IT Ideas

 I've spend the last year upgrading our Trust schools to dedicated leased line ethernet circuits. This process is still ongoing and and at some sites painfully slow - a bit like their current VDSL connections. However, 5G broadband is now starting to be offered on unlimited data tariffs and its starting to become an attractive option if you live in the right area. I've just switched from my BT VDSL connection to EE's 5G unlimited broadband. Below is the before, BT speedtest: Our home broadband speeds have not changed at all in the last decade since VDSL became a thing. No sign of fibre to premises here - at least not in the short term. Back then we went from about 2Mbps - so going to 20ish was great.  However, after setting up the new 5G router (and to be fair I have 5G on my phone - so knew what to expect), we now get: The download speeds we get exceed those of some of our schools on 200Mbps ethernet circuits for about a sixth of the price. However, upload is somewhat slow...

I've previously posted about the ability to manage Windows PCs in the Google Admin Console. However, what if you are still managing your PCs via local active directory, but use Google Workspace for most things? Well you can have your cake and eat it - you just need to use  Google Credential Provider for Windows  and do a few configurations. Step 1 - update your users on the Google Admin Console You need to add a custom attribute to all of your users (at least those who use PCs) on the Google Admin console to link them with their local AD account. So you need to create a custom attribute in the Google admin console and populate this with the AD windows user details: The custom attribute you need is Enhanced_desktop_security and the field is AD_accounts. Detailed instructions can be found here . You can auto populate this field using GADS (Google Apps Directory Sync) if you use this to auto provision your accounts in Google from AD. Alternatively, you can populate them in bulk w...

Given the times and how often I'm asked about how Meet works with Classroom, I've done a quick tutorial. Please be aware that how things work, does depend on how the admin console is configured: For the demo: Meet is enabled for students as a service, but they cannot start video calls and all of the admin options are turned off for their OU. Some feature require Enterprise licenses.