CharlesGreig

Hi All, I have a primary that has purchased 20 chromebooks without asking IT about them, now, that ship has sailed and it is what it is, what I want to know is, do any of you have chromebooks in a primary and if so, how are you using them? The staff at the school think that having the kids log in using an email address will be too complicated for a primary age student. I realise this is kinda closing the gate after the horse has bolted, but do you just make a '[email protected]' for each chromebook and just leave them signed in kind of thing? Honestly, I have not used Chromebooks before so if anyone has any tips or places to find particularly good guides / tips for chromebooks in general / in a primary I would be everso greatful. Apologies if I have posted this in the wrong area, I couldn't find a specific Chromebook forum. Thanks

Is it hibernating or actually turning off? Like, if you look on your c: do you have hiberfil.sys? When you turn off hibernate Impero wouldn't do it according to the guy I was talking too (though I was a little sceptical). I will speak to them again though if its working for you and not using hibernate?

WOL works, its Impero's implementation that doesn't work as it did. I really only want to turn on and off classroom machines, the granularity and scheduling that Impero afforded was just the ticket, the free WOL programs were a bit less user friendly. I just wanted something that was easy to set up and configure and use that would turn on and off a subset of machines (the majority but not like teacher office / admin machines etc).

Is PDQ Deploy decent value for edu? I assume you use this instead of SCCM for your machines software too? Thanks

I don't know, I mean, I was on the phone to Impero support and they just said it doesn't do it anymore - because of the load that it puts on the network - which I pointed out to them was clearly not the case as that would be miniscule (magic packets to WOL probably pale into insignificance compared to all the youtube vids and junk that people are looking at in the day and certainly, I don't care if it happens at 7am and 8pm!) I'm not suggesting WOL doesn't work on W10, more that it doesn't on W10 and Impero - it was them that told me this. I'll have a look at this though.

How many machines do you have? My main concern is I have ~500+ machines churning through electricity over night every night for no reason, if not for the cost implications, the environmental ones are enough that I will have to give it a decent look. Appreciate your feedback though

Hi, I used to use impero's WOL feature to turn on and off the machines on our school network outside of school hours but since I got us up to W10 this nolonger works - they suggest using hibernate, but, I don't know about you guys, I don't have enough available diskspace on a bunch of my machines SSD's to have hibernate enabled. Anyway, with that out the window, I have tried some free WOL options but nothing gave me either reliability or granularity that I was hoping to achieve so I thought I would see what you fine people use? Thanks

@HPlum78 I get you, I don't think you're wrong, I don't think I would ever say anything online that I would worry particularly if my bosses saw, I don't know if it is me that has you worried, but none-the-less, I think its a fair point, I always am ultra professional in my emails even when talking to friends etc as I always take the view that my boss could stumble upon anything or someone could send anything unprofessional to them. That being said, I think that its fair that people can disagree with their bosses and their desire to solve a policy problem techincally. I appreciate that not everyone (and least of all bosses) will agree with me on that. I have read with interest this french law thing with the hope it might help, but the problem I really have with automated systems is the reliability and the granularity that I am trying to achieve, its not something I have seen anyone achieve in a way that they seem fully happy with - there are a lot of people talking about MTA's but with a distinct lack of specifics, I used to work with a company providing security MTA's which could probably achieve this, but the cost would put it WAY out of the reach of most schools, I do think that we often try for techincal solutions where policy would be better and being as I think the desired outcome of this is simply to try and address work life balance, I don't think its a bad idea - I do think if you make it policy not to do this and people choose to ignore it, you can reasonably say that they have had every opportunity to do so and that email out of hours isn't 'expected' - much in the same way that health and safety policies exist, but have you never seen anyone standing on a chair or something? We don't remove every chair... weird analogy but I hope it makes sense. Anyway, I am happy to do both policy and technical if I can find a good technical solution, and that is where I'm drawing a blank thus far. PS, if my boss is reading this, hey, this is me doing my job, I told you I was doing some research! Thanks

@wickit I have heard some good things about flow, I have only just taken over at my school so I'm more firefighting at the moment than bringing in new systems, but it is something I am eager to get more into as I think it has a bunch of applications for schools. Absolutely let me know how you get on with it, I am super interested to hear how you get on. Thanks Charles

I am absolutely on board with this being a policy rather than a technical issue, I just thought I would do some due diligence before feeding back to the Principal who asked for it, I have already had to say no to a bunch of things that are a policy rather than tech issue and I don't want to seem like I have come into a new role and poo-poo'd everything, but I do think this is going to end up being policy rather than technical. Thanks

Hi, I have been asked to make it so that outside of work hours (or slightly earlier / later) that I disable email for staff and automate a reply explaining 'Staff are only available during the hours of 8-5' or something like that, the message is not important, what I need to understand is, is there a way to facilitate this, ideally with some degree of granularity, so I could have key staff like the site manager / senior team (probably me doh!) still be able to get emails whenever. Also, the emails should still be recieved, just staff unable to get them... I think... I mean, I am open to other ways of achieving this, but generally speaking I want to do it in the most simple manner possible. I come from a GSuite background, but even then, I wouldn't instantly know how to achieve this. While I have your attention, does anyone have a company who can assist them with O365 who are both good and reasonably priced so that I could always fall back on them if I can't figure out a couple of solutions? Thanks Charles

hey chaplic, I certainly had no desire to use a third party - I just have noticed there are a lot of random tools to do things in 365, I thought perhaps this reflected a lack of a way to do them yourself - as I say, I'm not by any stretch fully up to speed on the 365 train. What are we considering a new version of windows 10, its not as new as I would like, but I am focusing on building my windows 7 machines to 10 rather than sorting out a new 10 image at the moment (there is a LOT of updating and stuff to do), we are certainly not on the newest version. I was looking at the known folder move tool but it kept referencing syncing which put me off, but I'll give it more of a look! Are you using this in your school? Thanks Charles

Thats awesome, really appreciate this - I think I will wait until monday to start playing about as it will give me a window to fix anything I break, but this looks good. So have you gone for the approach of getting rid of the network folders in place of OneDrive or are you running the pair in tandem? How have you found it either way? Much appreciated. Charles

Ok, so I have parachuted into an academy and had basically no handover with my predecessor, however, I have inherited a bunch of projects that its expected that I carry through, not a problem in itself. I have, however, come from a primarily GSuite background, and we are O365 here so I am on an extremely steep learning curve in terms of the stuff they want done. I have the brief of effectively mapping the user area to the users OneDrive, not syncing, where the files exist in both places, but literally replacing the existing network area with OneDrive. I have been struggling to achieve this, I managed to get it so that OneDrive synced the MyDocs with OneDrive without any interaction with the user, but the files still existed on the network (the goal is for OneDrive to just be 'the place'). I think that the plan my predecessor had was not to use the OneDrive Sync tool, but rather, to map the drive - but in that case, I only found one article from MS saying that it wasn't recommended: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/support/administration/troubleshoot-mapped-network-drives Googling just results in a myriad of different hacks and solutions and old MS docs that don't seem to do what I want anyway. Ideally, I want this to be zero touch for the user, I don't want them to really know they are using OneDrive, I need to be able to do this via GPO / SCCM or something automated, but I'm kinda stuck. Have any of you guys and gals done this? Did you use a tool? Did you use a third party company to help? Did you have any negative repercussions? I'm super interested to hear what people did to achieve this and how it went? Thanks Charles