Bloody Frog! We own the server & the warrany expired!??!

[mthomas08]

Biggest popular one was secure gateway, we had this setup and students/staff loved it.

 

Also the ability to improve and edit their own sites, staff here utterly hate the way moodle is on the basic level "too clunky" are their words. I showed staff how to drag/drop and setup their sites in frog and they were shocked at how easy it was. You have to play with frog yourself to fully understand the difference, I didn't believe it till the school had got frog and even then still took me a few months.

[TheCrust]

Coming a little late to this one but some weeks ago I received an email from James Shackley @ Frogtrade stating they do support Frog in virtual environments. The platform he mentioned specifically to me was VMWare vSphere - fine by me as we have a vCenter / vSphere setup with ESXi hosts - but there was no mention of any support or migration fees to get our current host converted into a VM if we wanted to explore that option and the inference was we could migrate it ourselves (we also sourced and installed our own memory upgrade to 16Gb to support FrogOS).

 

I am a bit concerned at the inference there could be / are additional costs later as we have specifically been asking them about hidden or additional fees or terms, particularly with the migration to FrogOS coming up, and nothing like this has been mentioned at all - just the ongoing annual £2.5k + £2/student subscription figure.

[JamesFromFrog]

Hi Jim!

 

Apologies for the delay in a reply to this post, I had somewhat of a family emergency that meant I was away unexpectedly - however I'm back now and wanted to drop a reply to you.

 

In terms of the support for VM, hopefully this gives a little clarity over the current situation:

 

We are currently working on projects to be able to offer visualization of FrogOS to customers. Please be aware that this is for FrogOS only and that we are yet to be in a position to commit to customers running Frog 3.0 being able to continue with Frog 3.0 running on the physical server and FrogOS on a VM.

The VM environments we support are limited to VMWare - FrogOS is currently supported on VMWare ESXi 4.1 U3 and later. Work is being conducted to ratify installation and support on the latest version of Microsoft's Hyper-V platform.

Regression and performance testing is scheduled to start later this year, with a target for beta delivery after September 2013.

 

While you stay on your current hardware, there's no additional costs for taking FrogOS and it's entirely optional, the new license fee covering your managed service is the £2,500 + £2 per pupil (with upper and lower caps) - so nothing changes there from what I've mentioned in the past.

 

Should VM become a possibility and be desirable to you, if work is required at our end to make this happen then it is likely there would be a charge for this. However, as you can see from the above we are too early in the process to have this nailed down yet - the thing I'd like to make clear is that a move away from your current hardware (especially now you've upgraded the RAM) will not be forced on you, this would be entirely your choice if you felt the benefits (and indeed any cost) were acceptable.

 

Thanks a lot - I'm always more than happy to discuss further and can always put you in touch directly with the guys that are looking at VM here if you wanted a little more info regarding the nuts and bolts.

 

All the best,

James Shackley

Head of Services - Frogtrade Ltd

[TheCrust]

Thanks for the clarifications on the VM situation James

 

Given the Frog platform is essentially based on widely-used open source products running in a Linux environment, there should be no reason why either v3 or OS won't work with any hypervisor that supports linux VMs so it will be interesting to see the results of your testing as it progresses.

[educator123]

Does it cost a basic £5000 and then on top nearly £4k a year to have the Frog system? Thanks! Comparing VLE costs at the moment!

[mthomas08]

Basic cost is a lot higher last I checked £20K but you are getting more then just a basic VLE.

 

We have gone down the RealSmart route which really does offer the basics and good integration with Google stuff and word press which is all free anyway. And no AD link and no SSO as well which I am not impressed with. This is the 5k ish payment + 4K a year.....

 

You are in a sense paying RealSmart for the portfolio which is very basic but "looks good" when comparing to moodle.

[educator123]

thanks mthomas08

[Tallwood_6]

You will likely spend more than 5k if you want frog to do any real legwork and the yearly cost is bases on student numbers. Frog is probably one of the most popular VLE's but if your buying into at the moment you probably will be buying FrogOS or Froglearn as they now call it which is still buggy and incomplete in my view.

[educator123]

Want it to incorporate:

Learning platform - content for individuals

Communication with parents, teachers, students

Upload teachers own work

Assessment tools and dashboard.

Integration with SIMS

[funkyfin2000]

Frog may well be one of most popular VLE's but here in Staffs a number of schools have become very racked off with the direction of Frog Learn and the non ability to bring Frog 3 resources in to FL and many have dropped it. It's also the usual story from some of these schools of VLE's that; it's one persons love and baby and it never ever becomes whole school or embedded in to school life. That's an awfully expensive mistake to make when it's cost a school over £20k!

 

Certainly the experience of a number of schools I've spoken to recently.

[Tallwood_6]

Frog may well be one of most popular VLE's but here in Staffs a number of schools have become very racked off with the direction of Frog Learn and the non ability to bring Frog 3 resources in to FL and many have dropped it. It's also the usual story from some of these schools of VLE's that; it's one persons love and baby and it never ever becomes whole school or embedded in to school life. That's an awfully expensive mistake to make when it's cost a school over £20k!

 

Certainly the experience of a number of schools I've spoken to recently.

 

I am similarly hacked off with it, Frog just seem to pursue there own agenda or that of a select few when it comes to development. We are stuck with on Frog 3 at the moment which is really showing its age, simply because people have invested so much time training and developing resources for it and Frogs approach to the FrogLearn roll out seems to very much be, here you its now enabled on your server best of luck setting up and training your new VLE, there are some help guides and some videos on the communities.

[Achandler]

Just a quick question, is anyone on there new FrogOS here then?

 

My school is currently looking at it for a replacement to Moodle (not a decision driven by myself but by SLT who are convinced it is necessary to help rebrand and modernie the school). Everything on here is very negative about it, and personally having seen the new FrogOS as they are calling it there seemed to be very little actual substance and a lot of look it can do this and this and this.

[fs171]

we have just started looking at frog again, with the possiblity of using the new system as a 'backend' so that the teacher can edit the content easily. The students would link to a totally public site with no login. The issue we have at the moment is that our frog is set to open with compatability mode (as we have had issues with frog 3 and IE10) but we now have problems when trying to use frogOS/Learn as this is also set to compatability mode (and shouldnt be). We are investigating using the theme to resolve this.

[frogwoman]

Just a quick question, is anyone on there new FrogOS here then?

 

My school is currently looking at it for a replacement to Moodle (not a decision driven by myself but by SLT who are convinced it is necessary to help rebrand and modernie the school). Everything on here is very negative about it, and personally having seen the new FrogOS as they are calling it there seemed to be very little actual substance and a lot of look it can do this and this and this.

 

The problem is a lot of us are in schools with Frog3 we were loyal customers who developed our frog installations and achieved great things. FrogOS is developed for the Malaysian market, and we were all given the option to install and move forwards using it. Problem for most Frog3 schools is that we can't because the things we have working and implemented just do not exist in FrogOS. There is no migration strategy suggested by Frog because it's really start again from their point of view, Subsequently us Frog3 schools are really let down by Frog. And speaking with Frog for best part of 2 years on the subject has got us no further forward.

 

Now if your starting from scratch and FrogOs has what you need already then fine, but if your waiting for them to develop the other bits that Frog3 has and you might need for the future you could be in for a long wait like us Frog3 schools.

Edited March 27, 2014 by frogwoman