chrisjako

Where is the data being held?

Problem with yeastar is they are a Chinese company so you probably shouldn’t input contact details to them which technically breaches GDPR

Just came to say don't touch CIVICA cloud, we are with them they dont sync arbor data for 48 hours which causes chaos with parents, currently looking ot end for a breach fo SLA they take hours to answer the phone and tickets still not repsonded since february

I’m at breaking point with this company, before they joined Qoria I was a real advocate, even recommending them to our LA of whom took them on for a lot a Bradford school and things ran virtually seamless for a decade. Fast forward to three years ago, we joined a MAT of 19 schools and smoothwall won our tender to join them all together with a central management smoothwall parent and child box structure. Its an absolute pile of horse manure, I’ve had issues right from the start of them sending faulty s1 boxes, post installation we had 5 boxes hacked due to their install team leaving the password as default and they had the audacity to blame me for not checking them all post their technical install handover! We where promised cloud filter from the start and due to a series of mismanagement on their side we only got it working a month ago, when I say working, it randomly blocks internet traffic across multiple sites sporadically causing the PC to look like they are running slow, we had to set an intune policy to test roll out inprivate so we could bypass cloud filter and voila it works, I am being made out by them to not know what I am doing when apparently they have 100s of customer uses cloud filter successfully only to be told by another technician that we where incorrectly informed about secret knock configuration and they further information about setting custom DNS records was released to us after that didn’t work on the child boxes. Their teams and our account manager take ages to respond. Don’t get me wrong there are a few gems in support but getting a hold of them is like trying to find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. You spend more time logging a ticket then you do troubleshooting it with support. These things are just the tip of the iceberg! My team supports other schools outside our Trust and one uses Exa and surf protect, I called them several times to troubleshoot firewall ports for a new SIP system, EXA support answered the phone straight away, no need to raise a ticket, one stayed on the phone for 30 mins with me whilst we finished testing, this was way past 6pm too. I know they are a sponsor here and seem to get well protected whenever a ‘smoothwall issue’ post is made but I honestly don’t care, this company has been an absolute disaster for MAT and I can’t wait to rip this crap out once our contract ends

LOL, yeah i just spotted 2 of those three can be done natively, i've just setup an arbor report with the import contacts template and fired it out to my BM's across the trust to respond back to me - it is a manual process though, the only thing that looks good is the ability to open Arbor when that contact calls however i dont quite know how that will work in a central MAT 3cx installation with 19 seperate Arbor sites, maybe UPWORK is my friend here to complete a cheap CRM script for point 2

So i am aware that clarion have their own CRM which does the following: 1. Caller Preview- Displays the parent/student name so you know who is calling before you answer 2. Screen Popping – Once you do answer, it will open the MIS on the parent/student record automatically. 3. Click-To-Dial functionality - No more memorising phone numbers and no more misdialling. Simply find your contact and call straight from your MIS. But are there any other alternative solutions out there? Has anyone attempted to do their own

Contact me if you want to talk to someone,- been there, done that wore the T shirt - Our MAT is on one tenant its fab but was a grind to get it to this stage

I appreciate I said "crashes" however that was probably the wrong terminilogy - the green tick still shows on the dashboard so essentially isnt a "crash" - it just needs a service restart to function as intended - in this case the alert will not help

Web proxy randomly crashes and needs restarting – with no alert telling us it needs to. We find out when students are reported accessing the internet unfiltered, has happened three times over the space of 2 years within 19 academies, apparently a known issue

So for BYOD with http are you saying it could be possible for our students to bypass fitlering?

2 of these points can be fixed and prevented, one can not

It seems there are several issues that allow unfiltered sites across our academies • Web proxy randomly crashes and needs restarting – with no alert telling us it needs to • http/https-QUIC needs adding to firewall reject rules • Devices which secret knock via cloudfilter will not filter traffic when a browser is used that hasn’t got the cloud filter extension, for example renamed portable browsers that are difficult to police in an intune enviroment I have growing concerns regarding Smoothwall's effectiveness in safeguarding both our staff and students.

I mean if that was me i wouldve come straight out into the external access point so no cable was visible, there is a false celining at the other side to i dont know why they didnt do this, if it did have to have cable external run it would be inside proper trunking. I just hope to got they havent stapled it into the flat felt roof above otherwise we will have water ingress issues youears down the line

Nope not epoxy you are 100% correct it is a zip tie foam sticker, the same ones we all know to last around 2-3 days before loosing their tack and falling off, this is also a cat6a cable not a fibre

We have 17 schools in our trust currently undergoing installation of this project, our supplier who well established and well known to our community, seems to be rushing it through and subcontracting subcontracters. I visted a primary school today to see how its going and saw a plethora or install issues however this one stood out - I know my opinions of the install but what are your thoughts?

Yes apparently there is a meeting/webinar today and we are to await that for further clarification

I'm grinding my teeth with jealousy over here reading this lol We where told 2 external max, did you go cisco or meraki or another vendor?

Whats frustrating is that i submitted our first Doc3 in April and it got denied by the DFE due to the equipment being aruba and in short supply, we where told to resubmit with meraki and it took our suppliers 2 months to re-quote - I'm about to point the gun at their heads for taking too long

We were told in the DFE online webinars that there is plenty of funding avialable and when they run low, more will be allocated We are being shorted £124k on one school and £324k on another I cant install half a wifi system full of dead spots around the schools, it'll be a worse off user experience then what we currently have

The actual complete WiFi system! I know they do not cover anything that isn't related to WiFi, i've been through this process with 18 of my schools, for my primaries full funding was granted but my secondaries where halved, the DFE systems are practically independent to my main LAN, the only connection it has is a 10gb entry point to my core switch Within my submitted application i've tried to be as scarce with resources as possible, less equipment = less maintenance, less electricity costs, less licencing once the program expires - some areas we where doing 1 AP per 2/3 classrooms - everything is cisco meraki as advised by the DFE themselves in a one-to-one call With the two secondary school plans submitted to the DFE, they basically responded with half of the cost approved, I can't dilute the wifi system anymore than what it already is

We just got our response back today from the DFE for two of our secondary schools, they have both been granted less than half of what we submitted on the Doc3 cost matrix. Not meaning to seem ungrateful here but what am i supposed do I do with that!? fit half the school with Meraki Wi-Fi and leave the other half on a 15 year old ruckus system The criteria for the CTC program is: - an education investment area and have an Ofsted rating of ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’. - a priority education investment area One of our secondary’s fits both of these plus it fails on all the current standards for Wi-Fi that the CTC program is set out to achieve. The catchment area for pupils is one of the most deprived in Bradford a lot of students only have access to the internet when they are at school (not to mention it’s a time when some of them are only fed on FSM) I have been informed that other participating schools in the program, were provided full funding even when their existing Wi-Fi standards still passed the criteria prior to the CTC install, which raises concerns about their resource allocation. Our vendor says they never seen anything like this before, with some of their clients receiving triple the amount of what we were granted. My initial impression is that there could be potential bias against our identity as a Catholic Multi Academy Trust With less than half the requested funding granted, I'm at a loss regarding our options moving forward, given that we completely lack the extra capital required to cover the remaining amount needed to complete the install Has anyone else here in the CTC program experience this? Any advice on how to tackle this, I’ve already sent an email to CTC expressing the above points.

Can anyone offer some advice on how automate the creation of folders within a team so that only student and teacher have access (not viewable by the rest of the students within the team) We use paid salamnder to create teams per our arbor timetable Assignments do this but its not what my teachers are after, they need a folder to dip in and out from that only they and each individual student can view

They use gmail, chatGPT is the least of their problems

Hi Lee, we have spoken before, you will be invited again for the next tender in 2025

I looked into a MPLS solution, 1gb was too expensive for our primary schools I feel the serverless intune enviroment we now have is the most cost effective and effeiceint way to connect the MAT under 1 Azure tennant, albeit it a lot of work cloud migrating 17 school (took us a year non stop 12 hour workdays!) It would be a perfect setup if smoothwall was reliable