Policy Central

[austen]

Hello,

 

Does any one have any experience of Policy Central from Forensic Software? There are several schools I know of which have PCE installed, however it is often completely ignored. I'm really looking to see whether there is anyone out there who uses it effectively!

 

Thanks,

 

Austen

[trekmad]

Hi Austen,

 

We have used it for several years and it works fine for us. We have it installed on all of our student machines and it catches a few screenshots every now and again. Overall our students are pretty well behaved and they know we have this software as it is in the student ICT AUP. If you have any specific queries feel free to PM me.

 

Many thanks

 

Stuart

[stevenlong1985]

Hi Austen,

 

One of the Heads looks over it once a week and finds a few things that's the kids have been up to.

Its all installed on our Kids Laptops. However I have started removing some PCE from teacher classroom PC as I find that PCE locks up and crashes the computer.

 

 

Steve

[laserblazer]

We have it here. It used to be really good at catching transgressions. If a pupil typed in a barred word, it would be logged with a screen image showing the word and we could present the evidence. The latest version logs the incident but 90% of the time there's no evidence, so we can't do anything about it. You can normally tell from the context if it's innocent. It is quite good for filtering websites.

[abillybob]

I did try it but wasn't to keen. We eventually got rid of it and use Smoothwall now which was cheaper! They're only primary school kids so Smoothwall does us just fine and generated a report every month of the top 10 kids that were blocked and the categories they are blocked from so we can keep and eye out for certain children. If worcesterhsire have offered you this (I don't know where your from) then Smoothwall is £100 one off cost fi you can get by with just that but they don't like people knowing this for some reason!

[DarrenShan]

We used to have Policy Central but everyone eventually got fed up with is causing crashes and slowing the performance that we moved over to Securus.

[laserblazer]

If worcestershire have offered you this

They did provide it initially. I'll take a look at Smoothwall.

[Michael]

I have mixed feelings about Policy Central. On the one hand it complies with certain requirements, set by the LA or the school themselves, but in some cases it can generate hundreds or even thousands of logs everyday. It's a full time job in itself.

 

You also have to bear in mind it isn't multi-platform compatible. There is no iPad client for example, so you're just scanning users on Windows devices and not Apple or other. There's also no provision for BYOD either.

 

Gone are the days when we just had Windows networks. We're using multiple platforms or Operating Systems, yet Policy Central only focuses on Microsoft Windows. This makes the concept of keeping pupils and staff 'safe' completely flawed in my opinion.