Educational software vendors must

[Arthur]

We have the latest Chrome on computers

That's good. At least you're not stuck with just IE10.

 

some of the legacy software we use in some departments does not work on newer browsers. The software itself hasn't been updated and we keep telling Staff to find an alternative for when we roll out Win10.

Perhaps it might be worth deploying Google's legacy browser support extension so that only the legacy websites load in IE, and the rest load in Chrome?

[mjk]

I think you might be answering a different point (good answer, mind). I think the original post meant that you, the vendor, can whitelist the school's domain / IP address. So, for a school with the domain name myschool.sch.uk, they pay a yearly all-users subscription, now anyone who logs in to your system with an email address ending in myschool.sch.uk is seen as a registered user, no more setup needed. If you're using Google OAuth, you can get the domain membership separatly from the user's email address at the very lowest level of user data access (so you record just a Google ID number and the domain membership), meaning you don't need to record any personal data about the user at all (not even their email address). Some sites also skip having to have logins at all, going on the IP address of the request (does it come from a fixed IP address that someone's registered as the school's?) or the domain of the refering link (so schools can put a link to the site on their VLE that takes users straight, no separate login needed).

.

^ what he said

[dhicks]

Educational software vendors must...

 

...provide a decent amount of time to evaluate the product, preferably by having a free tier of basic usage, with paid-for subscriptions featuring more functionality (actually, that probably applies to most SaaS products). Schools, especially, have limited time to evaluate products, and expecting them to setup, install and comprehensivly test and compare your product to others inside, say, a week is unrealistic - other stuff comes up the whole time, it might be a couple of months until I get back to looking at your product.

[David-BE]

...provide a decent amount of time to evaluate the product, preferably by having a free tier of basic usage, with paid-for subscriptions featuring more functionality (actually, that probably applies to most SaaS products). Schools, especially, have limited time to evaluate products, and expecting them to setup, install and comprehensivly test and compare your product to others inside, say, a week is unrealistic - other stuff comes up the whole time, it might be a couple of months until I get back to looking at your product.

 

I'm on the same page but it isn't yet unanimous here. It seems critical to beta test with IT departments and not just think about users. Before that I should be developing working relationships with IT staff or former staff not afraid to get hands dirty with some development hours. Upwork anyone?