EduBadger

Not personally - unfortunately i'm stuck with senso for another 2 years as bought a 3 year subscription but they are unlikely to retain our business.

Hi Geeks. With Easter Break approching my thoughts start turning towards reimaging devices and updating software images. I thought it would be intresting to see what free locally installed applications you all use in your educational enviroment. To get us started here is a list I generally use. With a rough explanation of what it is. VLC - MEdia player 7zip - file compresser Python - programming app Visual Studio - programming app Gimp - vector graphis app Scratch - game creation GDevelop - game creation Cura - 3d print slicer Chrome - we browser Adobe - pdf reader Freecam - screen recorder Kodu - game creator Notepad ++ - notepad tenqq - I'm currently trying to find something that can be locally installed and help teach typing - I'm thinking Tux Typing might be good - Is anyone using this. For this use case we currently use typing.com but i'm finding it causes some issues lately so thought i'd look at a locally installed app. Other free software i dont curently use but have used in the past Brackets Inventory Autocad Thonny Audacity Musescore

I have a 5400 aruba core and 6100 aruba switches with fibre backbones everywhere using om3 and 4 and a xgs3300 firewall with a 1GB link out. Its all pretty good new mid range kit that you see in education. I've ruled out network issues for my setup and the fact that others have the same issues mean to me its a general senso product fault.

Hi Alastairb25 The safeguarding aspect of senso from what i can tell works well. I have considered the same thing as i have a perpetual license of LAnSchool which works as a classroom managment product but not well as a safeguarding product. However i've thus far held of on this as we no doubt will all agree having competing products doing the same task is a bad idea. In my senario i would end up with 3 products all with MITM certs on my devices and may even cause me more issues than i currently have. It is a last resort for me. Same for the general machine monitoring / control i guess in that i would have 2 products trying to stream the desktop to teacher

Hi Ollie For you new firewall you might need these exceptions adding https://support.senso.cloud/support/solutions/articles/79000116305-firewall-and-content-filter-configuration and make sure you have upto date firmware. also If you have the sophos antivirus as well as the firewall and the STAS does not work for you following your change you can try working with your support / vender to have the authentication for web traffic go via the sophos central A.V rather than the firewall. That is something we'll be looking at soon over half term. Even now we still get the sophos pop ups on occasions but its not as bad as it ahs been.

In regards to the sophos issue. We use STAS and it would continuously be popping up asking who was using the machine which you can imagine caused a lot of complaints at the school. Senso investigation concluded that the MITM cert they used and the MITM cert sophos was using was the cause / clash. Sometimes the sophos cert would load and intercept the traffic sometimes the senso cert - when the senso cert loaded it would cause sophos to not understand who was on the internet and cause the pop up to ask the end user to sign in. The solution which is not exactly a solution was to disabled the senso web filter module - for me i needed a quick answer due to the level of complaints and we basically use sophos to block the bad sites so it didnt cause to much of a bother at the time to disable the module. Also we upgraded our sophos firewall firmware as sophos has released a fix for a lot of the compatibility issues. one last note not exactly related but there is also another update which has recently been released for sophos firewall that will be rolled out for my site over half term next week. If you have a similar issue i'd say upgrade your firewall and see how that goes. regarding all the other issues i have - senso customer support are working with us and are a nice bunch but we just want something that works - personally i'm trying to get a refund on the product and might look at impero local client / server setup if i manage to get refunded. Our teaching staff have asked similar questions to me elsewhere and have a multitude of the same responses regarding the product as you will see here.

Hi Frodo - Thank you for your response it looks like we are all having a bad experience of the product.

Hi Robins - Yes we also use Sophos and ran into issues with this.

Thanks for your feedback Iain its really useful to see these responses.

Oh dear. Well at least I'm not the only one which is little consolation. Did you manage to get a refund ?

Hi. Thank you for your reply it is certainly starting to look like i'm not the only one having these issues which is what i suspected maybe the case. Unfortunately the modules that do not work are the ones some of my staff are most interested in utilizing. As its been a few months now a lot of the staff have lost faith in the product. For my part i'm frustrated as have spent months working with 3rd party engineers reconfiguring network switches as senso advised me there product is ok and it is our network lol.

Hi Karl - Thank you for your feedback - hopefully others will also provide feedback. Our senso relationship manger advises us that no other customers have these issues which as you can imagine i'm on the fence about. I have a 3 year license and don't want to spend the entire 3 years with our teaching staff complaining.. I'm currently giving there support another chance to resolve but I'm not hopeful at this stage.

Hi Geeks. I've been using Senso Enterprise Cloud since the start of term 1/8/2023 and have never seen consistency in the classroom management side of the product. I have all the recommended firewall exceptions in place etc but when our teachers select a room of computers and try things like lock computers - broadcast to computers - etc only a handful of the devices in the room receive the commands - there is no consistency in which machines or the amount of machines - the teacher then deselect the devices, reselect the devices and issue the commands again - sometimes this then sends the command to all the devices but sometimes its just a few more so they keep doing the process until eventually all the machines receive the command. Clearly this is not great for teachers and i'm curious if we are all having the same problem. Senso support have advised its our network, i've had extensive analysis by the network vender HP Aruba and the educational specialist installation engineers who installed the network - although some small issues were identified and resolved the senso product has always remained inconsistent. Anyone else have senso cloud and struggle to get end devices to consistently receive commands like lock screen / broadcast and probably others ?

Anyone tried anything with https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/application-security/application-isolation/windows-sandbox/windows-sandbox-overview ?

We are currently looking to change our Broadband supplier and have shortlisted Virtue Technologies, prior to awarding I would be interested to hear your feedback if you have had projects completed by Virtue Technologies or have an ongoing support relationship. https://www.virtuetechnologies.co.uk/solutions/connectivity-platforms/internet-services/