Limiting user accounts from Accessing Internet but not Office Licenses

[SeeFights]

Pretty much as the title says, how would I go about restricting users from using the internet but not restrict Office Licensing getting through?

 

We currently set up a block on Smoothwall to the accounts in question but it blocks the Office activation servers too so none of the Office programs work. Any suggestions?

[DWilson1997]

Could you enable Microsoft 365 URLs and IP address ranges - Microsoft 365 Enterprise | Microsoft Learn only on the smoothwall and block all other traffic. Then prevent the browser with something like Senso?

 

Dave

[SeeFights]

I think this would work but as this is exam based we really need the Student to come along, log into the account and get on with the Exam, we cant have external 5-10 mins to disable things via senso.

 

Unless this is achievable via senso?

[DWilson1997]

Senso kicks in almost instantly - never seen a delay with blocking applications. It is what we are going to do for exams.

[SeeFights]

can we apply the policy to accounts and not computers?

[36Degrees]

1) Under Policy Objects > Categories create a whitelist of the Microsoft URLs. (Warning - we have a lot of URLS in ours as we had random issues with certain things in Teams not displaying correctly)

2) Under Manage policies create a new policy of Everyone > your Whitelist > Everywhere > Always > Allow > Enabled and put it at or towards the top of the list of policies

[DWilson1997]

You can if the usernames are consistent for example 'ExamUser01, 02 etc' but i've not tried it. You create a new group on the left, apply the username variable then apply to policy to block access to that group.

 

 

[SeeFights]

made the group with the filter applied, took sometime for Senso to update but eventually it did. Just waiting on Smoothwalls settings to apply before I begin messing with Sensos Policies

[Joeloman]

In Sweden and many other countries in Europe, Safe Exam Browser is used instead, which is completely free to use.

https://safeexambrowser.org/about_overview_en.html

[SeeFights]

just had a little mess around with this and little play, not what i am looking for right now but is something we are looking into using for CAT Exams etc

 

Amazing post - thanks

[Joeloman]

If you also use Google EDU, there is an extremely good product for homework quizzes and tests.

https://www.trelson.com

However, it costs 4 Euros per student and year.

If you are a larger school, please contact me, and we can probably fix a slightly better price.