DavidYoung

We use it now at 3 schools and it is great. The fact that staff now have a good SIMS experiance through a web-based interface is really helping drive our Chromebook programme. The fact that we can use a cheaper SMS provider (ClickSend) plus the app push messaging is saving us money. The interface is easy to navigate too. I do really wish it had Google login and Classroom support too though, that would be perfect.

Hi, Is there any further news on this? We would really like to start using ClassFlow but the lack of Shared Drive compatibility is a big hinderance. Thanks David

Hi Richard, The current version of WebScreen HTTPS decryption is not compatible with Chromebooks. The LGfL option would be to sign up for Freedom2Filter which is the native Netsweeper implementation and is fully compatible with Chromebooks via an explicit proxy setting. If you want to get that set up then PM me and I can give you some hints from our experiance. To be honest, if you just want basic monitoring of traffic then Securly might be more simple. David

We had this issue today and I noticed that the PC had SMART Ink installed and running. I remember that we had a very similar issue several years ago with SMART Ink interfering with IE in the same way so I uninstalled it and it worked fine afterwards. As the reports seem to be widespread I would imagine the problem is a graphics issue with overlay applications rather than being specific to SMART so it'd be worth checking if you have similar programs running.

We're using this: https://chromex.io/ and it is working really well. We are running Mock exams now with it and it is much more straight-forward than the way we did it on Windows. We do also have a trial running for DigiExam but it seemed more complicated. ChromEx has the great advantage that everyone logs in with Google (teachers and students) but the students are obviously in a locked down environment.

@Chris_Cook, could you put the Apps Script you created onto GitHub or similar? Is it in a state where it would be useful to others?

We went with Cambium over the summer in the end too and it seems to have been working out fairly well. I do like the full cloud management as it's not relying on any of our servers, etc. The cost was very competitive, I think it worked out about £8k cheaper than Ruckus on a 75 AP installation and I'm a bit more confident in it than Unifi. The 5-year warranty is good to have and we really needed a system without ongoing costs.

Definately agree with point 1. We do use the built-in email facility (It was a requirement of ours when we signed up and was implemented during our trial period) but having an additional minor check like DOB or post code would prevent potential leaks due to mistyped addresses, etc. I sent a whole raft of feature requests to @lwalshaw a couple of months back, maybe I should dig it out and get feedback here the same way. Overnet Data are very good at listening to feedback and making changes.

@DaveAshworth, when we renegotiated our contract our cost came down significantly, even for the primary schools who also got a speed upgrade at the time so I'm sure there's saving to be had if you speak to them. @JohnJackson, thanks, yeah I know we're already at the top, and as I say, the new price helped a lot. I've been trying to get hold of the Adobe license for a while now. I think Troy is just getting them set up today. Also looking forward to getting our Chrome licenses with Neverware on Friday. Gridstore, unfortunately, isn't really compatible with our infrastructure as we are virtualised and use Veeam Backup. It would be great if we could use the Gridstore offering with other software.

Looking forward to our upgrade...

Hi, Sorry to resurrect this thread but Cambium are currently at the top of our list for a wireless refresh and if there are any schools with Cambium deployed I'd love to speak to you. Particularly if you are doing high density or 1:1. Thanks

We use ClickSend too which has the advantage of being about 1/2 the price of things like ParentMail, T2P, etc at around 2.5p per message.

Thanks. I did do some more investigating and see that MIS:Sync is not picking up the email addresses. I thought we might be able to manually upload the addresses but it won't even let us add it to the records. I think this is completely ridiculous that a program intended to reduce school admin load can't do this simple task and instead causes the workload to increase. I can download the activation codes in a spreadsheet so can do a manual mailmerge but it baffles me that this is required.

Hi, Does anyone who uses ParentPay email the login details out to your Pre-Admission students? I spoke to ParentPay today who said it wasn't possible but I find it really hard to believe that no school has wanted to do this before. Thanks David

I've just run a check against our domain which is not hosted with LGfL but with Cloudflare. We get the same first message and we do get an SOA warning (serial number). The SOA records are all to do with the internal management of multiple DNS servers so that's for the provider to worry about if it works then there's no problem. I do, however, agree with you on SPF/DKIM/DMARC, which LGfL should be implementing by default. We have had a couple of schools having issues getting their messages rejected by Gmail because they don't have any authentication on their domain. We've had to request SPF records for each of these. @PaddyNewman, perhaps someone should go through and check that StaffMail domains have valid SPF records, and if DKIM can be set up, even better and Atomwide should probably have a way of monitoring DMARC for issues. On the general DNS front, I think if you want to do anything particularly fancy then you can easily move your domain to another provider as I say, all ours are with CloudFlare and we have a fair few custom records. The example given of Lets Encrypt would work particularly well in this scenario as it is designed to be automated and CloudFlare has an API that you can use for this. Atomwide's manual system is a safety net against silly mistakes, and that's why we are happy, with, for example, the firewall situation where it does take some time but I know that it is being double-checked by someone. I would say that a read-only view like we have for firewall rules would be very useful, the example of MSPs being the obvious one and we are doing this a bit ourselves, so a tab on the LGfL deployment page would be helpful to see if anything different is going on.

Hi @JohnJackson, do you know when we can get our hands on the 120 licenses? This is an interesting thread as I was a bit sceptical when it was announced as user licenses but looking at the costs listed here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/licensing-questions/206875-adobe-cc-license-100-devices.html#post1769055, I can see why. We currently pay around £750pa for 30 licenses. It will be interesting to see how easy it is to add additional named or SDL licenses to the adobe instance we get access to. We would also need to federate it with our own AD and Gsuite. Thanks David

Is the Parish council a charity? If so then I believe you can get Gsuite basic for free: https://www.google.com/intl/en-GB/nonprofits/offerings/apps-for-nonprofits.html

This is something we might want to do in the future. Discover is always more difficult, it seems to have issues every time there is an update. The main thing I'd be concerned about is SOLUS 3, do you know if it would be 1 instance of SOLUS and everything would have to be in sync?

Have a look at Altaro: https://www.altaro.com/vm-backup/buynow.php. What I like is that they price by host not socket so you're making a saving straight-up there. Their retail pricing is on the website but with educational discount and going via a reseller it will be about 30% cheaper anyway. We still use Veeam as we have the licenses but we have Altaro in a primary school we support and it does work well and is much more affordable.

How many hosts & sockets?

We have it set up in Netsweeper by adding a URL entry to add request header: Edit: You need to do this for all the addresses here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6214622?hl=en

Thanks Paddy. This does seem to correctly block us from using the wrong IP now.

@HTCPCP: I don't want to take this thread off-topic but I think this does also form part of the original question: With your experience with Acer support, was that recently or a while ago? What was the issue with extended warranties?

We have done 1:1 for one year group in one of our schools. We used Asus C202 Chromebooks which are ruggedised but had a couple of design flaws that kind of negated this, particularly the screen hinge cover which regularly came off. Their warranty service was very good though, it was provided by Stone with onsite engineers in our area and the turnaround was quick. 3-year onsite warranty was included as standard. However, they have lost a lot of favour with me now as the C204 Chromebooks, which I like a lot as they seem to have fixed some of the issues we had before with the hardware now only come with a 1-year return-to-base warranty and it is nearly £50 to bring it back to the 3-year on-site warranty as we had before. This is putting the cost of the programme too high for us to continue with Asus so we are currently evaluating an Acer C732 which comes with 3-year RTB but is about £20 to make it on-site (which we may or may not do) The Acer seems pretty good, I'd agree with your assessment @localzuk. Does anyone have any experience with Acer warranty service? The last experience we had was about 10 years ago and was pretty poor so I would like to see if it has changed.

You can select which document types are available to parents, so you can turn off profile reports but I'm assuming you want to then be able to publish them once finalised. We have a feature request open for an embargo so that we can set a publish date for documents and not show them before this time. I suggest you email Overnet and add your requirement to that. They're pretty good at responding to feature requests but I did just send a bunch last week and haven't heard back yet.