Securus

[krisd32]

Has any body heard of this or used it?

Securus Software

your thoughts please guys

cheers
kris

[woody]

Look here:

http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?nam...hlight=securus

[danIT]

I really like this product, we tried it for about 2 months. Its basically a badword logger, evertime a word entered into the "bad" word bank is detected either typed or displayed on screen, a screenshot is taken complete with username time and date. It really worked quite well for us. Obviously it doesnt detect any images or anything "non-text" but how many dodgy sites do you know without the dodgy words to go with it.

We didint purchase it though, far too expensive!

[number34]

It is a very impressive package and we use it but:

It needs monitoring carefully and you need to decide what to do with all the violations.

It is expensive and the leasing option does not include the support! (Guess who got caught out!)

I've found the support very good, easy to contact by phone and they will come out if that fails.

Kids hate it so it must be good!

[secman]

We have been using it for over a year now. We have found some issues with earlier versions of the server software being a bit iffy but that seems sorted with the latest version. We have also been a bit miffed with the fact that we have over the past year had to uninstall and reinstall the clients. This too is fixed in the latest version with an autoupdate function (I think)

There is an issue with monitoring the violations. We are looking at setting up a user for staff to do the monitoring. There used to be a supervisor type login that allowed viewing but not deleting or access to the admin bits. I couldn't find that profile when I looked yesterday, and need to speak to their support.

Otherwise a good product that has proved it's worth a number of times stopping some e-mail bullying and proving that some herberts were trying to access naughty websites. It is expensive but what price do you put on protecting the kids???

Alan

[kingswood]

We have been trialling it for a week now. Install went well (MSI) and it seems to offer tracking of abuse and misuse that is going to be useful. It's scary watching the violation reports growing- mostly chat sessions from Meebo and stuff. We have already had a couple of possible bullying related incidences.

Would we buy it? The Head is keen to do something about network abuse and is looking to Securus as part of our ongoing network changes that will bring about as secure a network for students and staff as possible. It's expensive (coming in at about £5000). Is it worth it though? That's what the next two weeks are about- testing it and seeing where it can fit in. Alongside updated AUPs and better group policy schemes we are thinking it will make our job easier and use of the network safer.

Might just be a utopian thought :-)

[Disease]

We use Spector CNE ( although its not working properly at the moment ).

Spector monitors everything that happens on a PC then Emails an address of your choice whith the violation details as they happen. It takes screenshots all the time and you can tailor it to a timeframe you want for example ours is set to screenshot every 20 secs but if a keyword is triggered it screenies every 2 seconds for 2 mins to capture exactly what the pupil is doing.

It's been great but as I say its not mailing at the moment which is a bind.

[krisd32]

received securus yesterday, so far very impressed install was extremely easy found our first ssupect this morning, very easy to use.
do you pay for the liscences per user or per machine?

we'll just to wait 2 weeks to see if its going to be cost effective or not but the head seems really impressed so we'll end up with it more than likely.
but it does go to show without this sort of software on your network you wonder how many instances of this abuse you've already missed, which is quite a scary thought.
its worth the money if you stop 1 pupil from getting bullied.

the only problem is its probably a bit too sensitive picks up everything but they're probably things that you'd have to learn to ignore.

cheers

kris

[wesleyw]

You can change the sensitivity of the package though as well so you can remove from the normal reports the daft stuff. It will still capture them and you can view the ignored findings so it's actually very good! The price is the stumbling block for us A minimum of 30 licenses I believe.

Wes

[03jmason]

Securus is good, but there are ways of bypassing it, which isn't great.

[dgsmith]

Well done for digging up a 2 and a half year topic. Seriously, I have been seeing this a lot lately.. can't people read the date!

[Edu-IT]

Securus is good, but there are ways of bypassing it, which isn't great.

Anybody here able to tell me what the yearly maintenance costs are for Securus?

[Michael]

Birmingham recently deployed Policy Central which you can view here

[tmcd35]

I like securus. But it does have two issues.

1) It doesn't scale well. The last place uses it with some 700+ workstations and the box crashes regularly. I think the amount of hits it gets causes it to overload and die when you try to access the logs. Here we have around 300 workstations and I've never had a problem with the box.

2) It needs monitoring. As with anything like this, to get the best out of it it needs monitoring regularly which can be a full time job in itself. We just don't have the time/resources to give the box the attention that it needs

[EduTech]

lol, yup well done..
we have securus, its very good especially the latest version.. you'll appriciate the new box aswell (if your as unlucky as us and have the old one)

James.