Trial of IMPERO

[kath]

We are due to run a trial of Impero. Has anyone got more recent comments than I can find on the site (which seem mostly very positive)? We are an upper school - I wondered if it was aimed more at younger students.

 

All input would be greatly appreciated.

[Jazzman]

Having used it (as a teacher) at my previous school, I can genuinely say it is the best thing since sliced bread, it has so many intuitive and useful features which are great in the classroom. The ability to filter the net according to individuals, groups or room policies is great, the kids never found a way around the screen blocking and the file deployment and capture was superb. Overall I would definitely recommend this product - it is worth every penny.

[broc]

We have been using Impero for a while now, and have recently renewed our maintenance contract for another 12 months. We are a secondary school with approx 900 students.

 

Teaching staff like it as it gives them greater control over their classroom environment, not only in preventing students straying off-task but also assisting them in getting started more quickly by being able to send them documents, URLs etc which open up on the client PCs automatically.

 

I would say from a technical support perspective Impero is in an almost continual state of development, which means that it has had its fair share of bugs. In fairness though, the development team are very approachable, very responsive and receptive to ideas when it comes to product enhancements. V3 is due in a few months time.....

 

We find it is very useful being able to log on to a whole classroom of PCs and send commands to them, particularly if you want/need to install programs 'locally'. This is especially useful when you get a teacher brandishing a CDROM they have just bought and ask 'can this be put on the network for next lesson please.....'

 

On balance, I would recommend it too, I think we would struggle now without it.

[saundersmatt]

We are using Impero and are very pleased with it.

 

Support is also excellent: We were having some issues with it monitoring websites on our vista clients (we were aware that vista support was not guaranteed at the time) and in order to track down the issues we had an Impero developer visit our site twice.

 

Matt

[Ex-MGSTech]

Hi Kath

 

If your going to trial it you'll soon find out how good it is, We have it on all PC's in school and love it.

If you'd like a short guide (written by one of our ICT Teachers) drop me a PM

 

Steve

[ninjabeaver]

Have a look at AB Tutor as well Kath. It seems to do all what Imperio does at about 1/3 of the price. Rolling it out here now and seems very good.

[Jazzman]

Let us know how ABTutor works out for you - I would be very interested!

[ninjabeaver]

Let us know how ABTutor works out for you - I would be very interested!

 

So far extremely well. We will have it rolled out to all Curriculum Machines by the end of the week, and slowly doing staff laptops and PC's as and when we can.

 

I gave a short demo of it to the ICT Departmenal contacts last night (Basically the person in each deprartment who is in charge of their ICT delivery). All where very impressed. The main parts being the usual way of locking all the PC's down with a screen on asking for teachers attention, showing a demo of whats on the teachers screen to the rest of the class and turning off the internet.

 

Two other great parts on it was that in 'detailed view' you can see the name of each PC in a list, and next to it an icon of the software that is running on that PC at the time like Word / Explorer etc. If it seems that they are hiding games in Explorer under the Word window you can hover your mouse over the Explorer Icon and it tells you what webpage they are on. Just right click and close and it's gone.

 

The second part was the quick poll system. You bang out a few questions of multiple choice or single answer and send them to all the students in your class instantly. They then respond and you get the results instantly on your screen. Perhaps something that can be used at the end of the lesson to make sure they have learnt some of the information you have taught them.

 

On the NM / Technician side of thing you can also view the entire school at the same time. So, if a teacher has a class on his/her AB Tutor Control screen you can still see and interact if needed at the same time. My HelpDesk server is running this at the moment and I can see all the PC's that are set up and switched on.

 

The installation of the client on the teachers laptops and PC's also enables us to remote into them and fix a percentage of the errors there and then instead of running half way across the school for something easy.

 

All the Tutor control PC's can be setup for the rooms the teachers are in. This allows the teacher to select only the room they are teaching in and not to see all the other PC's on the network.

 

Cost get cheaper the more AB Control license your buy. Clients are free and unlimited. The school purchases 10 licenses at £125 each, but the more you get the cheaper it gets. We might need one or two more to cover a couple of the teachers (SMT) who want to monitor the VI Form room etc, but the pricing stays in the 10+ bracket and does not start again as a single license purchase. So I will be paying £125 per license for each one now.

 

I think that covers what I've found out so far, any more questions then please shout.

[ninjabeaver]

Oh, I did miss out one more item. I've posted a request for a bad word list on another thread in this topic area.

 

You can also set a policy inside AB Tutor to monitor key presses and words. If a word on your list is spotted it will take a screen shot, time, date and PC and flag up a warning for you as well. All the evidence you need to stamp on the little darlings when needed.

 

This will help on the cyber bullying and other rubbish that goes on in the background that no one ever seems to see.

[Ex-MGSTech]

Ditto on Impero, sounds like a different licencing model though?

 

Oh, I did miss out one more item. I've posted a request for a bad word list on another thread in this topic area.

 

You can also set a policy inside AB Tutor to monitor key presses and words. If a word on your list is spotted it will take a screen shot, time, date and PC and flag up a warning for you as well. All the evidence you need to stamp on the little darlings when needed.

 

This will help on the cyber bullying and other rubbish that goes on in the background that no one ever seems to see.

[ninjabeaver]

Ditto on Impero, sounds like a different licencing model though?

 

Yeah, we saw the Impero Demo and both products look similar. I just thought that AB Control was better value for the school.

[Jinkz]

If you look at the Impero forum though, there's a lot of new features being added in the new version 3 which is due out shortly, which makes it far more appealing than ABTutor.

[MkII]

Used ABTutor myself - very feature packed and works like a dream. Would be interested to see a feature comparison list with Impero - I can't see Impero beating ABTutor for features and ease of use, our teachers love it. ABTutor is also under constant development and they're very approachable too.

 

Bad vibes from Impero staff trying to force their way onto the edugeek wiki here in the past left a bad taste too.

[broc]

Yeah, we saw the Impero Demo and both products look similar. I just thought that AB Control was better value for the school.

I agree with your comments about the similarity. We trialled both products & I let the staff(teachers) who use the product decide. We had a budget that allowed us to licence either product, they chose Impero, saying it was more 'teacher-friendly' .... whatever that means

[Jinkz]

Used ABTutor myself - very feature packed and works like a dream. Would be interested to see a feature comparison list with Impero - I can't see Impero beating ABTutor for features and ease of use, our teachers love it. ABTutor is also under constant development and they're very approachable too.

 

Bad vibes from Impero staff trying to force their way onto the edugeek wiki here in the past left a bad taste too.

 

In a similar way Impero is constantly under development also, if you check the forums you'll notice new revisions every few weeks, and server updates etc. The development team on this are also directly approachable via email or phone.

 

There is a free download of Impero located somewhere on their website, might be worth just giving it a try?

[MkII]

That was already said above jinkz, hence why I mentioned it. I thought that was obvious.

 

ABTutor has a free trial too. The client installs easily to the whole network via msi. ABTutor is also completely teacher friendly.

 

Sounds like you're another Impero bot sneaking free advertising again.

[JLunn]

We have been using AB Tutor for 3 years now as we found it to be the most cost effectivve classroom desktop management solution available for a network of over 700 systems with 15 suites. The licencing based around Tutor licences and unlimited client is by far the cheapest solution for us.

 

We started looking at Impero along with Securus (as these were the two recommended in the Edugeek forums) as we wanted a network activity monitoring solution and not necessarily a classroom desktop management solution. Like most we struggled with keeping up with the filtering of the hourly creation of Proxy sites. We just didn't have the time to be monitoring all our students activity and disabling the sites in our Smoothwall filter or at Grid level filter that they were bringing into school. We needed on screen monitoring. Both Impero & Securus provide us with this and Securus has just resleased flesh tone recognition which was very tempting but the reason we chose Impero was that Securus was still a retrospective action system which relied on a technician reading through logs daily and disabling accounts. Impero developers assured us that they would consider adding to their policy structure the functionality of when a user breaks a particular policy their internet is disabled wherever they log on to the network and can only be enabled by a console user. This means in one fell swoop we would cut proxy site use as as soon as a few are caught and loose access to the internet for a period of account (depending on their previous offences) then others will not risk it.

 

At the moment I don't know how much of this is a sales pitch but we payed a price for the licence now that enables us free upgrades to version 3 which would cost us double to buy.

 

The fact is that Impero and AB Tutor functionality overlap quite a lot. If you only had the budget to buy one and you have no desktop management solution at the moment I would advise you go for Impero. If you can afford both AB Tutor is far more polished after the recent upgrade and is far more intuative for classroom teachers to use.

 

Jon Lunn

[tom_newton]

We started looking at Impero along with Securus (as these were the two recommended in the Edugeek forums) as we wanted a network activity monitoring solution and not necessarily a classroom desktop management solution. Like most we struggled with keeping up with the filtering of the hourly creation of Proxy sites. We just didn't have the time to be monitoring all our students activity and disabling the sites in our Smoothwall filter or at Grid level filter that they were bringing into school.

 

Jon Lunn

 

Jon,

 

If you are finding proxy sites that get past Smoothie, you either have some *very* clever proxies or a config error. Let me know either way and I will make sure it gets sorted. (This bit of advice applies to any of our customers seeing sites they don't like get through!)

[JLunn]

Apologies Tom and to the smoothwall team I should have mentioned we only use the free smoothwall version 3 and not the latest commercial version.

 

Jon Lunn

[tom_newton]

Jon,

 

Thanks for the speedy reply - I was (perhaps slightly perversely) looking forward to some new, harder to beat proxies ;-P

 

Apologies most definitely not needed!!!

[reltihmd]

We trialled Impero shortly after the head fell off his chair when he saw the price of securus, have to say we've never looked back

 

I've now rolled Impero out across 2 schools, and moved with them through version 1 and 2, we are currently trialling version 3 and if you thought version 2 was good, you aint seen nothing yet

 

Version 3 is scarily good, all the features you never knew you needed are right there in front of you in a fantastic new user interface, they have just released the next Beta and I'm hoping to roll it out over christmas

 

anyone who is interested should take a look at the new site

Impero - Complete Lab Management Solution

 

We did recently have a member of staff recommend the one they used at their old school so we did re-evaluate impero against the competition - whilst doing so we also found that another school had also done the same, and uploaded the results to youtube

 

 

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD1vvlCJFuY]YouTube- Review of Top 6 Remote Control Software Products[/ame]

 

Whilst I didn't review ABTutor myself so can't comment - they are included in the video though

 

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJHC_DlNWNI]YouTube- Impero (v3) vs AB Tutor (v6.3.3)[/ame]

 

 

just hit preview - apparently the videos will link across to just here - enjoy

 

Mark

[Guest Guest]

I'm sorry to say this but OP you're pretty naive if you believe some of the posts in this thread. I wouldn't put it past Impero to make accounts on forums such as these and create hype for their product under a different allias. As you would expect from any large company. However I can asure you Impero is not as secure as these people would have you believe. Many of my fellow students at school have already learned ways to bypass Impero without the use of external programs or removing the input cable (myself included).

 

It also stifles creativity and is regarded more so as the Nazi party of Internet Security systems. I'd also like to add to teaching staff on here, when students use their initative to bypass a filtering system they shouldn't be regarded as would be internet terrorists. Many of the people intellegent enough to get around the system are smart enough to realise why it is installed, and the risks which younger people can be exposed to, and also the potential risks to the school computer system. However these people are unlikely to perform malicious acts with the wide range of resources on the internet. If staff members can't seem to trust 15 and 16 year olds, almost all of which have access to the internet at home, enough to allow them to browse the internet at will, then it's time to have a public book burning from the school library.

 

Please don't add the old "Students are in school to learn" phrases either, as they're incredibley short sighted. Many students finish their work ahead of the alloted time and are left to twiddle their thumbs while waiting for slower members of the class. It's rather pretentious of teachers to think that children don't have the right to surf the internet without being constantly monitored. I'm pretty sure if someone looked hard enough it'd also be against some form of human rights.

 

Don't rely on this system, don't rely on restricting children's ability to learn of have at least some enjoyment. Rely on your own initave and the control you should have over your students.

 

- Henry (student) -

[_Adam_]

If the above post is anything to go by, Impero has just been given a boost in PR. Still Henry could be an Impero employee in disguise

[Ex-MGSTech]

I'm sorry to say this but OP you're pretty naive if you believe some of the posts in this thread. I wouldn't put it past Impero to make accounts on forums such as these and create hype for their product under a different allias. As you would expect from any large company. However I can asure you Impero is not as secure as these people would have you believe. Many of my fellow students at school have already learned ways to bypass Impero without the use of external programs or removing the input cable (myself included).

 

It also stifles creativity and is regarded more so as the Nazi party of Internet Security systems. I'd also like to add to teaching staff on here, when students use their initative to bypass a filtering system they shouldn't be regarded as would be internet terrorists. Many of the people intellegent enough to get around the system are smart enough to realise why it is installed, and the risks which younger people can be exposed to, and also the potential risks to the school computer system. However these people are unlikely to perform malicious acts with the wide range of resources on the internet. If staff members can't seem to trust 15 and 16 year olds, almost all of which have access to the internet at home, enough to allow them to browse the internet at will, then it's time to have a public book burning from the school library.

 

Please don't add the old "Students are in school to learn" phrases either, as they're incredibley short sighted. Many students finish their work ahead of the alloted time and are left to twiddle their thumbs while waiting for slower members of the class. It's rather pretentious of teachers to think that children don't have the right to surf the internet without being constantly monitored. I'm pretty sure if someone looked hard enough it'd also be against some form of human rights.

 

Don't rely on this system, don't rely on restricting children's ability to learn of have at least some enjoyment. Rely on your own initave and the control you should have over your students.

 

- Henry (student) -

 

I think you may need to take a reality check as I don't remember unrestricted internet access becoming a right?

 

You need to remember Henry, not all students are as upstanding as yourself. Our job as IT support staff is to protect both you and the network from abuse. School networks are provided for all to use and benefit, not to become the playground of just a few tech savvy students.

 

Unfortunately we HAVE to put in place restrictions, not just for the protection of minors but to prevent the school from allegations of failing to protect its students. Each and every school in the UK has a duty of care to uphold and any school not seen to be taking SOME precautions may be seen as negligent. Also remember YOUR parents expect us to be filtering your access to inappropriate material, I as a parent would expect nothing less!

 

We use Impero in school both as a monitoring tool, but also as a teaching and learning tool. I've used it on several occasions to prove a student’s innocence not their guilt!

You should also be aware that the right to unmonitored internet access does not exist out there in the commercial world. Its highly likely that in a business environment attempting to bypass a companied firewall or internet filtering software would result in dismissal and potentially criminal proceedings, it is after all an offence under the computer misuse act to use a computer system for purposed not authorised by its owner!

 

Regards

 

S

[lionsl2005]

i did try lanschool. its brilliant, my vision is nooo goood. wanted to try Impero and ABtutor. registed wit impero yesterday no link still. :-(