Iceni Opendium

[owen1978]

Been lurking around the forums looking for a filtering system for our primary school.

 

I came across Iceni Opendium, seems to tick all the boxes but their doesn't seem to be much interest in it with people on the forum.

The product seems great but people are shouting about Sophos UTM, iBoss etc...

 

It also had the added feature of content filtering? which the others don't.

 

Am I missing something here?

 

Would like so feedback from users who are using Opendium please

[owen1978]

Been lurking around the forums looking for a filtering system for our primary school.

 

I came across Iceni Opendium, seems to tick all the boxes but their doesn't seem to be much interest in it with people on the forum.

The product seems great but people are shouting about Sophos UTM, iBoss etc...

 

It also had the added feature of content filtering? which the others don't.

 

Am I missing something here?

 

Would like so feedback from users who are using Opendium please

[AlanD]

You need to consider the prevent strategy, where the emphasis is on monitoring, not necessarily filtering. So...can you"see" what students are typing into searches? Does it create alerts wherein these searches suggest radicalisation, violence, self harm etc. Does it produce reports categorised by those things mentioned in prevent.....and not necessarily block them...lists of 100 most blocked sites isn't much help. And of course you need to identify this by user...which may not be easy or convenient in a primary school...especially if using tablets.

[owen1978]

Grabbed this from their website

 

"Iceni’s reporting system offers live statistics of recent network traffic, including filtered users and web searches. The Iceni will produce regular automated reports which instantly give you an overview of your network. You can analyse any aspect of the system, drilling down to the finest detail, including the ability to review thumbnails of the images they have been browsing. Iceni gives you ultimate control allowing you to understand exactly how your Internet connection is being used, down to the smallest detail."

 

Is this what you mean?

 

We also policy central which monitors searches which should cover the prevent strategy

[inewman]

Hi, I use Iceni and it meets the prevent requirements. I auto produce a report every Monday that the pastoral staff then follow up. I think they offer a fully managed option which may be useful for primaries.

let me know if you want more details.

[mats]

Policy Central (and impero) are client programs. Best practice is to mitm ssl connections and cover all devices on the network, not just those which have the right client program running. That's iceni, smoothwall, whatever.

[Opendium_Steve]

Policy Central (and impero) are client programs. Best practice is to mitm ssl connections and cover all devices on the network, not just those which have the right client program running. That's iceni, smoothwall, whatever.

 

Its worth noting that the UK Safer Internet Centre guidelines (which the DfE's "Keeping Children Safe in Education" statutory guidance references) specifically say that filtering must be "network level" - i.e. it has to be a thing that sits between your LAN and the internet, as Iceni, Smoothwall, Lightspeed, etc. do, rather than software that sits on the end-user device (Policy Central, Securly, etc.).

 

That's not to say that you can't use the "client programs" to provide some level of filtering for school owned devices when they aren't on the school's network, but the Safer Internet Centre don't consider them robust enough to be the only line of defence for a whole school. That's especially true for BYOD type setups, where you can't reasonably prevent kids from uninstalling such software from their own devices.

 

So as mats says, these days you're really expected to be able to inspect HTTPS traffic for both filtering and reporting, and you should be able to do automated reports of stuff like concerning search phrases, etc. irrespective of what type of device was used - school workstation, school tablet, user's phone (in the case of a BYOD network), etc. Inspecting HTTPS traffic means you're handling sensitive data, so you need to be sure that whatever solution you choose keeps that data secure - that might sound obvious, but I've recently reported a serious security problem to a popular filtering vendor as it turned out they weren't handling HTTPS data securely at all!

 

The UK Safer Internet Centre filtering guidelines are well worth a read for anyone who hasn't already done so: https://www.saferinternet.org.uk/advice-centre/teachers-and-professionals/appropriate-filtering-and-monitoring/appropriate-filtering

[w00dy01]

We use Iceni here also.

 

Would definitely recommend them if you are considering switching or breaking away from your council provided filtering system.

 

The reports are great, I have a top ten all round report that is automated to run every evening. This gives various stats such as most data heavy users, most accessed website, most blocked website attempted to access, etc. The amount of data from these reports is amazing. Also being able to go back and run a quick report on a user's internet activity can be exceptionally handy if an incident has occurred and one needs to trace breadcrumbs.

 

Their support is also fantastic, when you call up you get straight through to the gentlemen that make/maintain the product. So generally I would say nearly every time I call them with an issue, it pretty much gets resolved there and then. On the rare times it doesn't the gents have in the past made custom fixes for us.

 

They are also very competitive on price compared to their competition out there!

 

As I said above, definitely a big thumbs up from us

Edited March 8, 2017 by w00dy01

[AJWhite1970]

Apologies for the thread necromancy but this came up in conversation yesterday and has piqued my interest.

 

I've had a look through the website, are there still Opendium users here who could give me an opinion either here or by PM?

 

Just looking at the web filtering solution rather than the full blown UTM

 

TIA

Andrew

[w00dy01]

Hi Andrew,

 

We are still rocking Opendium UTM and the web filtering solution. Still echoing my thoughts in the previous post I created. I don't really get to speak to the gents much these days as it runs so smoothly. Would still highly recommend them for use in your network, still offering a big thumbs up from us!

[inewman]

I can second that. The Opendium solution works well for us. We have automated reports each week that help us meet the Ofsted requirements and the number of kids that complain about it suggests it is doing exactly what I want it to do! The web logging and history are spot on and any queries are dealt with the same day.

[owen1978]

As others have said. It works great for us too. Never head any headaches and their support is excellent. I was a bit apprehensive moving away from them LEA for the filtering & firewall, but it has been seamless. As above I have automated reports that go off daily and get sent to me and DSL/E safety officer.