FrogTeacher VLE Questions??

[jiffy]

I just want to say that we have been with FROG for 3 years now and found the product absolutely brilliant. It has enabled the school to automate so much that we now use the VLE for everything from communication to lesson observations, from Student Internet Control to automated room booking systems.

I have found the the best support from FROG is in finding someone who works in support and build up a telephone relationship with them, so that you can call on them for just a little advice or for when you have that little emergency.
I'm not going to tell you who I contact else he may be on the phone to you when I desperatley need him

Their Parental Portal is great - The parent voice feature has enabled us to open two way communication with parents and actually find out what does really matter to them courtesy of the voting system.

I do believe though, that FROG suffer from lack of beta testing as when they release new features, I am often on the phone within 4 hours with about half a dozen different problems. Some of these can take a while to get resolved as they often need to be sent to the development team and can take months until a fix is released. But these problems do not effect the way the VLE works, it just tends to affect the new features.

[dsm]

We have frog VLE and it's pretty average. We've had many problems with it (too numerous to mention here) and found their support to be unresponsive- they appear to have a very basic understanding of the system but as soon as you ask a non-standard question they are fairly clueless. I recently asked about the parent portal system which their support team had no idea about. I asked to be put through to someone who could answer some really basic questions (e.g. can it access data from sims assessment manager) only to be told that no-one was availiable. This is in spite of it being a 'released' version?! On the plus side, they seem to have realised there's a problem and now have someone who is 'monitoring' issues that schools have had with the system. She seems to be very good.

I really can't understand any of your comments. The telephone support we have received has always been excellent. Yes, if you submit a ticket via e-mail it is normally always slower to get a response but that's the nature of e-mail ticketing against telephone support - almost all companies and schools, inlcuding ours, give more priority to telephone support than e-mail tickets. Telephone calls suggest the person needs something more urgently than someone who is willing to explain the problem in detail over e-mail.

You recently asked about their parent portal and which 'their support team had no idea about' - are you sure you phoned the right VLE provider? We purchased their Parent Portal in March, I think. The product has been available to purchase for sometime now so that statement confuses me.

As for being able to access data from assessment manager. This is currently being beta tested and due to be released in January - as their latest newsletter tells us. An excellent feature than I'm keen to start using in our school.

Regards

[Hacksawbob]

I just want to say that we have been with FROG for 3 years now and found the product absolutely brilliant. It has enabled the school to automate so much that we now use the VLE for everything from communication to lesson observations, from Student Internet Control to automated room booking systems.
yada yada yada... gush sush...

.

Rule one of Forums, give any low post count user who sings praises from roof tops of a product the due credibility they deserve.

[dalbuc01]

I really can't understand any of your comments. The telephone support we have received has always been excellent. Yes, if you submit a ticket via e-mail it is normally always slower to get a response but that's the nature of e-mail ticketing against telephone support - almost all companies and schools, inlcuding ours, give more priority to telephone support than e-mail tickets. Telephone calls suggest the person needs something more urgently than someone who is willing to explain the problem in detail over e-mail.

It was by telephone - generally companies then generate a ticket if a telephone support query is not answered during the call - a ticket is then created as the issue needs to be followed up...

You recently asked about their parent portal and which 'their support team had no idea about' - are you sure you phoned the right VLE provider? We purchased their Parent Portal in March, I think. The product has been available to purchase for sometime now so that statement confuses me.

Their support team informed me that since the product was 'so new' they hadn't received training on it.

As for being able to access data from assessment manager. This is currently being beta tested and due to be released in January - as their latest newsletter tells us. An excellent feature than I'm keen to start using in our school.

I am skeptical of this release date as it has already been pushed back on several occasions - they were allegedly 'beta testing' assessment data at BETT in Jan this year. I have asked for some info on how they are planning to configure the assessment side of the portal and as yet they are not able to provide any info or screen shots! Mind you nothing beats seeing a system working on 'live' data.

[Wallgo]

I just want to say that we have been with FROG for 3 years now and found the product absolutely brilliant. It has enabled the school to automate so much that we now use the VLE for everything from communication to lesson observations, from Student Internet Control to automated room booking systems.

What? With a webcam is it?

[lquinn]

HELP! I have Frog and ISA Server 2006 and cannot get SG working any Ideas?

I have published the Web server and can get to Frog from the internet (external) but cannot get the SG to work. Frog say I need to port forward port 2001 - that means nothing to me Frog say they know nothing and don't support ISA. go figure!
Anyone with ISA configuration and network rules for this. I will be very grateful for any help.

Many thanks.

Len

[DarkMaster]

We also have frog but have no idea how to port it through the isa server any help would be appreciated

[lquinn]

Hi Dark,

With a lot of testing and some help I've got this up and running. Lets see if I can help you out. We have our own internal i/p network where the frog server is. This attaches to a network card in our ISA server (which is running ISA 2006). The network from our 'isp', is attached to a second network card in the server and has the i/p address given to us by the ISP and also the i/p of the frogserver being routed to by our ISP.

Assuming your ISA server is configured ok for web surfing and other connections and all is working ok Then you just need to add the external frog i/p to the external network card addresses on the server and then in ISA Server Management setup a Web Publishing Rule for the website then several Server Publishing Rule to allow in requests from a number of different ports.

First thing though you need to setup a weblistener (A network object) before you can add the Web Publishing Rule

In the weblistner setup you need to do the following
Networks - Check External then select it and choose the external frog i/p from the i/p selection
Enable port 80
Enable port 443 and chose certificate if you have one else don't worry about it.
Client authentication method. - No authentication.
Default for everything else on the listener.

Setup the following rule

Web Publishing Rule (Firewall Policy > New > Web sitel Publishing Rule)

Enable and allow. From anywhere to the internal I/P of the frog server (not the name, must be the i/p)
check forward original host header
check Requests appear to come from the original client
For all traffic HTTP and HTTPS
Select the listener that you have created as the listener
Add the www.... addresses in the rules for public names
You can take the defaults for everything else.

This should get you up and running for the website.

You also need to setup new protocol for port 2001 (Inbound port) then setup a Server Publishing Rule port 2001. and point it to the i/p of your frog server.

To allow the frog people in for management you will have to setup several Server Publishing Rules for different ports. I suggest you ask Frog for this info.

Your Web Publishing Rule must be the last in the 'frog' rules list all the other frog based rules come before this.

eg
1 Server Publishing Rule (Frog1)
2 Server Publishing Rule (Frog2)
3 Server Publishing Rule (frog3)
4 Web Publishing Rule (Frog Webserver)

Remember on the ISA server to Apply any changes you do as they won't become 'live' until you do so.

I hope this helps.
If you need any more detail then PM me.

[DarkMaster]

great stuff

cheers for that i will implement asap, this should make a few people happy

[Crispness]

My kids school have just installed Frog Parent Portal and are handing out pre-generated logins/passwords, but only one per child. Is this standard Frog procedure?

[dsm]

The school can generate as many usernames/passwords for each child as they want/need. I can see why they have just created one per child, it will make managing the system much easier.