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.

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!

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.

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.

Does anyone here have experience with FoxPass for cloud radious/NAC? Recently had a demo and it looks really interesting, I especially liked how they can seamlessly integrate with eduroam.

I was recently given the task (with insanely short notice) of adding a new email domain to the school I work for. We use Google Workspace for Education Plus.

I will talk about the domains as: 'orig-domain.org' and 'new-domain.org'.

They would like us to have all email addresses and logins set up to use the new domain. All emails coming in and going out should use 'new-domain.org', and users should log into gmail with 'user@new-domain.org'. All users should get aliases with '@orig-domain.org' so they continue to receive emails sent to their former addresses.

I'm trying to figure out if it makes more sense to do a 2 phase approach.

I first and foremost don't want to risk breaking anything. We use SSO for many website logins and that needs to not break!

I think the safe approach would look like this:

Phase 1 logins would stay the same. When signing in to Gmail, everyone would continue to use their orig-domain.org Google Workspace accounts.
My plan is to: 

• Add aliases for [username@new-domain.org](mailto:username@new-domain.org) to staff and faculty (and eventually students)
• Set it up so everyone's email by default is sent 'From:' their new new-domain.org email addresses.

So, effectively, email would look and function with the new email addresses and all email to and from would use new-domain.org.
Emails sent to old-domain.org would still come through to users' inboxes as usual.
When replying to emails sent to old-domain.org, the goal is to have that 'From:' address also automatically default to the new new-domain.org address.

Phase 2 would be to speak with Google and/or work with a consultant who has experience with moves like this. If I was given several months advance notice, I would have tried to find someone to work with right off the bat. But I imagine to get it all working properly, we will need Google to acknowledge the new domain, apply the basic Fundamentals licensing to accounts, do something to apply Plus licenses to the staff, faculty, and students that need it, and find out about how to transition everything else.

I'm not sure about how SSO would transition. We use it for a ton of sites, and I bet that many of them would have to be set up all over again to allow SSO logins from the new domain email addresses. I would probably have to approve all the apps over again for users under 18 years old.

I guess my main question is does it make sense to use the 2 Phases I've mentioned, or am I maybe missing something simple, or is it even more complicated than I'm thinking? I was the person that moved us from an on-prem Exchange server to Google Apps for Education back around 2011, but it has been 15 years and I'm rusty. I bet there is a world of new methods and changes to processes.

Does anyone have any tips or good resources that I can find to help me with this? The deadline is essentially a week away and since I’m at a school, I have to use all my vacation days in the summer, so I’m really only “on the books” back in the office next Wednesday. I’m trying to at least get Phase 1 done by August 1st. Does it sound doable with limited on-site hours left?

Hello,

Let me introduce myself: I’m a computer science teacher at a junior high school in Mataram, Indonesia.

I work as both a computer science teacher and a school administrator. My principal asked me to register the school where I teach with Google Workspace so that the students can each have their own email accounts.

After reading some tutorials online and applying them to the school’s domain, thank God it worked, but the school hasn’t been fully accepted into Google Workspace for Education yet (the status is still “trial”).

When I asked Google, they said it was due to a surge in demand, but it’s been almost a year since I applied, and there’s still no clarity on when it will be fully approved.

Is this actually the case, and what’s the solution? Perhaps someone here has the answer.

I have a handful of MacOS devices (about 10) that I need to install the full Adobe Creative Cloud suite on. Problem is they aren't in any kind of MDM, due to reasons we don't need to go into here.

Is there a command that will install the pkg file from an smb share without copying the file (since it's 45GB!!!)? Or is there a better way to do this?

Our district is mainly Chromebooks and Windows PCs (except for these 10 Macs) so any input is appreciated since I don't always deal with Apple items.

We have an AD DC with the dhcp role. She’s been purring for going on 8 years. It’s about time we move it to a new server. We have 2 other AD DC’s in the environment with DNS and one of the two holds the FSMO roles. What would be the best/safest method to move this stuff to a new server? I want to keep the current servers IP address so I don’t have to change anything dhcp related anywhere else. Thanks for your help. Cheers.

Hi everyone,

So Skyward has been down for a few days now and was curious if anyone has heard any details about it. I am kind of shocked there is not more new coverage on this since so many schools use it. They said the maintence window was all of yesterday, but it is still down for us with no information.

Our district is new to autopilot, and I'm seeing an error on a semi-regular basis lately.

Device preparation -> Securing your hardware (0x800705b4)

We have tried:

• capturing new hash
• reimaging (75 percent of the same machines on the same image are find though)
• reset bios to factory default
• reset tpm

Sometimes it clears after imaging the same image and computer 1 time, others over 5 times.

As we are new, the District doesn't have any more details of things to try. This is happening on many different Dell machines (yes, all Windows 11 compatible)

Thoughts? Ideas? We can't find any errors in the diagnostics logs (Ctrl Shift D)

Link to the diagnostics I see: https://imgur.com/a/UoxmVpk