Senso Enterprise Cloud. Good / Bad

[EduBadger]

Hi Geeks.

I've been using Senso Enterprise Cloud since the start of term 1/8/2023 and have never seen consistency in the classroom management side of the product. I have all the recommended firewall exceptions in place etc but when our teachers select a room of computers and try things like lock computers - broadcast to computers - etc only a handful of the devices in the room receive the commands - there is no consistency in which machines or the amount of machines - the teacher then deselect the devices, reselect the devices and issue the commands again - sometimes this then sends the command to all the devices but sometimes its just a few more so they keep doing the process until eventually all the machines receive the command. Clearly this is not great for teachers and i'm curious if we are all having the same problem.

 

Senso support have advised its our network, i've had extensive analysis by the network vender HP Aruba and the educational specialist installation engineers who installed the network - although some small issues were identified and resolved the senso product has always remained inconsistent.

 

Anyone else have senso cloud and struggle to get end devices to consistently receive commands like lock screen / broadcast and probably others ?

[karldenton]

Good Morning

We used Senso for a year at our trust and had nothing but issues with it. Machines no picking it up plus all the other issues you mention above.

We switched to Classroom.cloud from Netsupport and all the issues have gone away

Karl

[EduBadger]

Hi Karl - Thank you for your feedback - hopefully others will also provide feedback. Our senso relationship manger advises us that no other customers have these issues which as you can imagine i'm on the fence about. I have a 3 year license and don't want to spend the entire 3 years with our teaching staff complaining.. I'm currently giving there support another chance to resolve but I'm not hopeful at this stage.

[mrbios]

Hi Geeks.

I've been using Senso Enterprise Cloud since the start of term 1/8/2023 and have never seen consistency in the classroom management side of the product. I have all the recommended firewall exceptions in place etc but when our teachers select a room of computers and try things like lock computers - broadcast to computers - etc only a handful of the devices in the room receive the commands - there is no consistency in which machines or the amount of machines - the teacher then deselect the devices, reselect the devices and issue the commands again - sometimes this then sends the command to all the devices but sometimes its just a few more so they keep doing the process until eventually all the machines receive the command. Clearly this is not great for teachers and i'm curious if we are all having the same problem.

 

Senso support have advised its our network, i've had extensive analysis by the network vender HP Aruba and the educational specialist installation engineers who installed the network - although some small issues were identified and resolved the senso product has always remained inconsistent.

 

Anyone else have senso cloud and struggle to get end devices to consistently receive commands like lock screen / broadcast and probably others ?

 

I've been using Senso for quite a few years now, unfortunately a couple of modules are just really clunky or broken:

Broadcast is useless, they tried to remake it a while back but hit a dead end, treat that module like it doesn't exist and you'll be happier for it.

If live viewing lots of machines in one go in thumbnail view, you'll find most machines on the first view load fine, then you scroll down and you see machines haven't loaded.....weird workaround is to wiggle your cursor over the control buttons above the thumbnail view, and you'll see them refresh.

 

Tip: Add a password reset policy to your very top level folder, don't need to enable password reset, but use it to tick the "Pre-load screen module to speed up initial connection" tickbox.

[EduBadger]

Hi.

Thank you for your reply it is certainly starting to look like i'm not the only one having these issues which is what i suspected maybe the case. Unfortunately the modules that do not work are the ones some of my staff are most interested in utilizing. As its been a few months now a lot of the staff have lost faith in the product. For my part i'm frustrated as have spent months working with 3rd party engineers reconfiguring network switches as senso advised me there product is ok and it is our network lol.

[gszech]

We tried Senso for one month and only had problems with it.

[EduBadger]

Oh dear. Well at least I'm not the only one which is little consolation. Did you manage to get a refund ?

[gszech]

Oh dear. Well at least I'm not the only one which is little consolation. Did you manage to get a refund ?

We had a trial and we simply decided not to order the product.

[CHiLL]

We had a demo of Senso Cloud within the past couple of years and also experienced this sort of thing. We liked the idea of it being serverless on our end, but it was inconsistent with commands, WOL, broadcasts, etc, not hitting all machines selected, despite them being on and online. We decided to stay with our on-site Impero...while certainly not perfect, it's more reliable in those ways.

[Iain.Faulkner]

Just another one to add not a great experience with Senso. In my opinion as a classroom management tool it is lacking, safeguarding side is great though. Broadcast is poor and unusable when trying to broadcast to a full class (we experienced times of around two minutes between making a change on the host and it appearing on the classroom PCs), taking over screens is unreliable (I tried to remote support someone yesterday and couldn't get beyond a black screen). Like @EduBadger we've raised the issues directly with Senso and been told it's our network. This isn't at just one of our schools, this is happening at both of our secondary schools. I'm disappointed that they are telling you that no other customers are having these issues. We're constantly fighting with our teaching staff who want us to put Impero back in, but we can't afford Impero and Senso.

 

I would say that the broadcast feature has been better since around November time when they released an update for it. It's still not great though.

[EduBadger]

Thanks for your feedback Iain its really useful to see these responses.

[TheRobins]

Been a user for 4 years now.

 

There does seem to be some inconsistancies and issues like described above. However I have done some work with them in the last 12 months and found quite a few conflicts with Sophos which we started to mitigate and it has been much better since. Its still not "perfect" however. We are due up to renew in next few months, just need to demo some alternatives to see if the switch is worth while.

[Frodo_Baggins]

Senso user at two different mat's same experience where it is so hit or miss and seems to taken a nosedive in the last year in terms of performance - always get the same generic response from support that there are no wider issues.

 

I'm sure when there is an affordable alternative we'll move to that (classroom cloud seemed to have a lot missing when I did a trial)

[EduBadger]

Hi Robins - Yes we also use Sophos and ran into issues with this.

[EduBadger]

Hi Frodo - Thank you for your response it looks like we are all having a bad experience of the product.

[Fox]

Hi Robins - Yes we also use Sophos and ran into issues with this.

 

Any fixes you can share with us plz?

[EduBadger]

In regards to the sophos issue. We use STAS and it would continuously be popping up asking who was using the machine which you can imagine caused a lot of complaints at the school. Senso investigation concluded that the MITM cert they used and the MITM cert sophos was using was the cause / clash. Sometimes the sophos cert would load and intercept the traffic sometimes the senso cert - when the senso cert loaded it would cause sophos to not understand who was on the internet and cause the pop up to ask the end user to sign in. The solution which is not exactly a solution was to disabled the senso web filter module - for me i needed a quick answer due to the level of complaints and we basically use sophos to block the bad sites so it didnt cause to much of a bother at the time to disable the module.

 

Also we upgraded our sophos firewall firmware as sophos has released a fix for a lot of the compatibility issues. one last note not exactly related but there is also another update which has recently been released for sophos firewall that will be rolled out for my site over half term next week.

 

If you have a similar issue i'd say upgrade your firewall and see how that goes.

 

regarding all the other issues i have - senso customer support are working with us and are a nice bunch but we just want something that works - personally i'm trying to get a refund on the product and might look at impero local client / server setup if i manage to get refunded.

 

Our teaching staff have asked similar questions to me elsewhere and have a multitude of the same responses regarding the product as you will see here.

[Olliedawg]

Senso cloud/network cloud here - secondary school with Sophos firewall / STAS

 

We do experience some inconsistencies, however I don't really get complaints from staff regarding Senso & the remote control feature 95% of the time works perfectly fine. I frequently use the remote scripting feature for our IT rooms (~34 computers) & this always catches every single PC without fail.

 

We are due a new firewall next Friday (XG 210 > XGS2300), hoping not to run into issues!

[EduBadger]

Hi Ollie

For you new firewall you might need these exceptions adding https://support.senso.cloud/support/solutions/articles/79000116305-firewall-and-content-filter-configuration and make sure you have upto date firmware.

also

If you have the sophos antivirus as well as the firewall and the STAS does not work for you following your change you can try working with your support / vender to have the authentication for web traffic go via the sophos central A.V rather than the firewall. That is something we'll be looking at soon over half term. Even now we still get the sophos pop ups on occasions but its not as bad as it ahs been.

[supportman]

I've never used the broadcast feature but for simple screen monitoring it seems to work as expected.

 

We use it in all our IT classrooms

[mrbios]

I'm taking a serious look at alternatives at the moment. My hands are tied a bit to requiring any replacement product does the safeguarding/monitoring element otherwise i'd probably happily go back to some on-prem solution like ABTutor or Impero. We've got fastvue, so we have web filtering alerts, but it'd feel like a backwards step to lose the monitoring outside of the web filltering.

 

Trying to consider what my options are, currently looking at:

Classroom.cloud

Impero cloud classroom

Smoothwall monitor - for the safeguarding bit, freeing me up to look at whatever i like for classroom management

ABTutor cloud? (Not sure they have safeguarding keyword monitoring etc?)

 

Any others anyone can list?

[Alastairb25]

We have had similar issues.

 

Upgrade was necessary as Impero was outmoded for us

 

That said Remote Control / Broadcast is a serious issue

 

We may keep Senso just for safeguarding aspect and go back to an Onsite system for remote

[EduBadger]

Hi Alastairb25

The safeguarding aspect of senso from what i can tell works well. I have considered the same thing as i have a perpetual license of LAnSchool which works as a classroom managment product but not well as a safeguarding product. However i've thus far held of on this as we no doubt will all agree having competing products doing the same task is a bad idea. In my senario i would end up with 3 products all with MITM certs on my devices and may even cause me more issues than i currently have. It is a last resort for me.

 

Same for the general machine monitoring / control i guess in that i would have 2 products trying to stream the desktop to teacher

[Alastairb25]

We have an old Impero install / Site License from way back.

 

Senso is good, ie up to date, offsite usage, use via web browser, potential for Teams, CPOMS integration..

Safeguarding wise it does work

 

Broadcast not so much

 

What network / ISP spec?

 

We run Cisco 65XX Core, 10gb to each Edge, 3750X v2 at Edge, all Edge PC on 1gb and Edge switch 10gb back to Core

ISP - Talk Straight with Netsweper / Fortigate - exclusions done

 

A previous setup at another school with Senso worked better.

 

It was HP 5604zl with HP edge switches

Internet was BT with onsite Fortigate 101E for filtering

 

I suspect the onsite device for filtering was the difference

[EduBadger]

I have a 5400 aruba core and 6100 aruba switches with fibre backbones everywhere using om3 and 4 and a xgs3300 firewall with a 1GB link out. Its all pretty good new mid range kit that you see in education. I've ruled out network issues for my setup and the fact that others have the same issues mean to me its a general senso product fault.