Securus Alternatives

[Steve21]

eSafe wise Same reason I told them multiple times I'm not at all interested. Not having all information, e.g. potential credit card numbers/passwords being sent off to them just because it might flag an issue

 

Steve

[DrCheese]

Yup & they expect you to wave all those concerns away with the "But think of the children!!!" - Bleh.

 

Impero's e-safety has come on leaps and bounds recently & can do pretty much what Sercurus does at the mo without the trillions of false positives, tho Impero is a bit bugtastic at the moment.

Netsupport were showing off a new version of DNA at BETT that does this too & the interface is very simple, meaning you can hand it over to your child protection officer without them needing to be techy minded (Something you definately can't do with securus)

 

Having said all this, Securus emailed recently saying the product is being rebuilt from the ground up and they'll have something to announce/showoff soon - Their reason for not attending BETT was to focus on this.

[Al_NetSupport]

Yup & they expect you to wave all those concerns away with the "But think of the children!!!" - Bleh.

 

Impero's e-safety has come on leaps and bounds recently & can do pretty much what Sercurus does at the mo without the trillions of false positives, tho Impero is a bit bugtastic at the moment.

Netsupport were showing off a new version of DNA at BETT that does this too & the interface is very simple, meaning you can hand it over to your child protection officer without them needing to be techy minded (Something you definately can't do with securus)

 

 

Quite a few different solutions mentioned here, including our latest release of NetSupport DNA and our new safeguarding module. There are a number of different ways to monitor, but we felt it needed to be something that did not generate traffic on, or require an external connection to operate. When you include Safeguarding as part of a broader network management suite, we felt it needed to be easy to separate and manage, so we have distinct roles, so if the safeguarding lead signs into NetSupport DNA, all they see is the safeguarding functionality and it's made to be very accessible. Lots of the feedback we have been given was that Network Managers didn't want to inherit ownership of this element as well as everything else.

 

I can't agree with the comments about false positives being a sign a system is working well, i would argue that's a lazy way of saying, leave the work to the customer to figure out what is and isn't important....that's the no.1 reason people turn these types of solutions off. Our approach is to include a bigger database of terms, use a lot more context ( application in use, surrounding phrase etc) and then for lower level alerts, rather than fill the safeguarding leads inbox, we create word clouds by category in the console, so staff can see trending topics, perhaps for certain year groups and then choose to raise alerts on topics they then decide are more relevant.

 

In the spirit of fairness, some of the other solutions mentioned in this thread are ok, but if you'l like to compare against NetSupport DNA you can find out more on the safeguarding module here : Safeguarding - NetSupport DNA - IT Asset Management

 

there is also a short video on our safeguarding functionality here, as well as the complete solution with all of its ITAM capabilities :

An video introduction to NetSupport DNA - IT Asset Management suite

 

Hope that is helpful.

 

Al.

[altecsole]

I can recommend ESafe for the fact it's a monitored solution so from an administration point it's very low maintenance.

 

http://www.esafeeducation.co.uk/

 

Or it's available through Smoothwall.

 

I got a quote for e-Safe via Smoothwall and it's so expensive it's a non starter for us. I've had a look at NetSupport DNA (which looks pretty good) and will be looking at Impero too. I just wish that there was additional funding available to allow us to fully follow Ofsted guidelines on Prevent.

[mrforgetful]

How much is it for you? Will cost us around £10 per pupil for 3 years.

[altecsole]

How much is it for you? Will cost us around £10 per pupil for 3 years.

 

Our quote was for £6-£7 per pupil per year. With 1450 pupils that's way outside our budget!

[Wubbalubbadub]

Just to add a note regarding Impero.. Recently nothing but problems!

 

Not sure what has changed there end! But for the past 3 months it has been driving me insane!

[Al_NetSupport]

Yup & they expect you to wave all those concerns away with the "But think of the children!!!" - Bleh.

 

Impero's e-safety has come on leaps and bounds recently & can do pretty much what Sercurus does at the mo without the trillions of false positives, tho Impero is a bit bugtastic at the moment.

Netsupport were showing off a new version of DNA at BETT that does this too & the interface is very simple, meaning you can hand it over to your child protection officer without them needing to be techy minded (Something you definately can't do with securus)

 

Having said all this, Securus emailed recently saying the product is being rebuilt from the ground up and they'll have something to announce/showoff soon - Their reason for not attending BETT was to focus on this.

 

Thanks for your comments on us. Just wanted to clarify, in NetSupport DNA you can create dedicated staff Safeguarding accounts, so unlike the IT team who sign into the console and get everything, when a Safeguarding lead or a teacher signs in, all they get is just the safeguarding display, it has its own management area so the safeguarding team, not the IT team can manage it, add keywords, safeguarding resources, view logs and so on. The no.1 feedback we got from IT Staff was that safeguarding systems were a huge overhead for them, so if it could be provided so that Teachers and Safeguarding staff were self sufficient that would be a big plus.

 

We have an update due in 10 days that adds a few extra bits to the safeguarding solution, you can now limit keyword monitoring by application - so filter and alert when they are in a web browser, messenger etc, but exclude if they are in Excel, Powerpoint and so on. Helps avoid silly triggers when students are working on genuine lesson content.

 

Hope that helps

[Rammy1964]

You were led to believe wrongly!

[Rammy1964]

Hey Dr Cheese,

Just to follow up on your concerns re Data Protection and eSafe etc.

The reality is that all data which eSafe generates remains the property of the school - in its entirety. eSafe acts as the data protection agent of the school and is strictly bound by the data protection act. The data for UK school clients is held in ISO27001 compliant data centers in the UK, remaining subject to UK laws.

Consequently, schools need have no concerns whatsoever about their data. In fact, the schools data is more secure in our charge than it is when residing on the school servers:)

That will remain the case until such time as schools begin to comply with ISO 27001 standards, which should be sometime in the 23rd century.

 

Happy to answer more questions if you have them