ThatBoringBloke

Latest Update. Seems to now be working for us. 20/03/2024 09:40 - A fix for this issue was implemented last night. Overnight monitoring and some customer feedback has advised that this has restored the synchronisation for customers affected by this issue. Any customers still affected are advised to restart the OpenVPN service on their 3rd Party Connector. If the issue persists after this please contact your support provider for further assistance. We are now in a period of enhanced monitoring to ensure the stability of this service for our customers. We will provide a further update this afternoon. We thank you for your patience whilst this issue has been ongoing and we apologise for the inconvenience this has caused.

Same here, fine yesterday, broke today. We have it loged with ESS. This was the latest update: 19/03/2024 09:45 - A potential fix was attempted last night to mitigate the issues being experienced, however monitoring is still showing synchronisation issues between SIMS and 3rd Party Software for Hosted SIMS/SIMS Connected Customers. We are continuing our investigations with the highest priority possible, and will provide a further update this afternoon. We again apologise for the inconvenience caused. Whatever they've applied to fix it has actually broken it for us.

Not something I know much about I'm afraid as we are a Google school but I have been looking at this a little recently, so please take anything I say as just my understanding of it. Firstly I believe that you will need some MS365 A3 licencing for staff (not necessarilly all staff). In the intune admin console you can assign an a user as a DEM (Device Enrollment Manager), this would allow you to join the machines to Entra AD in much the same way that you would local AD, meaning no need for the autopilot enrollment. Once the machines are in EntraAD you can start to assign settings and policies to them through Intune. You can even upload your existing GPO's and see how compatible they are with 'cloud' management. Hopefully someone who knows more will come along soon...

We have a departmental management system. Each device is assigned to a dept and labeled as such. If a device isn't where it is supposed to be then the HoD can ask for the device to be disabled. its not perfect and does rely on departments to look after them, but for the most part works.

There's a free web based version Office 365 A1 that all eligible academic institutions can access. This is web based and only offeres limited funcationality. If you want more than the basic Web based Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Email then you're going to have to pay. Google works, its easy to manage and it's free! Fundamentals is anyway. I'd be asking 'management' what features they feel Microsoft can offer that would make them want to change.

LTSC 2021. Supported until 2027. LTSC 2019 is supported until 2029.

Not something I'm really clued up on, so i could be way off here, but do they not just need to licence the users that need it, with each Staff licence also allowing 40 'Student licences'? So how would MS distinguish the diference in the user? You might have 10 staff that actually need the extra 'Staff bit of the licence' (what ever that is) whilst the rest could just use the 'Student' licence? Or am I way off?

PDQ here. Athough they have increased pricing recently its still value for money for us IMO.

That looks like something I'd do. I am not a professional cabling installer.

I'm with Steve on this one. I messed about with Start Menu's when we went over to Win 10 only to discover, after hours of trying to get a customised menu to work, that they all just use the Search to find what they want. We just use the default menu now. Never been an issue.

Looked at it, thought 'That looks good', passed it on to the DHT (My Boss) who said "but it's not Promethean is it?" Looks like we're sticking with ActivInspire for the foreseeable...

For me it's all dependent on how often you re-image. I don't if I can avoid it. We are currently using WDS/MDT, but long term this will be obsolete, hence why I asked the original question. Currently its looking like a USB build, manually naming, then PDQ deploy for everything else. I have tested this and it works quite well.

No, long term plan is all staff are to remain on Windows, Students will mainly use ChromeBooks with only the occasional need to use Windows for specialist areas. We are looking at the need for onsite AD. Since staff mostly use their own device exclusively (Classroom PC, Office PC) I can authenticate them with GCPW.

WDS/MDT still requires a 'Server' though. Even if it is just a PC you still need to licence it. - - - Updated - - - So essentially booting to USB?

As a Google school who is moving more and more towards a serverless environment I'm just curious how you deploy Windows? All of our staff run Windows PC's and as I look to remove servers slowly from our onsite estate it's got me thinking about OS deployment and how we would do it in the future without a deployment server. I no longer feel the need to rebuild machines each summer, but every now and then one breaks and needs to be re-imaged. Currently I'm looking at a generic clean Windows Install from USB and then using PDQ to deploy everything else, but for those of you that have gone serverless (be it using 365/Azure/EntraID or Google) how do you delpoy a clean windows build? Can you even do this from the cloud without third party software?

Education Fundamentals here and getting the 404 error.

I'm not aware of a way that you can automaticaly do it, but we used to use the OK Goldy workspace add-on to do groups / classes. Its pretty straight forward (With the YouTube videos), but you have to manually update them.

We are in a simillar position to yourself in that we are a Google School (With no plans to change direction anytime soon), but still have MS OVS licencing in place for Local Servers and PC's. I would be curious to learn what the difference in licencing types allow you to do in terms of your current setup. I know for example that we have 365 A1 licencing included and our staff can all login to Office.com to access the online versions of Word, Excel, etc. I'm not sure if this is part of our OVS licence, or just Free to School's in general. I would suggest trying to contact an MS Licencing specialist to advise the best course of action to meet your current needs and setup. We use VeryPC and John has been great.

If you are moving to being a Google school then why change at the moment? Why not just renew the OVS licensing and rethink about it when you are further down the line with Google. What are your aims with a hybrid setup? Depending on you Google licenses you may be able to manage devices (both Windows and Chrome) via Google. What will you get from moving to Azure (Entra) AD?

This guide may help:- https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/gsuite_dsr_customer_guide.pdf

Thanks for this. I shall return this to them!

Not my choice to make I'm afraid. Over ruled when I aproached the subject.

Wanted to post this in Smoothwall Direct Support but don't seem to have the rights to create a new thread in there? We have a member of staff who is asking about how Smoothwall identifies AI Tools as we have the Category blocked for both Staff and Students. They have noticed that some educational AI tools are allowed through such as https://curipod.com/ai I informed them that it's a complicated process and directed them to have a read of this. Not content with this they have come back to me asking the question below:- Can anyone answer this in simple terms?

Following. Same thing happened to us last week on our Print release printer. I just reticked the share, hasn't gone missing again... yet.

That sounds steep to me, but it also depends on what you've been quoted for. I think that we used to pay around $500 per year for it with one admin licence, I know that the price has increased this year, but it was a gradual increase up to something like $600 this year and $750 the next. This is for the Deploy Product only. Sounds to me like they are including their Inventory product in on the cost you have been quoted, unless you have asked for multiple admin accounts?