Jollity

Does anyone know if this has been fixed, or when it might be fixed? It could be a major issue for us as most of our user names have spaces in, and we want to start installing Office 2013 soon.

That does sound more likely than it being programmed to feel insulted. I was not criticising the filtering of the page - I agree the content makes it suspicious. I just found the coincidence amusing.

Page 9 (only) of this thread is now being categorised by the Smoothwall content filter under web proxies and blocked. I don't think it likes being criticised.

My information about lack of SSL decryption came from the engineer who came to install the demo unit. I questioned the point specifically, and he did not mention the proxy option. However I only realised the full significance for us in terms of logging later on, so I did not push the point as hard as I might have. I do not recall being pointed to the web essentials course or web videos, but I may have forgotten. However, pre-sale when I am trying to compare different options and get as much of a complete overview as quickly as possible, personally I find video a rather slow way to learn about a product. So had I known about the videos, I would probably have skipped through some but not watched them all.

I am sorry to have missed that then - the demo unit was a bottle rocket, so that is probably where the misunderstanding arose. It probably would not have been enough, but it might have swung our decision. I did feel lacking in information on technical detail for Lightspeed - a lot of the wiki seems to be customer only. It would be helpful if you could put an easily accessible page of technical specifications and features with a comparison of the different models. Maybe one already exists and I missed it as well! Did a quick test and it seems not, but I am not quite sure what category the security forum would be blocked under - proxy bypass maybe? I would be surprised about it being blocked under any dynamic filtering though - working out automatically that that content is sensitive seems as if it would be pretty tough. Easy to block the security forum manually of course, but then we have web forums as a category blocked for pupils.

In the end, we decided to go for Smoothwall. Lightspeed gave us a trial and my old school let me run a comparison against the Smoothwall there. Lightspeed definitely has the better user interface. The biggest feature I wanted that Lightspeed was missing was HTTPS interception and decryption - it can log the domain off the certificate, but not the full URL. Smoothwall seemed to be somewhat better in blocking my attempts to access dodgy material through the filter. However I have to say the dynamic analysis does not seem to do as much as I feel it should - most of the blocks I hit on Smoothwall seemed to be down to the URL lists. I tried to do Geoff's test "Ask them to filter a big dynamic website like Edugeek." Edugeek did not seem to have enough questionable material on it, so I tried deviantart.com as a tricky case - a lot of innocent images, but also a lot of smut and social features. As far as I could see Smoothwall has the whole site in "non-pornographic nudity" and did not distinguish the pages much between the pages - once I unblocked that, I could sign up to the site and get into everything I tried. Maybe it is just too hard to distinguish "pornographic" from "non-pornographic" nudity - not sure people are much good at saying what art is either. I would be interested to know if Smoothwall can suggest a site that would really show their dynamic page analysis in action. I regret not giving Bloxx more of a chance. I would have liked to see how they compared.

I am looking for any advice people have on the best way to link an ADSL connection to our network. We are changing our ISP and filtering, and getting a Smoothwall UTM which I plan to use as a firewall. For the short term we will still be on ADSL, but hopefully this year will be moving over to fibre with suitable router provided. My question is what to do about connecting to ADSL in the meantime. It would make sense to me to use the Smoothwall to make the PPPoE connection and have an ADSL router in front of it running in bridge mode. The school's current router is a Cisco 837. From what I read, this can be put into bridge mode but many people have trouble getting it to work. I also do not have any real experience configuring Cisco kit. Alternatively we could buy in a cheap ADSL router to use in bridge mode. Can anyone recommend a suitable device: most basic features, but still reliable?

I was going to post some for you, but then I remembered the trial agreement says " you shall treat the design and performance of the Online Services that are accessible to you only via password protected access and any documentation or materials we make available to you under this agreement as confidential and shall not disclose them to any third party except in the furtherance of the parties' business relationship with each other." Not sure if that means I cannot put up screenshots.

I put the Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration commandlet that you use in Connect-SetRegional-SetSpelling in the script I use to create new accounts, however I find that it will fail if run too soon after account creation. Exactly how long varies, but it can be several minutes - presumably will the mailboxes are provisioned. In the end I have put it in a separate script to run a little after creating the accounts.

Just discovered that the Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange utility also supports generic IMAP servers as well, so that might work too - confusing name. You can give it a CSV of user names and passwords to migrate.

I may be facing a similar senario soon. I have not got far in finding a solution, but I did think this blog post offered one potential solution - using a command line tool called Imapsync.

I am not sure if it is relevant or not that Google dropped support for using Google Apps Sync with the free version of Google Apps. This does not affect the education or business version at the moment, but I wonder if it indicates an ultimate intention to drop it entirely - probably not, it is probably about pushing businesses to pay.

What tipped the decision in Bloxx' favour?

Range of applications seems a good pro for Google Apps. Can you give us some examples of some you have found useful? I would be concerned with some apps about whether they could be made safe for us to use - I should have mentioned it is a primary school I am looking at migrating.

My biggest concern about Office 365, as we currently have, is the lack of easy web storage/synchronisation - since Skydrive was removed when we were upgraded to Office 365. However I admit I have not had a chance to get sharepoint into use, so maybe this could have been rectified. I am delighted to hear that SkyDrive Pro is in the new edition, and that sounds as if it might be even easier to work with than google drive, with the Office 2013 integration. From my experience of using Gmail at home, I found Google Apps a lot slicker to use - feeling designed for the web rather than made to look like Outlook desktop. I also thought not being able to overlay different calendars was a real limitation of the Office 365 calendar. However from the brief look I have had so far Office 365 2013 is feeling a lot better designed, and at last I can overlay calendars.

Now we have a chance to use the Office 2013 version of Office 365, what are people's thoughts on how it compares to Google Apps? What are the pros and cons of each? I have been managing a Live@Edu, now Office 365, domain and my general experience has been okay but not great. I am now involved in another school's decision to go to one or the other.

Yup some students have grants. I am just blocking out the trauma on that one. They are presumably based on the number of sessions - I had better check up exactly how.

Using the markbooks would be an idea worth exploring, it would certain still be pretty awkward but it might help. Thanks!

I did a migration from EasyMail to Live@Edu. I did not find any way to access the EasyMail mailboxes without using the users passwords. I had a migration day where I reset the EasyMail passwords with a CSV files of randomly generated passwords, then fed CSV file with those passwords to the Live@Edu migration tool. One thing to watch out for is that EasyMail stores sent items in the "outbox" folder. When these were imported to Live@Edu this folder was hidden by the special "outbox" folder used for outgoing items, and the messages were not accessible at all except if viewed in the "blind and low vision experience" mode.

This is a thrilling tale of the minor nightmare that is setting up a registration and billing system for our preschool. I thought I should see if anyone else had any ideas for approaches I could take. Ideally we would like to be able to take attendance registers and calculate the appropriate bills within our MIS, SchoolBase, but I have not been able to find any useful way to make this work. The basic idea is that the preschool day is divided into five different time periods - each child may be booked to come to a range of different combinations of these sessions. A set of sessions for the week is prepaid for the term/month, but parents can book additional sessions right up to the actual session. We need to take an attendance register for these sessions. We need to record the extra sessions that were booked but not prepaid in order to bill for them, whether or not the child actually attended. The billing is further complicated as: the rate is determined by age at the start of term, rather than by class parents may opt to pay monthly or termly There are plenty of extra complications but those are the core issues. SchoolBase's core registration feature will not work as it expects every child to attend every day. It would be just about possible to use the activities feature to record attendance and take registers, but the process of entering the correct children into the correct sessions would be very unwieldy as each of the five sessions is treated as a separate entity with a separate list. In addition, this would not really help with the billing unless there was a separate activity for each age group and each billing type (so each activity would probably contain about one child). I have had a brief look around some specialist nursery packages, and some seemed as if they might work, but they also include their own pupils records and invoice production, which would duplicate the functionality in SchoolBase, and potentially require maintaining the records in two places. The least bad option I have come up with so far is a design for some clever spreadsheets which collect the registration and booked sessions, drawing on pupil data exported from SchoolBase. Then using macros to manipulate the data into a form which can be imported into SchoolBase's billing system Feemaster. This would be considerably more brittle, limited and labour intensive than I would like, but would probably meet all the requirements. Does anyone know of something that might work well for us? What does anyone else use for preschool registration and billing? Would anyone like to tell me how much better their MIS is at doing this kind of thing?

Another idea would be to try making the association through the file types tab in the windows media player settings rather than through the Windows dialog.

Your experience is very similar to mine. The first one could be from those who have a saved user password from Live@Edu. The only way I found to make it work again was to delete cookies, as jamesbmarshall says. We also had a couple of staff members with links to personal hotmail accounts, which every time they used, next time they went to Office 365 it would get stuck in an infinite redirect loop until cookies were cleared. I think we fixed by recreating the hotmail links. Your second issue occurred consistently when there was a saved user name from Live@Edu - you could tell that the saved login name would not work because it said something about logging in to partnerdomain under the user name. As you say, it is then necessary to use "sign in with a different user ID". I just put up a detail help file to walk the staff through this and had the IT teacher talk the pupils through it. Another one that we saw was that after Office 365 had been added to favourites, the favourite would sometimes send the user back to the Live@Edu login page for no apparent reason. I never got to the bottom of that - it seems to have gone away on its own.

I am dealing with a similar scenario. The biggest risk I identify is inappropriate or disturbing google image content, likely reached accidentally. Not something I had even considered. Sounds like it would be a great service to be able to offer, though potentially a real can of worms in terms of supporting parents. The firewall is something on my mind as well, so I am interested to hear the suggestions you are getting. We have been managing with just a basic port blocking firewall so far, and do not currently have anything fancy like a VPN. I am trying to decide if we need to have something stateful, IPS etc. A smoothwall with firewall components would be a handy compromise. I have been looking at Bloxx as well. They seems pretty good: similar to Smoothwall in using in-line scanning, price, and in most important capabilities (except for Firewall), look easier to set up. However as I have some familiarity with Smoothwall, if we are going for a solution of that class, I am inclined to go for Smoothwall.

I am pleased this subject seems to have raised some interest. Thank you for sharing your experience, dhicks. Is your memory that Smoothwall's categorisation was noticeably better? If the cost were the same, which would you go for? Thank you to you too, Frank. One rather silly question: are you quoting someone else? I am confused by the speech marks around your post.

This is an old thread started in February 2013 and contains information that may no longer be relevant - View the latest threads about internet filtering Alternative title: URL List filtering vs in line filtering. I am evaluating filtering systems again. I have used Smoothwall before and find it pretty good, and I know how keen people around here are about it. However the quotes I have currently, put a LightSpeed rocket substantially cheaper than a SmoothWall guardian appliance. If I sell SmoothWall to the powers that be, it would have to be on the quality of the filtering. I see the theoretical advantages of in-line filtering, but I see some merit in LightSpeed's response that analysing pages centrally and sending out a URL list is more efficient and allows for more through analysis of the pages. Ultimately it is the results that matter, but I am not sure we have the resources to do our own trial of the the options, so I am very interested in the results of anyone who has. Has anyone done any trials recently comparing Smoothwall against Lightspeed, or any URL list based filtering against in-line?