frogdude

All that and more in Frog, and yes it costs more than some VLE's but you get a team of people constantly building new features, widgets and content for you to include on your pages. Besides, when you look at the TCO over 5 years Frog actually works out cheaper than running something like Moodle, where you have to employ someone to look after it, update it etc. Give them a call and get a demo sorted out, afterall you can always say no if you don't want it after the demo. Plus they will be able to show you the features you enquired about in a live environment

I see your point regarding this issue - Frog takes the user information from your MIS, but does not create the network paths automatically - this is something that you can do with a CSV import/export. I think what you are suggesting is to be able to select all users from an MIS year and say "Use this path '//server/share/%username%/My Documents' as their home drives, rather than the added step of the export import. How many additional users join in a year? Network admin's must be told at some point otherwise they would never have network accounts created for them! In my opinion it is a very simple process. The Frog Extractor is installed on your MIS server, it pulls the data out on a nightly schedule - imports that into Frog which create the user-names based on a very customisable set of rules. The users are automatically linked to their AD accounts and can then login without any intervention from you. You can then add their home drives at any time, either with a CSV for bulk or one at a time for a couple for example. I think that any system, such as a network or VLE is going to require some amount of administration, this is unavoidable. The people at Frog do their best to minimise this whilst catering for all system types. Don't forget that it is a constantly evolving product and things are always improving Lastly: I tend to find that people are very quick to condemn, and slow to thank - people are more likely to want to post a rant rather than something positive, so I hope that such cases would be a tiny minority. Phew, sorry about the long post!

When you say that you have users split over three servers, do you mean that you have 3 domains? Or one domain, but with the storage for their "Home Drives" spread over three servers? You shouldn't have to alter your system in order to get Frog to work, as long as you can tell it what the usernames are and they are all on the same logical domain. Frog can only authenticate with one domain for username and password authentication, but can look at any server in the same domain for access to their files. You mentioned that you don't have a standard naming convention for usernames and locations. If this is the case, how do you create your users every year? If you can do an export from AD that contains the users path to the home drive that you want to use in Frog and their UPN number (as in your MIS system) and usernames then you could use one CSV import to correct all the data in about 5 minutes flat. You would only have to do this once a year when your new users started. If I have understood your setup correctly

OXBOX SCORM packages can be huge, over 2Gb in some cases. As you can imagine trying to open a 2Gb file over any sort over the web (even internally) is going to cause problems. This is compounded if you have a whole class trying to access the same package at once. I think oxbox can provide you with smaller versions of the packages which should cause less problems when trying to use them on your VLE.

When you create your users in AD do you import directly from your MIS? If so, and you have included your pupils UID/UPN number? You can use a CSV import to correct your usernames by exporting a CSV from your Active Directory that includes the usernames and UID's/UPN's of the students then importing that into Frog in one go. The problem you have is that you have an inconsistent naming format, and it is not possible to configure your Frogserver for every eventuality. Regarding the surname lengths, I have seen many longer than 10 characters, your import settings are probably configured to only take the first 10 characters of the surname - you can change this in your toolkit. I can confirm that the auto extractor will NOT change your usernames or create duplicate users. When the import is done it matches the UPN/UID of the child to ones that are already in Frog - other data (such as names / addresses etc) will change if the data in your MIS changes, but usernames never will. The only way that duplicate users can be created is if you do an CSV import and do not include the UPN of the pupils, or by adding duplicate pupils into your MIS. Hope this helps!