IT_JB

I'm looking at using it later this year, if you configure it with azure blob storage you can chose where the documents are held.

Hi all, I'm currently in the process of reviewing my trusts cloud strategy and would appreciate some advice from those who have already made steps towards going serverless. How have you handled systems such as FMS/Civica/PSF? Their "cloud" options are more of a hosted solution rather than a SaaS and it's not really the direction i'd like to take , has anyone looked at moving them to a VM in their own private cloud in Azure/AWS? I have some concerns around the performance of SQL over a WAN connection after several years of mediocre performance over VPN from site to site (We currently host the system at one of the schools).

This seems like something that could work, need to work out how to handle computers that are left on/in use. Thanks!

A system like Impero or Senso would be ideal but these are small primaries to there's no hope of getting the budget for that unfortunately.

Does anyone know if it's possible to trigger a remote logon using powershell? I know remote logoff is, but I can't find any documentation on a logon command. I'm looking at ways to speed up the start of lessons in the ICT suites by giving the teachers a script to remotely login their year group.

That's how I've been testing it, created a new OU with blocked policy inheritance, then set up my KFM GPO. The test device & user i moved to the new OU kept the redirection settings and then on login KFM kicked in, transferred everything to onedrive and redirected the folder to the "C:/User/username OneDrive... etc" path. If you have the silent flag enabled you don't even see it happen, it all uploads in the background then the redirect only applies after the whole folder has finished uploading.

The current redirection policy just needs to be changed to "not configured" and then it will work.

Moves it from the network storage to OneDrive using the same KFM GPO, previously it would just fail if it was not a C:/ folder path.

Spotted this in the O365 admin centre today and then tested using the newest OneDrive version and it works! https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=56383 We redirect Desktop/Docs/Pictures to the local file server currently but i was looking to move to OneDrive using KFM on our journey to going serverless but the sticking point was that it only works for C:/ path folders, meaning I would have to remove the redirection, copy to the local drive and then upload to OneDrive. Now I can skip that step and go straight from the redirected folders. Thought i would share for others who were looking into this but faced the same problem!

An FYI for those who use Arbor and InVentry the base level of requested permission is hugely excessive. Here's a copy of the access request. Not sure if this is the same for other MIS links but i don't see why it should have any more than read permission and write for attendance. Definitely not delete! After raising the issue with their support team i got a call from one of their higher ups, he said they had reviewed it internally and agreed it was excessive. They are now looking to reduce the level of permission requested but was not able to give an eta because it's something that would affect all customers (who use Arbor) as this is a global permission list used for all schools. If there are any other Arbor + InVentry schools on here could you give your account managers a push? Maybe with more people raising this as an issue they will get to it a bit quicker!

If there are a few key accounts you would like historical emails from you could always use outlook to backup the .pst and then import it into the new account. Very manual process but it works.

I wouldn't say it's easy but it's possible using powershell, it can also take a long time if you have any large mailboxes. I went through this to merge 10 tenants in a MAT, if your sponsor is saying you have to do this i would put it on them to do the migration. Full documentation here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/mailbox-migration/migrate-mailboxes-across-tenants

Question for those who are Primary and use Arbor. How do you report the comparative KS2 data to parents? This is our first year with Arbor and we have just found that Arbor does not offer this data in a report as SIMS used to (I've not personally seen this process so this is based off what office staff have told me).

Are you trying to do this in the desktop version? I think that license only gives you access to the O365 online version of project.

I asked about this when we moved over. If i remember correctly they currently (or are close to) supporting SSO through google accounts. O365 however is not supported.

I'm looking to write long term comprehensive improvement plans in collaboration with Headteachers and SLT, I've only really written project & short term plans before. Looking for advice and guidance on best practice for this. Would anyone be happy to share the document structure of their IT improvement plans or share any examples/templates they have used to help develop their own?

10 School primary MAT here. Just completed our SIMS to Arbor migration last month. Migration was a breeze, all 10 in one weekend! Admin and Teaching staff are loving it. One thing to watch out for is 3rd party system integrations, we have found a few of these to be more difficult than first described. It's early days but that's the only issue that's come up so far.

Exactly that, whitelist the public IP of your PSF server. Then in the SMTP config in PSF put in your MX address instead of the normal O365 SMTP address and tick the option for no authentication required. Emails will then get passed from your PSF server to O365 via the connector and get sent out as the required from address.

You can create them in the exchange admin panel. Admin Centre -> Exchange -> Mail Flow -> Connectors

How do you have it configured in PSF at the moment? You can configure it to use a connector in O365 to send emails without needing authentication.

Would be interested to see if anyone has been able to do this. I got the following from Microsoft when attempting to convert one of my schools agreements to a trust agreement (at the same time increasing the user count). "The customer must supply a confirmation letter that includes the company letterhead advising the details of the name change. The customer letter must designate if the name change is due to a simple name change (i.e. the company structure remains the same and is only changing its name) or if the change is due to a merger or acquisition. A simple name change will be processed by Microsoft as long as all details in the letter indicate that the structure of the company has not changed." My request was denied.

Was worried that may be the solution. Seems like a bit of a bodge, can you schedule the excel file refresh? Is there no live data access via their API?

Has anyone been able to connect Arbor to Power BI. I'd like to start creating some reports for the MAT pulling data from each school but can't find any documentation on Arbor's site on how to set this up.

Has anyone had a go at creating a RemoteApp of the PSFinancials client?

Full accounting suite, locally installed connecting back to the central SQL server. All of our schools are connected by a mesh network. I realise RDP sessions to the central site would provide better performance but then staff would get a performance hit on their profiles/file access as we have folder redirection to local file servers.