Aprice

We've had very mixed results over the years with Surface products, I would probably stick with HP unless there is a real desire to go for the surface.

Zioxi do some flip up desks, I'd have a look at those or look at getting something built similar. https://www.zioxi.com/product-category/flip-top-it-desks/

I'd suggest having a look at Cloud Connect from Burconix. We've been trialling it and so far have been quite impressed. Effectively it just maps OneDrive to be their home drive & Sharepoint libraries as network drives. We found that the OneDrive PC client was somewhat unreliable and caused a lot of man hours to be spent supporting it. Especially for users that roam PCs

We've also been asked to take this on, not really sure it should fall on an internal or in our case external IT team. A couple of Googles found this as well: https://wslaw.co.uk/insight/upcoming-changes-to-kcsie-online-searches-of-potential-new-recruits/ The other question it raises for me is what happens if we 'miss' something who then becomes responsible. It's a HR job that can't be done by HR

We're looking at CloudConnect at the moment for mapping the document libraries to file explorer. Currently it's been a manual process for staff. Unfortunately the OneDrive sync client does cause a number of issues for us, especially with spreadsheets by the sounds of it. I'm hopeful that CloudConnect will be the 'cure' for this, from the demos we've had it behaves more like a network drive rather than a sync, which seems to cause all the issues.

One of our schools has had this problem. So far they've tried Nova T6 with Bromcom (gather they couldn't get it to work), then it went to timetabler and now I believe they are using e-timetable. All of them have had their fare share of problems. From memory e-timetable didn't like Network drives or Sharepoint.

We've had a BenQ large Venue laser based unit fitted in one of the new builds. It's an impressive bit of kit and looks the business but wasn't cheap. https://www.benq.eu/en-uk/business/projector/lu9245.html In a primary we did not to long ago it was a Panasonic (Laser again) Believe it was a PT-VMW60, look to be about £2200.

Sophos with Intercept X all day

Something to live with I think, We have loads of these blinking ActivPanels, even wired in they cause headaches. We have constant issues with them displaying 'No Signal' and requiring messing around with. We've had faceplates removed and new cables put in and still having issues. Think we had about 8 that needed looking at today. Not had a single call out to our customers with HiSense boards that cost a fraction of the price. We have a MS wireless display adapter on standby when the trust staff arrive because their laptops just don't seem to play ball with them over HDMI, Fine with every other screen though

The worst of it is that a lot of our customers have now added these devices to their domain and bought trollies for them. The user experience is terrible, they consume so much time to support and it's created a cost centre when they eventually get around to replacing them. Staff are now used to having the resource and we can't now get rid of them. Not sure where they fit on the replacement schedule either, there the newest devices but the worst on the network! Multiple times a day we have students arriving with full disks! The really irritating factor is that most of them never even went home to students, Complete waste of money! Argggh!!!

There's a tab at the bottom. But we found a few years ago when replacing them that they do tend to cease onto the brackets and need a fair bit of force to remove. Definitely time to replace them though , they'll be long out of support by now

I'd go with the Aruba kit all day. Just to keep away from those licence costs. All Aruba APs at our main customer sites, using the Aruba Instant controller running on one of the access points. Have to say I see little benefit to getting Aruba Central for us, but if it's in the deal I probably wouldn't turn it down.

For us it's radius authentication (NPS / Accounting to Smoothwall) to get on the WiFi and then a transparent proxy. Certificates is another matter, as they will require installing. Guest networks generally we have HTTPS inspection off so don't require the certificate, but then do need a password that is frequently changed.

One of ours has been down, thankfully we had a 1GB lease line put in over the summer and a Smoothwall delivered the other day. We just were not expecting to be commissioning it yesterday. Now that's all our customers moved over from these sorts of networks

For a web filter to be any use now it needs to be able to inspect HTTPS traffic, any devices that are going to have traffic inspected need to have this certificate installed on them so they trust the web filter. Here's a guide for installing certificates on Android devices: https://support.securly.com/hc/en-us/articles/212869927-How-do-I-install-Securly-SSL-certificate-on-Android-device- Substitute their certificate for yours One option is to setup a separate WiFi network with a different address range and then tell the Fortinet not to apply HTTPS inspection to that range. This would allow users without the certificate installed to connect to the internet, however the filtering for these devices would effectively be non existent. This is our standard practice, we leave it up to the school whether they use this WiFi network or not.

I think it would be mostly fine. I turned on one of the old boxes we had, when the HTTPS cert was renewed browsers rejected it as the validity period was too long. (used to be 3 years I think) Once updated it reduced that back to one year. That was the only thing really that prevented it from being 'usable', It was only used for testing anyway so blocklists being updated didn't really matter.

Everything continues to work, however you will stop receiving support, software and blocklist updates. It might be fine for a short period of time, but long term you will probably have issues.

They should be able to tell you from the switches, my guess is they don't understand STP. The Core switch(es) should be configured as the route bridge by setting the priorities to be the lowest & that's generally about it for most switches. In the context of what we're discussing the router is irrelevant.

Aruba for us, I'm not a a massive fan of the CLI changes they've made to the CX series. But it's not a deal breaker for us. At the end of the day there rock solid switches with firmware updates readily available and a solid warranty. The remaining Cisco kit we have is also solid, but as none of it has support contracts tied to it and Firmware not readily available without contracts it just doesn't really make sense to buy more Cisco. We've used Ubiquiti switches before and had a high failure rate, whereas I'm yet to see a Aruba / HP fail (apart from a faulty slot in a new ZL chassis)

This is one of the scripts I wrote for ours: Connect-MicrosoftTeams $Roster = import-Csv \\Itoffice-pc01\c$\File.csv ForEach ($Student in $Roster) { Get-Team -DisplayName $Student.Team | Add-TeamUser -User $Student.UserPrincipalName -Role Member } From memory two columns one names Team with the team name and UserPrincipalName as the headers.

i5 8GB SSD (NVMe ideally) is our general customer base spec now. We've pretty much stopped recommending refurb to customers as an option now, largely down to Windows 11 and it's difficult on one hand pushing 5 year replacement cycles and the other replacing it with kit that's already 3-4+. We trialled some Lenovo AMD units and wasn't really that impressed with them so Intel is our go to unless there's a really good reason otherwise at the time of purchasing.

Exactly what we use with some of our installs, in some situations we have a pair of Mikrotiks running VRRP.

Ubiquiti I would suggest would be better for WiFi and would be easier to configure. Mikrotik has a bigger learning curve and not necessarily better WiFi performance. You will struggle to get an education discount on both, probably because they’re both pretty cheap already.

I've found Salamander to be great, provided you know exactly what you want it to do, their onboarding process was very thorough as well. It made life so much easier at my previous site. The problem now I've moved is that whoever set it up at my new site didn't really know what they wanted it to do, so its made a bit of a mess and I just can't really trust it. (not Salamander's fault whatsoever). Should have a call with them to go over the configuration at the end of this month. Also it relies on the MIS being correct, not full of spelling mistakes and fields that should be populated not being populated, which seems to happen more frequently than I'd like It would be nice if making changes yourself was possible, I can understand though why they manage changes themselves though.

Impero for all the ones we support, So far the best I've used out of AB Tutor, Lanschool & Netsupport, that said I still think it's a bit buggy.