Smoothwall suitable for an all Apple provision?

[Gobstopper]

Good afternoon everyone,

I look after an independent school that has an all Apple provision, there is no existing server infrastructure of any kind. Until recently, the school didn't even have Apple School Manager and were just buying devices from local retailers and refurb providers and setting devices up with local accounts. All a bit of a mess!

 

The school now has the following in place:

1. Microsoft 365 is being used as the directory service and has been linked and syncs with the local Smoothwall appliance (Currently a Staff and Student Group).

2. Apple School Manager has been configured for federation with Microsoft 365 for managed Apple ID creation

3. All devices (iPads, iMacs and MacBooks) enrolled into Apple School Manager

4. Jamf Pro has been configured for MDM and all devices are managed by Jamf Pro.

5. Jamf Connect has been configured for Microsoft 365 sign-in on MacOS devices.

6. Smoothwall Cloud Connect has been set up and the Unified Client has been deployed to all MacOS devices along with with the Google Chrome extension.

 

As things stand I am now getting filtering, albeit, whoever logs in is being treated as a default user by Smoothwall and while not ideal, I can now at least search internet use by username but I am lacking reporting and user/group specific filtering. This ultimately means that while I have basic filtering, it isn't compliant and is lacking a lot of control.

Whenever I speak with Smoothwall support I don't seem to get anyone who seems to be overly familiar with Apple and have been told that while Smoothwall can work, its not as feature complete or as well integrated. Is this actually the case? If it is, I need to look at alternatives as a matter of urgency. The school does have an on-prem appliance so at some point I would guess that Smoothwall must have said that it would be a fully compliant solution.

Any assistance / clarification from fellow forum members or Smoothwall would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks!

Edited March 1, 2025 by Gobstopper

[CrootUK]

The issue isn’t so much smoothwall, but rather the options Apple gives these vendors.

 

Smoothwall ships a custom firefox browser for apple devices, whilst this filters well within the app itself it doesn’t filter in other apps that have built in browsers eg onenote, google earth etc so theres chance of misuse. You also have to remove safari which may make an iPad less familiar to the regular user.

 

Same applies for many other vendors in the web filtering and monitoring space again mainly due to the options Apple are allowing these vendors (with the excuse of privacy even with asm enrolled devices), I know others have tried to get around it with likes of netsweeper tunnelling traffic in a vpn like fashion which has its pros and cons I believe.

 

Apple has some options via MDM to do web filtering but it’s basic and no reporting.

 

This is all only really an issue if you’re looking to filter off site, if you have an onprem appliance thats doing proper realtime filtering / https inspection then that will cover an iPad appropriately (smoothwall can do this)