[acs] Serco Progresso

[Tricky_Dicky]

Well said Ed

[PhilNeal]

I hope the decimal point is in the wrong place!

[EdWhittaker]

I hope the decimal point is in the wrong place!

 

Ooops! well spotted, Phil. (Although thinking about some LAs I know ...)

[mkennedy02]

I would love to hear from this community about how they ensure uninterrupted connection to the internet if their RBC or LA connection is inadequate.

 

In our case, and I'm sure many others are the same, we cannot ensure uninterrupted connections to the Internet. If our CLEO link fails, for whatever reason, we have no backup.

 

We did have an ADSL line installed a few years back, but we were informed that this was a 'major security risk' to the LEA's network and if we didn't disconnect it, we would be disconnected from the CLEO network. Which is a perfectly valid point, and I have no problems with it.

 

Granted, 99% of the time our Internet works, but there is always the chance it won't...

[pcstru]

You won't get 9.99% uptime with a locally hosted solution either. Take the time someone inadvertently turned off the aircon to the server room in my old school. All the cpu's fried and we were server-less for a week.

If all our servers fried, we would have no AD, no firewall - no one would be on the 'network' let alone have internet.

Really, in this day and age, cloud should be the most reliable solution.

I think that neglects a lot. Apart from the 'broadband' link being a single point of failure, the expertise with knowledge of how the school works especially for something as important as the MIS is hard to put a price on. When there are competing demands for support, you are able to easily prioritise those and keep the important balls in the air - providing you actually have the means to control your destiny. Do you think a cloud provider will be able to give your school the necessary priority when it's really important or will you be just another call in the queue?

As I've said before, would Amazon, Google, eBay etc be making a business out of it if the web was so unreliable? Like it or not, web hosting and software as a service is the way things are going so we might as well go with the flow; or arm ourselves with pitchforks and sticks like the Luddites and go and smash up the servers?

 

My concerns with hosted MIS solutions are access to and ownership of the data - it's too important and too valuable to be inaccessible or subject to the controlled access that hosted providers will out of necessity have to enforce. Google, eBay and Amazon sell cloud services, I'm not aware that they actually entrust their core business to other cloud providers.

[Tallwood_6]

Well i for one an looking forward to progresso the only things that are holding this back for us currently is the integration with other services and i think it would be in Serco's best interest to assist its partners as much as possible as many schools will likely have invested in products which need to talk to the MIS, and a bit of ? remains as if schools will be able to bring over more than ther current dataset.

The cloud hosting i look at as a possitive and providing the hosting costs themselves are reasonable will mean we wont have to spent money in the future on replacing hardware, its one less server to have to backup and above all it means the upgrades are handled directly by serco freeing up some time for us.

If you have a decent broadband connection with a good service level agreement then i dont think you have an issue with availablity.

The questions about liability if data is lost, levels of support do need some answers?

[mkennedy02]

Don't know if anyone has seen the screenshots on here;

 

Progresso- Hellfyre Design

 

I guess they're not quite the final thing but they are the first ones I have seen despite pestering many a people...

 

(I do hope they went with this concept and not something like ePortal!)

[john]

Don't know if anyone has seen the screenshots on here;

 

Progresso- Hellfyre Design

 

I guess they're not quite the final thing but they are the first ones I have seen despite pestering many a people...

 

(I do hope they went with this concept and not something like ePortal!)

 

From what I have seen at Progresso Events (of which there are some starting again at present combined with updates on the 11. range and the future for Facility / User Groups around the UK) they look like what I have seen but not quite the same colours and a bit more tweak-age but similar to those images on that site.

[techman]

Anyone know when Progresso will be available to schools in Ireland?

[john]

Anyone know when Progresso will be available to schools in Ireland?

 

I know that Facility is different in Ireland so I suspect it will come afterwards, perhaps @michael2k6 can cast some light on it

[michael2k6]

Hi, sorry, afraid not. I don't have a lot to do with the Irish market these days, but your account manager should be able to help you further if you're a current customer. If not please visit Serco Learning and make enquiries through our sales team.

 

Regards

Mic @ Serco