently doing some of his courses on control panel design and wouldn't hesitate to recommend him. https://beeautomation.co.uk/

I think their 'decent' DIY tools, Definitely wouldn't swap my DeWalt kit for it but for the odd DIY job it's probably more than capable.

Always been happy with the Synology Appliances & less happy with the QNAPs but that's just personal opinion. I do think the QNAPs tended to have slightly better hardware to the comparable Synology, but the Synology software appeared to be better to me.

I think they're a good value 'low' end switch, I'd probably prefer one in most cases to something like a TP Link. That said I massively prefer a CLI, I just find it so much faster to SSH or console in and get all the info I need from a couple of quick commands, hitting the tab key a few times along the way. Did find the whole Cloud / local a bit messy, would have much rather been able to use both if the cloud limitations have to be accepted. It has been a while now since I've used one so stuff may have changed.

For sites with clusters, own domain ALWAYS!!!! Please don't be tempted to add them to the 'Production' domain, when something goes wrong you've multiplied your problems. If it's a single host then just standalone, no domain and firewall enabled.

I would look to migrate to something like VMware VSAN or Microsoft S2D (Hyper-V Route) and get rid of the physical SAN. Replace your hosts with all SSD or a hybrid HDD / SSD cache.

Point well made there, the break glass should cut both the positive and negative connection to the maglock when activated. Our preferred model is the STP CP3, two versions exist a normal and a LED / Buzzer version, inside you can adjust the volume of the buzzer or turn it off. Flashes Red as well when pushed. The regular model is about £10 and the LED / Buzzer about £20.

All of our customers have now either moved away from Schools Broadband / KCOM / LGFL and switched to local solutions that they can manage themselves or we manage for them. Having the ability to make changes yourself when troubleshooting is invaluable, these setups have slowed down resolution time for so many issues we've had. This isn't a dig at their engineers, it just means you have to work to another companies schedule not you're own.

We just had an indoor one fitted for one of our schools, believe it was a similar sort of price, £1000 territory. It also required replacing the reader on the main screen with a new RFID version the school didn't have before which came as a further cost.I don't think the hardware cost is absurd for what it is, the Zebra units they are based on aren't cheap products. That said I certainly think better products exist e.g. Sign in app. They did enforce that their installers must fit, which was annoying as the installation process wasn't something particularly challenging and we had to re-do half of it anyway to get the cabling into it. Personally I would look to move away rather than invest further with them.

I've worked at a few secondaries where staff didn't have laptops, just desktops in classrooms. On the whole this just worked well, I never heard staff complaining about not having one. On the opposite hand I've worked in schools where staff take their laptop from room to room, which were constant headaches and loads of reliability issues. The current site I spend most time at has both staff laptops for all teaching staff and a desktop in each room. This tends to work pretty well at the moment. As the kit ages I can see the experience deteriorating. The school is just about 5 years old now and we are yet to start replacing anything. The original staff all had Surface Pros which have held up really well and the staff love them. Up until recently a mix have Lenovo devices have been rolled out which was less successful, lots of it's slow, trackpad sucks, battery doesn't last type issues. As some of the original staff leave those with two year old Lenovo's are desperate to swap to one of the original Surfaces which are now 5 years old! I think the choice of device really does make a difference. New staff are now being issued with a Surface Laptop Go, which so far seem to have gone down well. The replacement strategy does concern me with this site, overall I think they would probably be better off without the cost burden of staff laptops, I'm not really sure how much they actually get used by a lot of staff and suspect a lot of the cost could be better spent on the desktop / student infrastructure. My insight would be avoid laptops where possible, otherwise at least go with something that will give a long lifespan as the additional cost will likely force you to increase the time for your replacement cycle.

looking on the BT site they have a 'Home Phone Saver Plan' which is phone only. I would imagine going forward it would be an ONT with a router connected to provide the copper connectivity for a landline.

I will say Paxton's support is exemplary, any questions just give them a ring, they almost always answer immediately and have always been able resolve our issues. I don't think they will bar you from any support if you fitted without any training. Warranty replacement maybe.

The Paxton side of it is easy, the door hardware can be a bit tricky sometimes, especially getting a really good fixing on some door frames can be a bit difficult. We tend to go for the POE versions as it negates the need for any sparkies to have to get involved. Also been very impressed with the Paxlock Pro units, the install time after the first one is about 15mins a door. And the overall cost though is a lot lower, so for lower traffic doors it makes a lot of sense.

The RFIDeas ones are quite flexible if I remember correctly. It has been a while since I last used them but seemed pretty well engineered kit.

That's disappointing, I have been very happy so far with the Smart 50 and 51 units and would probably stick with them going forward.

Synology is our go to really for 365 at the moment. Been really happy with it so far.