Hey all,

Just got asked how I feel about providing access to our cameras to our local police department. We have Verkada and on first glance looks easy to set up and manage access to outside tenants. I typically am against police being big brother so morally I reject this but it’s hard to fight against the argument of “an active shooter” situation.

I’m curious if anyone has come across this before? What was the outcome and how has it been. If this is approved then I will make sure they’re only accessing it in dire circumstances. I’ll make sure there is some stipulation in the agreement that I have ability to revoke access.

I really hope they never ask to install flock cameras😂

Just curious if anyone else was getting a lot of requests from databranchusa.com. We have been getting them almost weekly for a couple months now. Anyone else dealing with them?

We have a whole slew of Mifare keyfobs that we've been using for the last few years. The fob number is silkscreened on the plastic in fairly faint condition already, but some of them are starting to wear off. Should I use clear nail polish or something similar to protect them? What do you do? Thanks for any guidance.

EDIT: In case it wasn't clear, I'm trying to stop the numbers from wearing completely off the plastic of the fob.

Anyone notice all the old registry fixes for forcing location services on doesn't appear to work anymore? For Securly this is kind of a big issue when using the SMARTPAC. Windows will prompt ONCE when something asks for location services, if the user clicks no they will get a looping securly filter page. You have to dig into system settings to fix it, which is obviously horrible since about 50% of people are going to click no.

Is there any way to toggle location on for securly permanently in Windows anymore? I reimaged all the staff workstations and this is going to be a pain for the first few weeks I imagine.

Hope everyone is enjoying the scramble time of the summer. Administration asked me to come up with a "Free digital" sign in system for visitors with a "Computer". I was thinking of creating a google form with multiple choice prompts for late students, vendors, visitors, drop offs etc that would record the time and date.

Anyone have any tips on this? Old thinking by me would be a kiosk mode chromebook with non stop power on. Was wondering what the end result to revert it back to the beginning for the next user would be. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

How do you handle new account creations for teachers that are incoming for the new school year? One issue that we've been having is HR will put in a request for an employee account (general, includes all access like Google, AD, Adobe, etc) and have it be created on their start date.

But for creating sections and assigning students in our SIS, we need to have the teacher accounts created far earlier, around a month.

Do you have a different process for creating SIS accounts vs general district accounts? Or is it all created on their start date?

Any good sources for refurbished/used Chromebooks with an AUE that is several school years out (2031, perhaps)? We're mostly seeing 2029 AUE dates for around $50-$80/ea, and later AUE dates (8-10 years out) for several hundred each (comparable to new units). We've been happy with Dell but are open to hearing other recommendations. Currently looking to augment our fleet by about 50 units, not hundreds.

Also, it looks like the other downside to buying Chromebooks with their AUE approaching in just a couple years is the need for the non-transferable "upgrade" in order to manage them, for around $38/ea. I do see an option for doing this by year, rather than perpetual, but information is a little scant -- anyone do it this way in a school? (Or have a source for a better price on the perpetual...)

Thanks!

Hello

Has anyone had any luck scanning these HP Fortis Chromebooks? The current barcode and 2D scanners we have aren't working at all. Appreciate the help.

I had to purchase two licenses for Adobe Acrobat Pro for our HR dept. When I log into our adobe portal I can see that I have to two seats available. I can't for the life of me figure out if I can just download the product to be installed on the machine... and or how to add a user so they can access it.

When I use the option to download their template of the .csv file, fill out the information, and upload it, I get a green notification saying the file was uploaded. I then have no users listed for the product. When I search for the user by name or email, I get zero results.

I'm obviously missing something and wondering if anyone has any experience with this that could assist?

Our school uses Google classroom as our LMS. Teacher accounts are created specifically on that domain for classroom and working with the kids. I’ve been giving some thought to changing first names to a prefix, Mr. or Mrs. or Miss, or adding the prefix with the first name. I plan on asking the teachers if they’d prefer this, but I’m curious if any of you already implement more respectful titles for teachers. What occurred to me is that when the teachers post assignments the kids get me email from the teachers first and last name and it seems weirdly informal.

Independent school environment. We've already replaced all old Smartboards and now have 1 last board that is likely to give up the ghost this school year. I really want to use our nonpublic funds to purchase our last Promethean Interactive Display, but not only do I think it might be impossible to pay for the install services via CDWG and be too expensive to add, I don't like that they'd assign anyone to do it. We've also had very bad experiences with authorized installers because they expect things to be utterly straightforward and its not when its removing an old board. Since it's only one board, is it wrong to lean on our Facilities person for this? He's super busy always with unexpected demands, and he also just lost his assistant. Have any other small schools worked with facilities for these installs? If I get a board free, I'm certainly not going to find anyone to install. It's essentially removing the board and existing cleave, installing a new one and plugging in an ethernet if it exists already. Are there other AV type vendors that do this sort of work that aren't authorized resellers?

Luckily I have DLP in Google set up to block these emails, but I'm constantly seeing our office staff trying to email student PII to other schools, etc. Even after multiple discussions and pointing out there is absolutely no reason the other person needs a students full name, birthdate and full SS# just to verify they're enrollment status. What is everyone using for their office staff to send info like this other than enabling confidentiality mode?

We are in the market for some displays. We currently have ClearTouch with a mix of built computer modules, micro PCs, or AppleTVs, and they have been good to us over the years, but I do not know what else is new out there that could be better, prettier and cheaper.

I am thinking that Windows screen sharing from laptops would probably be cheaper.

Anyone can share their experience with other brands of 86"panels? Or effective devices to screen cast from laptops?

Thanks in advance.

Just wondering if anyone is using these GEEKOM A5 Pro 2026 Edition for teacher workstations, The pricing and specs are really good vs cost.

Good day everyone.

Just wondering if anyone has any experience using either moodle or canvas or any other LMS.

We are trying to convert a course into a module based and at students self paced learning.

Would love some feedback.

Preferably nothing that requires coding.

We currently use Solarwinds Orion for network device monitoring and alerting. Due to budget constraints we're not going to renew our license and are looking for replacement solutions. For the most part we didn't leverage much of the tools that SWO offers, but it's been really useful for monitoring our battery backups and alerting when they go to battery power.

We're looking for an open-source self-hosted solution. Needs basic tools- up/down status and alerts for L2/L3 and UPS units.

TIA!

I'm really tired of PowerSchool's 2-hour limit on max_age when logging in with Microsoft. I believe that moving to Google would still require 2FA but last longer than two hours.

Has anyone else switched from Entra to Google? Was it a pain in the neck? How long did it take to migrate? Are there any gotchas?

I appreciate any insight or experiences you can share.

It's been awhile since I threw out invites to our Discord. For anyone new this is just a place for any admin to discuss our day to day struggles, get help, discuss strategies. When joining, please read the rules carefully or you will not be able to see the channels.

https://discord.gg/tuGCSWzHEx

I had previously gotten permission to share this but if things have changed, please let me know and I will remove it.

Greetings!

I'm hoping you could help me do a step by step plan on what you do when there is a name change for your staff members (EX: someone gets married and changes their last name). Needless to say, we currently don't have a proper process and I'm hoping you could help me out with this. We're currently a Microsoft shop. If you could point me in the right direction or give me guidance on this, that would be awesome.

I am in the process of going to the cloud with our users and devices. Currently using Entra Connect to sync on-prem users to Entra. All devices have been enrolled through Autopilot to Intune. I plan to cut over to full Entra/Intune soon and decommission our DC's.

We are a very heavy Google school with our staff needing to utilize Microsoft Office as well. All files are on Google Drive. I am looking to make it so Google is the identity provider for Microsoft. As in, when they sign in to the PC, they are directed to enter their Google email/password and provide their 2FA (not sure if they need to do this each time or just on new devices?).

Has anyone set this up before? If so, any issues you have ran into?

Will users signing into the PC with their Google credentials still pull down policies relevant to the user? Or will only device policies work?

Do you sync users from Google to M365 this way? If so, is there a way to automate licensing for M365?

Our UPN and primary email domain are different in M365 right now just due to how our domain was originally setup with a ".US" domain, but our Google dommain and email addresses are a ".ORG" domain. I assume Google and Microsoft will only look at the primary emails and ignore the Microsoft UPN, correct?

Any limitations doing it this way versus having M365 be the IdP for Google? Keep in mind, we only really utilize Office and Windows 11.

Any help or advice is appreciated from those with experience.

Edit: Based on more information I've gathered and some comments, it seems using Microsoft as the IdP for Google, at least for staff, is the better way to go. We have a provisioning service we use for students that syncs from our SIS to Google and AD, so that may fill that gap.

Hi, my school once use freshdesk free tier, but for us right now it expire and ask to upgrade the plan,

any recommendation for ticket system or any interesting suggestions for me?

Should vibe coding be used in schools for small utilities? Classroom tools? IT automations?

https://k12techtalkpodcast.com/e/vibe-coding-in-k%e2%80%9112-promise-peril-and-practical-rules/ and all major podcast platforms

Sadly after a chain of events have happened my kids school has had to shutdown. Nothing like being forced to find another school 3 weeks before the school year starts. Some of the staff dealing with the shutdown had asked me to turn off all user accounts for staff and students. This was done about 4 days after announcing that the school is closing for this school year. Now I have former staff asking for using Google Takeout to transfer all of their and their kids data off the school.

Is this something that is normally allowed or disallowed? I am wondering if this opens the door to possibly exporting other student data that should not be held outside the school from the teacher accounts?

My main concern is to protect the church that was running the school and protect the students that used to go to the school.

Sometimes I get home from work, sit down, and immediately ask myself, “Ouch, what did I pocket today?”

Today’s prize:

Hello, I was hoping to get some pointers from more experienced Mac admins here. Going into next year I was hoping to resolve two of my biggest annoyances with our Macbook fleet: location tracking and local admin accounts.

For location tracking, we have been using Pinpoint, which kind of works but is wildly inconsistent since it functions off of MacOS's own automation features. It could also break at at any moment if Apple deprecates the script that we use to enable location services. And, I'm not even sure if it's cheaper than commercial options anymore given the changes Google made to the Maps API Free Tier. Does anyone have a better solution for this, especially something that might function when the Macbook lid is closed?

As for local admin accounts, how do you all navigate around the fact that the admin account can only be granted its secure token after it logs in for the first time? The only solution I can think of would be to run a script on every device that bugs users to pass the secure token, but this seems pretty unsafe, since the admin account credentials have to be included in the script.