Impero | Is it any good?

[1TF0rward]

Hi, I have just been contacted by Impero. I was just wondering if anyone has any experience with them or use them at your school. We currently have LanSchool in place but this is a very old version, I've been told I can upgrade it when I find the login credentials. I have had a look at some demos and doesn't look too bad.

 

What are the pro's and con's in your opinion?

What is it like compared to LanSchool, is there more functionality?

What is the price of this and is it worth the investment?

 

Thanks.

[synaesthesia]

The price will vary depending on your setup. Make sure you get quotes for others like netsupport, senso cloud etc for comparison. We use Impero, have done for several years and have been very happy with it. Recent versions have been a vast improvement over the last few releases for stability and speed, and support remains good. Our staff love it and it ticks boxes for esafety, prevent, general safeguarding as well as IT support uses, energy saving etc.

[1TF0rward]

The price will vary depending on your setup. Make sure you get quotes for others like netsupport, senso cloud etc for comparison. We use Impero, have done for several years and have been very happy with it. Recent versions have been a vast improvement over the last few releases for stability and speed, and support remains good. Our staff love it and it ticks boxes for esafety, prevent, general safeguarding as well as IT support uses, energy saving etc.

I am apart of a MAT. If I can sell it to the Network Manager I'm sure there will be a discount for 3 schools?

 

I like the features, I've seen people say these can be replicated with other software or even for free. If I was to get it for the 1 school I work it they'd be reluctant to spend anything really. Got to sell it big!

[synaesthesia]

It's a *lot* of work open sourcing that amount and even harder collating it all. The only real open source alternative is iTalc/Veyron and that's frankly poor. It's good for free, but not reliable enough IMO and takes a chunk of system resource, and doesn't have any of the safeguarding stuff behind it, you'd have to replicate that somehow with your filtering or other systems. There's no chance doing a like-for-like for nothing.

[1TF0rward]

It's a *lot* of work open sourcing that amount and even harder collating it all. The only real open source alternative is iTalc/Veyron and that's frankly poor. It's good for free, but not reliable enough IMO and takes a chunk of system resource, and doesn't have any of the safeguarding stuff behind it, you'd have to replicate that somehow with your filtering or other systems. There's no chance doing a like-for-like for nothing.

 

We have filtering in place which isn't that good. BTLS are changing to NetSweeper from lightspeed, not too confident on the move to them to be honest. Would it be best and go all out to Impero Education Pro or just use the EdAdmin and EdTeach?

[sonofsanta]

We have LanSchool for classroom management and Impero for safeguarding. Except they still haven't split Impero up properly, so we still have the full thing installed, even though we're only licensed for the safeguarding side (EdProtect, iirc?). Which was a delight for me a couple of weeks ago when a new display driver for the classroom management started mucking up my photography room and interactive boards--we don't use that side at all, aren't meant to have it, but it's still causing problems. Joyful!

 

Impero is much heavier on resources than LanSchool IME. And more expensive: for our school of 550 PCs/1200 kids, we pay less than £1k p.a. for LanSchool Support. And if you're happy going without updates, you don't need to pay for support, as we did for a few years Win7 (just took it up again with the move to Win10).

 

I know LanSchool is building up the safeguarding aspect right now, but it isn't quite as full featured as Impero still.

[DaveTheTech]

I have only used NetSupport -We have both School and DNA installed. It works great.

Inventorying is a breeze. We use it to limit access to USB devices, time PC shutdowns and push out software.

[gsk]

Just wanted to pop Senso.cloud in the mix here. I've been hugely impressed by that. Over the next 12 months I can see it replacing Securus in all our schools for less than the annual cost of securus and the classroom management stuff will be a 'free' bonus!

[gotenks1321]

Another +1 for Senso.cloud. We use it on roughly 11,000 devices across all of the schools we support and it's been fantastic. Safeguarding, classroom management and a whole host of tools for network management too (remote scripts, software install, software/update checks etc).