IT_JB

Adding the arbor SPF record has taken your total DNS lookups to over 10 which can cause it to fail the SPF check with some email providers. Have a look at SPF delegation, this will solve the problem. Enter your address on here and it will show you the total lookups. https://www.dmarcanalyzer.com/spf/checker/

Sorry yes seems like you're right, bizarrely you need one personal facebook account to sign up for meta business. Then you can start the invite additional admins using just work emails. Maybe you can remove the personal account once set up?

Take a look into a meta business account. No need for a personal facebook account, you can just register using email. Then transfer in your meta assests, FB pages, intragram etc.

I use softcat as our CSP

The project needs to meet the DfEs spec, it's not the schools making the decision here. It's misleading to suggest that people are abusing this, when there is sign-off against a strict spec at all project stages.

That is for becoming a CSP i think. On your O365 admin look in Settings->Partner relationships. There is a huge list but you should see some familiar names that are big in the education sector. You will need to attach them to your tenant, then when you purchase licences via their portal/sales team they will appear in your usual licence section on O365 admin and can be assigned as normal.

Yes for both. Enterprise Mobility + Security E3 - £1.28 Enterprise Mobility + Security E5 - £2.14 I recommend selecting a CSP for your O365 tenant then you can browse these as much as you want. There is no commitment required to do this and you don't have to provide them with any level of access.

Is there anyone on here currently using PS Financials in a medium/large MAT? Growth is on the horizon for our MAT and one of the largest costs of bringing in new schools is adding new locations in PSF. Just wondering how others are doing this and if there is a more cost effective way. Also if you have managed to get Iris to budge on the mandatory 3k worth of licences for new locations. I'm already doing the "simple add location" option to reduce costs. Any feedback would be much appreciated.

I'm at a MAT, that is the list price showing on our CSP's licencing portal. Yes clear as mud for all of this licencing stuff, just for reference a standalone intune licence for faculty is 49p, it costing more suggests to me that it's not included.

Educational CSP pricing for "Azure Active Directory Premium P1 for Faculty" is 39p per month per user.

For DHCP we moved to the core switch stack where we have one and to the routers in the smaller schools. If you are pushing to remove anything hosted locally, Azure VMs can be a lot cheaper than you think. You are billed by the hour so if you set a tight schedule of up-time for those few servers you still need, and automate them on/off, you end up paying 10s of pounds a year (Depending on required spec).

This is going to be fun, going to test how many people can sneak into a game of solitaire during our weekly briefing

I've had this before if the machine is running win 10/11 Home and I've not realised before trying to use the provisioning package on it.

Sharepoint migration tool will do it, you can use an Azure storage location instead of local cache to maximise transfer speeds and bypass the throttle (I think) but you will incur some azure cost.

I think that is a fairly complete list, but what is often even more important are the processes and technologies used to get from point A (on prem) to point B (fully cloud). Some of these bespoke migration services can create a significant cost barrier for those looking at going in this direction. What do you use at Concero to achieve these migrations? e.g exchange to exchange online, file server to Onedrive/Sharepoint etc.

If you check the sign in logs on AzureAD for your test user you should be able to get some more details on if the policy is trying to apply conditional access and why it passes/fails.

Do you have any other conditional access policies in place that could be taking priority? Such as bypass MFA for sign-ins originating from the schools IP address? If you do, you might need to put an exclude rule on those to force the MFA.

I've started to use https://speed.cloudflare.com/ more these days, it seems more accurate to me. I've also found the auto selected speedtest.net server can have a big impact.

We went serverless over a year ago across our 11 sites. 0 onsite severs, azure AD only, files in onedrive and sharepoint with KFM enabled for redirection. It's been a very successful move for us, i'm happy to go into more details on each element of the move if that's useful, just drop me a PM. Schools have what can be described as 'average' internet at best. These are rural schools and having investigated costs of better, more reliable connections these are just prohibitively expensive. As such I think DHCP / DNS needs to remain local at present. We were in a similar situation with a number of rural primaries but after monitoring the bandwidth at each site over the last year we are yet to max out at the sites which only have FTTC lines. DHCP was moved to the router and there was no longer a requirement for local DNS with no services running from site. We are on the journey to moving everything to OneDrive / Sharepoint and are 99% of the way there! None the less having a server on-site with shares whose permissions integrate with Azure AD would be ideal. How have others gone about this? Do I simply create a VM and Azure AD join it? Sure you could have a file server onsite but i think you would quickly wonder why you bothered. Synced locations from SharePoint give staff the same shared folder experience and the performance is on par with local. Maybe if you are working with large media files, this would be the only case i would consider it worth while. Print servers - how are people handling these? Again, is it possible to somehow join a local server to Azure AD and manage permissions this way We tried universal print but there is still a requirement for an onsite server/machine to run a connector. There are only a handful of machines that have native connectivity to universal print. Other options would be printix & papercut hive if you need pull printing. Printerlogic if you just need printer deployment and management. With any of these options you don't need an onsite print server.

I would finally have a try at some 4K gaming!

Could be this https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-trialling-daily-attendance-tracker-to-cut-absences/ although the article says this is via Wonde. Maybe they have expanded the project?

Very late for them to change their mind on this.. annoying as most of mine are already past cabling stage. However with some of mine i seemed to reach an undisclosed cost cap so i doubt i would have been able to push for a re-wire anyway, unless they have changed this as well.

I had two orders of MR46s arrive back in July, have been waiting for the rest since then. They have in the last couple of weeks suggested we switch to the MR56 as there is still 0 stock showing on the MR46 product line. Switches have been less of an issue.

I've taken our 11 primary schools serverless in the last 18 months, happy to talk about our journey just drop me a pm.

Yes we needed deeper cabinets at nearly all our schools, this delayed things as we had to go back to the DfE for re-approval. Had no issue getting the new total approved however, we are now just in the long queue for Cisco APs...