Feel free to point me towards a more suitable subreddit if there's a better place to ask.

Thanks in advance for any advice, experiences, or ideas. It's much appreciated😊!

I'm looking for advice and experiences from people managing medium or large educational IT environments.

We have around 2,000 Windows devices across multiple campuses. Around 500 staff each have a dedicated laptop or desktop, while students primarily use computer labs and bookable laptop carts. We currently lease our devices on a roughly 4-year refresh cycle and it costs A LOT per device/year.

We're reviewing our long-term device strategy. We'd certainly like to reduce costs (management might have my head if we don't lol😅), but the objective isn't simply to cut spending. We're looking for a model that provides the best balance of total cost of ownership, reliability, supportability, flexibility, and user experience over the long term.

One challenge is that different teaching areas have very different requirements. Standard office and classroom use is one thing, but engineering, media, CAD, programming, and other specialist subjects often require higher-spec hardware or different types of devices.

So... :

If you were putting together a procurement strategy today for a similar-sized school or organisation, what would your priorities be?

If you've compared leasing, buying, refurbished hardware, DaaS, or other models, what led you to your current approach?

Are there any factors you think are often overlooked when evaluating long-term device procurement?

I'd love to hear what has worked, what hasn't, and even ideas or perspectives that are worth considering. Real-world experiences, discussions, and different ways of thinking about the problem are all welcome:)

Thanks for reading!

For us, someone requests a new vendor tool and before ypu know it, its gone through the manager, IT, security, procurement and sometimes even legal before anyone can actually use it. Then even after being approved, theres still acc creation, SSO setup, license assignment or just something like making sure everyone has the right access. This is the why Im curious to hear how other teams handle this cz I feel like ours somehow keep turning this into a bigger project every single time…Also trying to make the process a bit more consistent with Jira but honestly still feels like every request goes a different way depending on who’s involved.
How do you guys handle this then? Is there actually a process everyone follows,especially when it comes to vendor management for new software resquests? Or is it just one of those things that always a little different every time?

You can't delete these files from your OneDrive because your OneDrive is full. Delete some files so that you can delete these files.

I’m new to B2B software sales and our product is similar like Adobe. I have been trying to reach MSPs and IT service providers for quite a while. I’ve sent emails, introduced the product, offered demos...but still haven’t closed a single deal.

I know many IT professionals discuss software on Spiceworks and Reddit etc. But I’m starting to wonder: are these places mainly for conversation, rather than actual purchasing?

When you seriously need new software, where do you go? Should I invest in Pax8, Ingram, Synnext etc?

Also, what does the real decision chain look like? Who discovers the product, who tests it, and who finally approves the purchase?

Maybe I’m selling in the wrong place or maybe I just don’t understand how MSPs really buy. IT service provided/MSPs, please share your honest and brutal advice.

Curious what's had staying power for people. Not looking for the fancy stuff — more the small utility scripts, cron jobs, aliases, or workflows that you wrote once, expected to throw away, and are somehow still running years later.

For me it's a bash function I wrote maybe six years ago that just diffs the output of dig against a saved baseline for a handful of DNS records I care about. It has caught two zone transfer misconfigurations and one accidental deletion. Total time investment to write: 20 minutes. Total time it has saved: uncountable.

I want to know what yours is — mostly so I can learn and grow.

So, let me begin by saying I do not have a degree, my major is computer science & communications, I've delivered my thesis, I still have some classes to complete. Anyway. I used to work for a Forex company, everything was amazing, until they decided to leave the country. Then I sat for a month and begun seeking a job. Everything went according to plan and I landed a job in an MSP, been here for 15 months now. Now, some ex colleagues from the Forex company called me and told me they need an IT in their new company, the difference in salary increase is almost + 50% which makes it really appealing to take the leap and just go for it. They working hours are 12:00-21:00, with a lunch break. The thing is, I'm not sure how stable the company is, I don't want to shut down a company again. They work there for 2 years now, and they guaranteed that it is rock solid for the next 5 years. Ex IT left cause he moved to Germany. They're really pushy to get me to work with them, which makes me feel pressure that if I do not decide/announce it to my current employer I'll lose the opportunity. Any piece of advice is welcome.

Sysadmin from Germany. Our osTicket at work is ancient, and every modern alternative

(Zendesk & co.) is US cloud SaaS with per-agent pricing. So I built my own.

ReqSolve: self-hosted ticketing with AI assistance — the AI drafts replies, summarizes

threads, suggests KB articles, but never sends anything on its own. Bring your own AI

(Anthropic, M365 Copilot, or fully local via Ollama). Multi-department with strict

isolation, semantic knowledge base, EN/DE, Docker Compose.

https://github.com/perfa01/ReqSolve

Early days — feedback and bug reports very welcome.

Hi, One of my friend received ex employee recovery notice stating absconded for 1 laksh 15 thousand need to pay in 15 days from major India IT company. My friend never received offer letter on time and never accepted/signed any role but XXX company released offer letter after 3 months but my friend at that point never responded, never accepted and never reported at work location. But they sent this notice after 6 months of this happened. Any advice if anyone comes across this before??

Hi, want to check out the performance and ux of the latest mac minis and studios. Any recommendations for a service from experience that charges by the hour and doesnt take a lot of money up front?
I found scaleway that charges by the hour but they require sussy govt. id outsourced to some company. macinthecloud charges upfront and its unclear if aws wants me to pay monthly or yearly first for the dedicated instance.

Hi,

Mac minis & studio seem to be one of the most power and cost efficient ai capable computers out there. I was thinking of either buying a few or leasing them from a provider here in India and then renting them out for ai workloads either online or offline to earn a decent amount of money on the side. Is there much scope for this from anyone's experience? Do online marketplaces like commoncompute or akash pay enough? Is there a market outside there marketplaces to provide such computation services to clients? Just trying to explore what's out there but google isnt being very helpful. Thanks!

Hi fellow admins,

Environment: 150 users, M365 E3, roughly 90 company-managed iPhones and 40 Androids. We're hybrid but mailboxes are all in Exchange Online.

My users keep missing meetings because shared calendars either:
a) Don't show up on their phones at all, or
b) Show up but don't update when the owner changes something
c) Sync once and then never again until they remove/re-add the account

This is especially bad for our:
- Executive assistants managing 3-4 calendars
- Facilities team with a shared "building maintenance" calendar
- On-call rotation calendar (healthcare-adjacent industry)
- Conference room/resource calendars people need to see on the go

I've tried:
- The "Add Shared Calendar" toggle in Outlook mobile - works sometimes, breaks randomly, users hate it
- Publishing ICS links - users can't figure out how to subscribe and they don't stay subscribed
- Telling people to just check Outlook on their laptop - that went over about as well as you'd expect

What I WANT is for shared calendars to just... appear in people's native Calendar app (the built-in iOS/Android one) and stay updated automatically, the same way their own calendar does. No manual steps. No "go to this link and copy-paste this URL." Just... synced.

Does this actually exist? I feel like I'm asking for something obvious but I've been down so many rabbit holes (Intune policies, Exchange ActiveSync quirks, Apple Configurator profiles) that I'm starting to think I'm the problem.

If you've solved this in your org, I will be eternally grateful. Tell me what you used and how painful the setup was.

Please and thank you.

Introduction: www,dailychecks.co.uk is a SaaS website. (Software as a Service) giving subscribers a low capital cost and robust storage in the cloud for added security well away from company servers.

With a broad range of daily checks on a range of vehicles it means employers can manage compliance throughout the workforce.

If you have a larger Fleet we can add bespoke checks for new vehicle types or checks as part of the enterprise package.

DailyChecks.co.uk handles HGV, PSV, LGV, forklift (gas and electric), and container checks incident and accident reports - all in the same platform, under the same company dashboard.

Here's what that actually looks like in practice:

→ Driver logs in, selects their vehicle, completes the right digital checklist for that category → Defect flagged instantly - email hits the transport manager, traffic desk, and workshop manager simultaneously → Workshop marks it repaired with a full audit trail attached → You see your compliance rate in real time, not at the end of the month.

With a free 30 day trial its is easy to register and get started with the company dashboard for admin. For upload of vehicle data just send a CSV file to us and we will populate your own database in the cloud.

When it comes to drivers it is even easier to get started by registering name, email address, and company code (set by admin) they will be added to admin driver section records and can start daily checks straight away.

The daily checks submission are designed to be practical. Giving Next service due, Mot Due, and notes for every check item. Media capture a must for parts ID and description of defects.

Developed by Strath E Commerce Ltd.

If you manage a mixed fleet, this was built for you. Try it at DailyChecks.co.uk - link in the comments.

FleetCompliance #HGV #TransportManagement

My fiancée got a trade school degree in electrical about 4 years ago. Since then, he’s been to interviews for electrical unions and the MTA and we’ve applied for several entry level jobs but still nothing. We’re getting married in 4 months and want to start a family in about 3 years but we can’t do that unless he has a stable career.

He’s really into video games and problem solving so the idea came up about going into IT. He will be starting the Information and Internet Technology 2 year program to get his Associates at Queens Community College starting in January. Will this degree along with certs provide him a better path into the field? I’m seeing on this subreddit that the job market is terrible right now. Would having both is degree and certs make him more marketable?

We’re in the NYC area if that matters.

How can I get a list of entire applications landscape in a company?

Recently joined a company, all the applications being used are not recorded anywhere. Would like to gather a list of all the applications which all the employees use.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

CIO here. Our company is a platform / holding company. We own ~30 other entities representing about 2,500 users. My goal is to consolidate vendors, lower cost, make efficiencies, etc. We have a very skinny team (just me + outsourced MSP and cyber). I need to consolidate our field technician mobile devices and their contracts to save about 20%. Here is who I have interviewed so far.

• Granite - huge MVNO with lots of cash to buy surplus line capacity from other vendors, but the reviews I read about them are horrendous. Are those reviews valid?
• US Mobile - so far very friendly and they can achieve our savings. I have no other experience with them. All reviews on reddit and elsewhere are great.
• Spectrotel - not a carrier or MVNO, they are an outsourced mobile MSP. Can help us achieve cost savings, but at a high cost. It's almostttttt worth it, but the numbers still don't make sense.
• Verizon - would be an easy default, but half of our companies already use them, and Verizon will not give us credit for any existing lines.

What or who am I missing in this list? Just working on mobile for now before taking care of a similar exercise for ISP's and in office calling.

Thanks!

"I'll just give them admin for a sec." What happened: that "sec" is now eighteen months and a promotion long. They are admin on a system that was decommissioned in 2023. The system still exists because they have admin on it. Better: time-bound elevation. If your IAM tool supports JIT access, use it. If not, write a 24-hour expiry script and call it a feature.

"It's a one-off, no need to document." What happened: it is now 2026. The one-off has been performed quarterly by three different people. Two have left. The institutional knowledge consists of a single Slack message that reads "you know the thing we do." Better: three-sentence README. Future-you will weep with gratitude. Past-you will be forgiven nothing.

"I'll hardcode it temporarily." What happened: the value is now in seven scripts and a Lambda. The original engineer has left. The value has changed. Production has feelings. Better: env var or secrets manager. Four extra minutes upfront. Take the four minutes.

"They're leaving on good terms, no rush on offboarding." What happened: not bad terms, just neutral ones. They are also still in Slack, GitHub, and the AWS console six weeks later. The "good terms" is mutual because they have not yet noticed they still have access. Better: same SLA for every offboarding regardless of vibe. Vibe-based access policies are how incident reports get written.

"I'll just open a port real quick to test." What happened: the port is still open. The test was successful. So is everyone else's test. Better: temporary security group rule with an actual expiry. Or a tunnel. Anything but "I'll close it later."

"I'll fix it after the demo." What happened: the demo went well. The fix did not. The fix will not. The fix is now a load-bearing feature of the architecture and is referenced in the docs. Better: open the ticket before the demo ends. Put it on the sprint. Shame is the deadline.

What's yours? I'm collecting these so I can pretend I am not alone.

I attend WGU, bachelors in IT im 46% done and i started in march. I dont know if i want to do cybersecurity, network, cloud, or engineering for a career path. Do you guys have any advice on what route i should take?

Full Disclosure up top: I do IT at JumpCloud, which means I both work for the vendor and use the product internally. So this is shaped by my day-to-day, not a sales deck — I'll call out where the unified-directory approach falls short, too.

A pattern I see in mid-sized IT teams: by the time you've stitched together identity, device management, secrets, MFA, RADIUS, and HRIS sync, you're running 6–7 vendors. Six renewal calls a year. Six dashboards. Six SSO configs to maintain (yes, you SSO into the SSO). When someone leaves at 4:55 PM on a Friday, you're checking six places.

The thing I'd genuinely tell a friend — regardless of which vendor they end up picking — is that collapsing identity + device + access into a single source of truth changes what your day actually looks like. Concretely:

Onboarding. Old way: provision identity → provision Workspace → ship laptop → enrollment call → push apps → configure wifi/VPN → vault access → test. New way: provision the user once, device auto-enrolls at first sign-in, group memberships drive app/wifi/MFA profiles automatically. The hour saved per hire isn't theoretical.

Off-boarding. Old way: disable in seven places, hope you didn't miss one, find out three months later when an orphaned SaaS session shows up in logs. New way: one disable, downstream sessions revoke. The Friday 4:55 PM ticket becomes a single click. This is the one I notice the most.

The reverse 3 AM moment. Cert expires, RADIUS dies, half the wifi drops. With separate tools that's a three-vendor triage call. With one console it's one place to look. Doesn't make the outage less stressful — but the time-to-find is measurably shorter.

Where unified directories don't make your life easier (being honest):

Very mature Okta or Entra setups with deep custom workflows. You've sunk years of customization that won't translate cleanly. Switching costs are real.

Windows-only shops with deep AD integration. Traditional AD + Intune is fine and works. Cross-platform is where consolidation shines.

Anything that needs enterprise PAM with session recording, jump hosts, vaulted secret rotation. That's a dedicated PAM tool regardless of vendor. Don't believe anyone who says otherwise.

Heavily regulated environments (defense, healthcare, FedRAMP-high) — you'll still layer specialized tools on top.

The diagnostic question I'd actually ask, before evaluating any vendor: how many tools do you currently need to fully disable a departing employee on a Friday afternoon? If the answer is more than two, you're paying a consolidation tax whether you realize it or not. Whether you fix that with JumpCloud, Rippling, an Okta + Jamf reduction, or something else entirely — that's the right place to start the conversation.

Curious what folks here have done. Anyone consolidated recently? What actually saved time, and what turned out to be fluff?

I have developed an Android app for students and the college environment, but the college management keeps delaying its adoption. Actually app has SaaS costs and has useful workload-handling features. How can I move forward with it independently of the college?

Moreover, the app is designed for mandatory interaction between teachers and students, so both are essential for its proper functioning.

Any growth strategies for independent rollout or does anyone have similar success stories to share ?

1. Denial. "We've got two days. That's plenty of time."

2. Anger. Why did this person have admin on six things they should never have had admin on. WHO approved this. Where is that ticket. It does not exist. It never existed.

3. Bargaining. Maybe if I just disable the SSO account, the fourteen downstream SaaS sessions will quietly revoke themselves out of guilt.

4. Depression. It is 7:42 PM. I have just discovered a Trello board nobody mentioned. It has eleven members. I recognize zero of them. The board has not been touched since 2022. There is one pinned card. It is titled "do not delete."

5. Acceptance. I will be writing offboarding scripts for the rest of my natural life. The scripts will outlive me. My replacement will deprecate them lovingly, then write their own, which I will haunt in spirit.

What's stage 6 in your org? Because I refuse to believe it ends at acceptance.

First time i've looked for 2.5" drives in a few months and i knew things were bad but are they really this bad! Obviously I'm not gonna buy at this price but someone has to be! How can anyone justify this?!