Tela LAptop Policies for Staff

[Kevin Whelan]

spent the last 3 weeks on a change cycle for 35 odd tela machines moving staff private stuff onto their new laptops
Leaving them to do it themselves is not an option because there is a time limit before lease runs out
they don't have spare harddrives, and they would be constantly coming for assistance and I'd spend the time trying to figure out what they had done or not copied etc.

So anyway long story short but being perfectionist I'd just rather do it myself
Problem is most on on their 3rd tela machine now and have amassed collections of music ,100gigs plus,photos 100gigs plus and various other things,movies for the kids while were at the bach?

Does anyone have a strict work only policy for their Tela machines
this is just getting out of hand
Management aren't keen on being bad guys and enforcing anything that makes them seem even slightly in control

And why oh why does anyone need 33500 emails in their inbox, the pst files alone are scary

someone shoot me now

[Gerard MacManus]

Any personal stuff on the laptops is their own responsibility. Staff are told of any upcoming tela changes and it is their responsibility to make sure that they backup their own files. This is the way it has been dealt with in my last two schools.

Any school files should be saved on the school network share.

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[Craig Knights]

We encourage staff to use gmail rather than outlook to avoid pst bloat.

Back when we did our last windows rollover it was pop out the hdd usb dock migwiz across i think. Its been a while.

Some pain this time round with mac to mac transfer from 500GB hdd to 256GB ssd. But overall quite good.

We don't have a movie policy but a school close by does.. 

Ta
Cjk

[J B]

Same here, it is not the schools responsibility to do all their personal it work for free.  We will help if asked nicely though.

Sent from my Windows Phone

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From: Gerard MacManus
Sent: ‎8/‎27/‎2015 4:55 PM
To: techies-f...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [techies-for-schools] Tela LAptop Policies for Staff

[trevor storr]

yep, what's reasonable gets done, but no guarantees either.  About a month + warning.  Most use own external drive to backup personal files.  Gmail, no outlook client, no local email.

Interestingly, another organisation I work for has a policy of no music/movies (ie commercial copies, paid for or not) on the laptops because of the potential for copyright problems.  Laptop belongs to the organisation therefore any illegally copied files also belong to organisation -> risk.

cheers

Trevor

Trevor Storr
Director of eLearning, CantaNET http://educo.vln.school.nz
Waimate High School
Waimate
New Zealand

[Gerard MacManus]

Which raises the issue, since they are owned by the organisation and not the individual, are they being randomly investigated? 

When the staff where given the tela laptop, did they also sign a use agreement?

The school has the right to audit at anytime any material on equipment that is owned or leased by the school. The school may also request permission to audit privately owned ICT devices/equipment used on the school site or at any school related activity.

[trevor storr]

not sure if you mean the individual or the organisation being investigated - it could be either!

 The school may also request permission to audit privately owned ICT devices/equipment used on the school site or at any school related activity.

Request yes, but schools shouldn't even ask for the password for pupil accounts / devices not owned by the school.

http://www.education.govt.nz/school/managing-and-supporting-students/student-behaviour-help-and-guidance/searching-and-removing-student-property/digital-technology-guide-for-schools/

[Ict Technician]

Does anyone have a strict work only policy for their Tela machines?

We have a strict legality policy. No downloaded movies, utorrent etc. That certainly helps. We also limit the user's partition size to 200GB (to make our on-site backups rational). We also sync user content to the server, so changing laptops is not an issue, although to be fair last time i just used the migration tool (OSX). Leveraging your server to do the hard work for you is essential, imo. Changing laptops is no different from replacing a lost laptop, so if you don't already have all your data synced somewhere the users are at risk.
Mostly, upgrades and hard drive replacements are seamless, so i have time for personal interaction on tricky cases. Having good disk inventory tools can be useful to show staff what is going on in their filesystems. Daisydisk, X-inventory for mac, not sure for PC, windirstat, spacesniffer?

someone shoot me now

I know that feeling! but, no. 

[Craig Knights]

This time round with our Macs I had good information from OmniDiskSweeper but run sudo from a terminal to pick up the stuff that isn't owned by the users..  very useful.

ta

Craig

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[Matthew Strickland]

Generally staff are responsible for data on their laptop however like yourself I feel obliged to make the new as much like the old.

Usually the slip-up is custom word dictionaries, specific application settings especially when the new machine has a newer version.

As for PST files I usually set '3 months offline', the rest in the cloud which don't bother me.

It's usually SMT that hold onto all their emails.

For OSX I've usually used the migration tool, For windows generally manually since Easy Transfer is long depreciated.

A connected Microsoft account can sync some Windows settings between old and new. (colours, themes, language preferences, store app settings, favourites etc)

As we are using OneDrive/Sharepoint more and more, I am finding less school stuff on laptops (and probably just personal stuff residing)

Matt Strickland

Karamu High School

[Patrick Dunford]

Depends on school. At one school I just rip out the HDD and put it into another computer, make a backup VHD of the whole disk (very fast) then mount and extract the data we want. I never copy a whole profile, just the folders like desktop, downloads, pictures etc, only appdata we generally copy is the Chrome profile.

 

At another school we just took out the old disk and plugged it into the new laptop with a USB adapter then copied stuff across, didn’t keep backups for them but we were doing 30 laptops at once, whereas the first school their leases were all spread out so I rarely deal with more than three or four at a time.

 

The problem I see now is the Ministry has cut down the order window so when we used to have two months to order the new laptop, now we have just one month from the time we can place the order to the time when the old laptop has to be sent back.

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[Atholl Wilkinson]

We have a policy with teachers, if they have anything personal on moe laptops, that it is their responsibility to backup their data prior to exchanging laptops. Majority of teachers here are very good and usually clear off their own laptops. I do however give them at least 4 weeks notice of the changeover.  I also have the support of senior management. I just did a changeover of around 32 laptops in June and everything ran smoothly from that point of view.
Atholl
Selwyn College

[Simon - OBHS]

I'm forever reminding teachers that their own data is their responsibility and they should be storing school stuff on the network or at least making backup/copy of the locally stored school data on to the network.

I cringe every time i look at a teacher's laptop and see no clear space on their desktop, with it full of folders and files. I usually ask them "if the hard drive was to die, what would you do about your data?", this has been sinking in more and more, more often than not nowadays the answer is "i have a backup", but usually followed by "i haven't done a back since last term".

[Mike Etheridge]

Me too. My mantra

“If it’s important to you, *you* back it up

“If you want it to be private, *you* encrypt it”

Not going in, however.

Mike

On 7/09/2015, at 10:33 am, Simon - OBHS <simon....@obhs.school.nz> wrote:

I'm forever reminding teachers that their own data is their responsibility and they should be storing school stuff on the network or at least making backup/copy of the locally stored school data on to the network.

I cringe every time i look at a teacher's laptop and see no clear space on their desktop, with it full of folders and files. I usually ask them "if the hard drive was to die, what would you do about your data?", this has been sinking in more and more, more often than not nowadays the answer is "i have a backup", but usually followed by "i haven't done a back since last term".

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[Patrick Dunford]

We have staff with 250 GB on their laptops, just how are you going to back that up the network server?

 

From: techies-f...@googlegroups.com [mailto:techies-f...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Simon - OBHS
Sent: Monday, 7 September 2015 10:34 AM
To: Techies for schools <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [techies-for-schools] Re: Tela LAptop Policies for Staff

 

I'm forever reminding teachers that their own data is their responsibility and they should be storing school stuff on the network or at least making backup/copy of the locally stored school data on to the network.

 

I cringe every time i look at a teacher's laptop and see no clear space on their desktop, with it full of folders and files. I usually ask them "if the hard drive was to die, what would you do about your data?", this has been sinking in more and more, more often than not nowadays the answer is "i have a backup", but usually followed by "i haven't done a back since last term".

 

 

DISCLAIMER

This e-mail is intended for the addressee only and may contain information which is subject to legal privilege. This e-mail message and accompanying data may contain information that is confidential and subject to privilege. Its contents are not necessarily the official view Otago Boys’ High School or communication of the Otago Boys’ High School. If you are not the intended recipient you must not use, disclose, copy or distribute this e-mail or any information in, or attached to it. If you have received this e-mail in error, please contact the sender immediately or return the original message to Otago Boys’ High School by e-mail, and destroy any copies. Otago Boys’ High School does not accept any liability for changes made to this e-mail or attachments after sending.

[Mike Etheridge]

I don’t suggest the network. External USB 3 drives are cheap, fast and high capacity. Couple that with Time Machine (Apple users), there’s just no excuse.

Mike

[Craig Knights]

as long as they use those external drives for backup and not primary storage..  because they WILL drop them.

CJK

[Pete Mundy]

Hi all

I see different solutions at different schools (always the way), but I do visit schools that have teacher laptops with this level of data on them that backup successfully via their (W-SNUP) WiFi onto an Time Machine AFP share on a Mac OS X server (ie Mac Mini with large external storage). It all happens automatically in the background without them really being aware of it.

So it can work, but like Mike it's not what I'd recommend.

From the point of view of ease of load on the technician I prefer the allocation of USB drives to everyone and they're responsible for their own backups. Although Craig is right of course about them understanding that it's only a 'backup' if it's a second copy! I had a teacher recently who learnt the difference after loosing 15GB or so of data from her filed external drive :(

Pete

[flow in]

network homes? Its not been a problem for me - obviously if everyone attempted to sync everything at once it might slow things down significantly, but constant background sync is a relatively low load (compared to streaming a bluray, for example). That's with OSX laptops though. I've not tried with users on windows based laptops, although the staff can log into a windows machine and see all their files. I'm pretty sure last time i set up a windows system it worked pretty much the same.

I think it is very 20th century to have all your data on a really quite fragile device - their laptops should really be as throwaway as possible, imo.

[Kevin Whelan]

I don't want all their holiday/family snaps saved on our servers and that's another battle in itself. Now they finally realize the difference between on laptop and network storage they all just think ,Ah I will just make a copy on the network and suddenly your servers are full and your backups take hours to process.
Teaching them to use onedrive is helping and google photos having unlimited storage now is a godsend.
My original point is with rollouts they would all want us to provide them with usb drives at our cost,
they would take weeks to actually copy the data if I gave out the new machines first and there's a very limited window for returns
there would be tears for some that managed to copy alias/shortcuts etc instead of the files

What I need is to be able to stagger the original leases that were all placed on day 1 so we get more manageable rollout blocks.
Windows to actually build a useful migration tool with target disk mode and a cable connection
school to publish a fair use "company provided laptop" reminding them its a work tool only policy

By the By
having to purchase external dvds  is another painful expense and the hp840s only really go when you put 8gigs of ram in them, the difference is astounding

[Patrick Dunford]

We had one teacher had everything on an external HDD, she seemed not to understand the point of it, she lost all her stuff because the external HDD crashed and she didn’t have another copy of io.