What RBC services have you moved away from?

[Dos_Box]

Watching some of the talks at the conf last week it has become obvious that many schools are now moving away from what were centrally provided resources, although not necessarily the internet feed, that were commonly provided as part of the RBC connection bundle until he harnessing technology grant was cut. Now it seems that many schools are sourcing not only their own connections, but AV, filtering, hosting, VLE's etc.

I'm just curious to know what it is that you have dropped and what it is you have adopted, and what savings or improvements you have made in doing so. And yes, you can name the products you have brought in.

[FN-GM]

The only thing we get its an internet feed and they have managed to stuff that up. We are looking at going from that as well.

[Soulfish]

We currently have an internet connection, spam filtering and antivirus licensing from our RBC. We're currently in the process of moving away from them for all three due to better pricing/support being available elsewhere. For instance we're moving to M247 for our internet (better price, support, performance etc), and MS for our spam/av.

 

We don't use any of the other services provided (such as VLE and additional resources) although they are included in our current costs.

[SYNACK]

Not that we ever had the kind of provisions that you guys did but we have had some similar choices.

 

We dropped managed Internet/Filtering where possible as they did much more to get in the way than they did to help. Their version of an acceptable service is at least five years behind what we can do ourselves and although it is less expencive due to subsidies we still ditched it.

 

We moved to ISA/TMG and Websence (also provided for a limited number of schools) as it offered immediate customisation and actual control as well as a speed boost. With managed services every little thing was a fight and they enforced their own values and preferences on all schools without a large argument. For instance blocking Microsoft services like Bing entirely and making unblocking it something we needed to demand individually where as the choose to promote and accelerate their 'supported' Google services.

 

Moving to internal filtering and firewalling meant that we were able to implement stuff instantly in comparison and make our own choices rather than be dictated to and controlled by another entity with its own very distinct interests. None of the schools like being strongarmed into a solution merely because it is in the upstream providers 'interests' to force us into it and lock us out of all other options.

 

I know that I am in NZ and so completely isolated from your LA systems but I think that the concerns and eventualities are probably the same.