FrogOS your experiences so far

[MrWu]

Hi all

 

Has anyone been using FrogOS and what do they think? Thought it might be good to setup a feedback thread for others.

We have just yesterday activated FrogOS, so early days yet but I have found:

 

A bit slow compared to Frog3 (we have a brand new unbadged Dell server from Frog, although they still use mirrored SATA drives for it)

Crashes quite often on my iPad 3 on IOS 6

As yet FrogOS does not use SSO like Frog3(so needs redirecting within Frog3)

My Documents on FrogOS is different to storage area in Frog 3

FrogOS does not support upload and download from mapped server drives as yet

FrogOS has issues uploading files from stock Andriod browser(Chrome is ok), on Surface RT it has issues uploading as well

 

All sounds very negative but early days yet and FrogOS support is quite forthcoming so fingers crossed.

Edited August 16, 2013 by MrWu

[Tallwood_6]

I pitty those poor mugs that have just brought into FrogOS (without frog) because unless your a primary school I'd say there is at least a year or twos worth of development before its got most of the useful features built it. Looks pretty though so will probably sell well to school leadership!

[MrWu]

Agreed if you are new FrogOS customer it is a fair amount of cash to get it running, it needs to cook for another year before its ready for production I reckon.

 

Also to add to the list:

 

Can't add Quiz questions to new quizes you create (tried on iPad an PC)

Swiping from your personal page to school page on FrogOS does not work on Andriods

[Love_Sausage]

Very useful thread. We're looking to buy into it without ever having had a decent VLE before, it looks as if it's worth waiting before we commit.

[Theblacksheep]

I pitty those poor mugs that have just brought into FrogOS (without frog) because unless your a primary school I'd say there is at least a year or twos worth of development before its got most of the useful features built it. Looks pretty though so will probably sell well to school leadership!

 

The impression that I got from every Frog3 install i've seen is that it could do with at least 2 years worth of development work by the devs and full time staff on site. Very poor value for money.

Edited August 19, 2013 by Theblacksheep

[ConradJones]

never used it, but they go a bit mad with the marketing at bett

[ConradJones]

Very useful thread. We're looking to buy into it without ever having had a decent VLE before, it looks as if it's worth waiting before we commit.

 

try moodle, it won't cost you anything (if you have some hardware to run on it.)

[round2it]

If its anything live frog in the beginning then probably 3 years development then the usual bug fixes that break something else.

[fouldsy]

Sorry to hear you’ve had some problems – I’ve been using it on an iPad myself today, so it’s unfortunate to hear you’ve run into trouble.

 

If it is crashing on your iPad this can sometimes be because the cache becomes full – whilst it’s not ideal, I’d suggest trying emptying that.

 

With regards to your problems with Android devices, FrogOS won’t work anywhere near as well as it does for iPads. We’ve had to take the decision to focus on iPad support as the market leader but we’re hoping for a push on getting android devices up to speed, but I can't say when this will be.

 

Regarding the Quiz issue, if you could PM me I’ll see if we can look into this as it isn’t a common problem with FrogOS and I’m confident we should be able to help there.

 

Thanks

 

Matt

[CyberNerd]

With regards to your problems with Android devices, FrogOS won’t work anywhere near as well as it does for iPads. We’ve had to take the decision to focus on iPad support as the market leader but we’re hoping for a push on getting android devices up to speed, but I can't say when this will be

 

You had better get a move on. Ipad isn't market leader any more.

Small tablets drive big share gains for Android | Canalys

[Love_Sausage]

try moodle, it won't cost you anything (if you have some hardware to run on it.)

 

We've looked at it, but we need a complete culture change, and Moodle isn't going to get the staff on board here. It just isn't attractive enough.

 

Frog's advertising and sales is slick and caught the eye of the SLT. Our demo wasn't exactly smooth so that set alarm bells ringing, this thread confirms that we were wise not to commit - especially as most of our tablets are Android. Back to the research.

Edited August 21, 2013 by Love_Sausage

[LosOjos]

It just isn't attractive enough.

 

It's theme-able and completely mod-able - it is what you make it!

[john316]

Its nowhere near mod-able enough to engage middle of the road teachers and pupils though. Too much techie terminology in it IMO like a lot of the open source alternatives out there in software land.

[TheCrust]

With regards to your problems with Android devices, FrogOS won’t work anywhere near as well as it does for iPads. We’ve had to take the decision to focus on iPad support as the market leader but we’re hoping for a push on getting android devices up to speed, but I can't say when this will be

 

You had better get a move on. Ipad isn't market leader any more.

 

....and schools starting to move toward BYOD initiatives (such as ourselves) cannot guarantee students will bring an i-device to school either!

[MrWu]

Thanks Fouldsy.

 

Honest opinion of FrogOS is at the moment it has potential but some 'killer app' functions were not developed as priority:

 

A) The mapping of Home/network drives as was Frog3 - this would have been very useful for schools needing access to thier files, for example Foldr does this but cost money and only developed for iPads...if FrogOS had this for all Tablet platforms it would offer increased value and also have a Unique Selling Point.

 

B) better integration with Office 365

 

C) as mentioned, be platform agnostic and work well on all mobile devices.

 

D) Offer native app for the mobile platforms (if you look at My Big Campus, although not perfect, has an App available for Andriod and IOS) as well as working on a web browser

 

E) The integration with Frog3, is disappointing, FrogOS does not link to E Portfolio, time tables, Frog mail or resources, which makes migration for us difficult, I know you can embed Frog3 pages, but you inherit all the shortcomings of Frog3 limited ability to work on Tablets

 

Sorry this all sounds a bit negative, but from how it was sold to me back in BETTS sounded promising and Frog has a very good brand recognition amongst the school community, I'm just very surprised that the features mentioned wasn't pushed as a pirorty, put these in and you will have an extremely compelling VLE.

Edited August 24, 2013 by MrWu

[CyberNerd]

A) The mapping of Home/network drives as was Frog3 - this would have been very useful for schools needing access to thier files, for example Foldr does this but cost money and only developed for iPads...if FrogOS had this for all Tablet platforms it would offer increased value and also have a Unique Selling Point.

 

not really a USP because moodle does this already

 

B) better integration with Office 365

and this

 

C) as mentioned, be platform agnostic and work well on all mobile devices.

 

and this

 

D) Offer native app for the mobile platforms (if you look at My Big Campus, although not perfect, has an App available for Andriod and IOS) as well as working on a web browser

and this

[MrWu]

Thanks Cybernerd

 

Looks like Moodle is very feature rich.

 

I have not such a clear cut decision however since my school has sunk many hours and 30k+ into Frog before I took over (funny enough the previous tech left because we migrated from Moodle to Frog - so the skills worked out of the door :-( )

 

Now Frog will cost me 5k a year at the moment, if Moodle was a consideration how more retraining and resource do I need since I presume a lot of schools does this in house. We do not have any Moodle experience at the moment..since the guy walked when he found out we were going to Frog.

 

Other consideration could be that we use something like Salamander to export timetable data into Office 365 and create a sharepoint site to share school materials, to be honest if a student have easy access to emails, timetable and media then that is 90 per cent of what they need.

 

I have 10 months to work this all out before the Frog renewal.

[ass17]

I'm glad we chose firefly over frog. Been flawless for us and I've been able to integrate our old intranet ASP pages with there single sign on API.

 

We had a quick go of frogOS on iPad in April/may and it was pants, just didn't work as expected, slow as well.

[fouldsy]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. It’s appreciated and I’ve made sure that the feedback is circulated around the business as it’s always good for us to hear this – this is a major part of my role as Community Manager to make sure this sort of feedback gets where it needs to go.

 

In terms of the particular items you mentioned previously:

 

1). Access to network drives – this is on our roadmap but is something we want to do ‘right’. Existing Frog 3.0 customers can access the network files brick on a Frog 3.0 via FrogOS but we don’t consider this to be anything other than a workaround in the interim. In terms of feedback from UK customers, network files access is right up there so it WILL get done – our current priorities mean that we’d hope to see something later this year but can’t guarantee that as we’re focussing heavily on stability and other core features (such as MIS integration for non-Frog 3.0 customers).

 

2). Office 365 is in the process of being Beta tested with a large academy group – this is something that we need to learn a lot about, it’s not a trivial thing for schools to adopt ADFS so we need to understand all the requirements. Our initial offering is limited to a Single Sign On allowing access to FrogOS in an ADFS environment without the need to log in separately to FrogOS. We’re hoping to expand this in the future and bring the integration tighter but it’s always a case of walking before we can run – promises of anything else would be ill-advised until we feel comfortable with the basics of a solid and reliable authentication method between the two.

 

3). Platform agnostic. I take your point here, but we have to draw some kind of lines – with our current testing regime, it takes three people three days to test completely on ONE browser, it’s not manageable at present for us to support every possible setup of browser, operating system and device as they vary hugely. Therefore we are concentrating on key platforms with the hope that this can be expanded in the future. Again, attempting anything else would be unrealistic for us and lead to further delays and compromises trying to be all things to all men. We also need to understand what we mean by mobile devices – for example, if we were to target Blackberry devices, the current UI would not be acceptable – would we have a failover to a much simpler interface? What about content that was built by customers for the ‘full fat’ version? There’s a lot of considerations and we’re not shying away from these, simply electing to tackle them in the order we feel is appropriate and manageable.

 

4). Native apps – this is sort of covered above really, but we are targeting later this year or possibly early next for our initial two app offerings, one is a simple evidence capture tool and the other deals with file access and storage. Both of these are iOS only for the time being but it’s very much a never-say-never once we know those work, do what schools really want and are sufficiently stable.

 

5). Integration with Frog 3.0 – I’m sorry to hear you feel this is disappointing. Content that is held in Frog 3.0 can be surfaced without the need to sign in again and this includes the items you mention. It’s not possible for FrogOS to suddenly make these items fully tablet compatible so there are some limitations (Frog Mail being one) but equally there are things that can be done with the design of the Frog 3.0 pages to reduce issues on tablet devices.

 

We do have a massive amount of effort going into the development of FrogOS – I totally understand the frustrations you have but we have been at pains to make people aware it’s the start of a journey and that FrogOS will change immeasurably as the hard work of the developers begins to bear fruit.

 

If I can help further at all, please let me know!

 

Thanks a lot,

 

Matt

[CyberNerd]

@fouldsy

You will have better luck writing for multiple browsers and operating systems if you stick to some basic standards.

Perhaps checking your sites against a validator every now and again.

You'll save a hell of a lot of time on development and increase your user base if you could clean up your code, it will also make a simple path for developing tablet/phone apps and thus giving you a presence on the various (i)stores.

Edited August 28, 2013 by CyberNerd

[MrWu]

Thanks Fouldsy,

 

We will persevere with FrogOS, since a lot of time has been invested at more school. Hope your resources can be expanded to achieve your goals.

[jbew]

Hi,

 

I found your posts very interesting. We have also just signed up to FrogOS over the summer.

 

I am having trouble adding users and I was wondering if you have added users yet and how you have gone about doing it.

 

We want to have a process whereby users sign on using the same Usernames and Password that is in AD. I discovered that the only way to add users in FrogOS was to manually add them using a CSV file but Frog support told us they had a BETA ADFS Integration we could join. So we have signed up to join it only to find that we have to set this up on our domain servers via Microsoft's support. Being an RM network we do not actually have a contract with Microsoft so this step has already become an obstacle for us.

 

Kind Regards

 

J

[mthomas08]

As I say and always say, when choosing your VLE test it and play with it. Moodle is simple to install, work on getting your MIS data imported and ask a few teachers to create some content.

 

Content creation and not necessarily functions is the biggest difference between the likes of Frog and Moodle. I work in a school with moodle and staff always say it feels too clunky and basic, development of anything is slow (because we have to do it). Where as with purchased VLEs like Frog you will find the functions are being developed by them and updated to your server. With moodle each function you add your self is something you have to do and test and play with, there are times you will have issues. We gave up here trying to setup our own SIMs connection so we purchased it for 2K a year (now its no longer a free VLE). Secure Gateway is also a function that doesn't come with Moodle.

Content creation was tested by my old place with moodle and Frog, Frog won the majority vote of teachers. I my self spent my time doing content and working out how to do more "fancy" things instead of reading through pages and pages just to add a single function.

 

Calendars on Frog are also much better looking compared to Moodle, but moodle has the small calendar which I prefer to be available (at the time Frog didn't have this). Drag and drop is more on the development side of Frog yet moodle is not. Linking it to your network drives is not a walk in the park as we discovered and it also took time linking it to our AD system. Frog took 1/2 day to get their system linked to our MIS, AD and start to create content with all the functions available. I would if I was you get a full list of the functions available in Frog and most of them do not require configuring and others require a little bit of time compared to the pages of configuring needed for a function in Moodle. Both schools I have worked at have at some stage walked away from Moodle and each time its been for the exact same reasons.

 

It has been almost a year since I really dealt with Frog last but there are functions that are not available in moodle and vice versa, unless moodle was just expecting me to jump through hoops to find them.

[fouldsy]

Hi,

 

I know my colleague Tracy has got in touch with you already, but in case anyone else is having the same problem I'll post the response on here:

 

I think there may be some confusion with regards to the integrations being offered. There are two integrations that will need to be implemented in order to achieve your overall outcome which is a single sign on process using your AD credentials

 

 

• MIS Integration – This will involve a two staged process whereby you need to have the SIMS extractor installed on your MIS and then FrogOS configured to process the exported data. At the point we configure FrogOS we would try and setup the username format to match that of your AD server. While it won't be 100% it will help get the bulk of users imported with changes being minimal should there be duplicates. This is all dependant on your username format currently used on your AD server. I believe upon our last conversations that you wanted to place a hold on the MIS integration BETA as your MIS was needing to go through a migration / upgrade. However, should you wish to re-engage now I would be happy to advise of next steps
  

 

 

 

• ADFS Integration – Post the MIS data being imported into FrogOS the next stage that is logical is to have your ADFS integration setup. The ADFS integration is what will allow for single sign on into FrogOS using your AD login credentials. There is a requirement for the school to setup the ADFS configuration and this can be completed if you have an IT Technician that is familiar with the setup by following the links provided below -
  
  • ADFS Overview and Portal - Active Directory Federation Services
    
  • ADFS v2.0 implementation, specifically for Windows 2008 R2 (probably the most common, Windows 2003 is not supported) - AD FS in Windows Server 2008 R2 Step-by-Step Guide
    
  • ADFS v2.0 Step by Step Guide - AD FS 2.0 Step-by-Step and How To Guides
    

 

Thanks

 

Matt