Nexarius

Thanks all for your input. We looked at Smoothwall but were massively put off by their requirement for us to share details on leads and register deals with them before they would give us even indicative pricing. The convoluted sales process seemed a real step backwards compared to others. Senso was clearer on the sales/pricing side but technical details of the filtering product seemed sparse and I don't think it would have done what we needed it to do - it felt like a bolt-on for their classroom management product rather than a main focus. We've ended up sticking with Securly - to be fair they stepped up the support and escalated the long-running issues which are now getting sorted on their end. 95% of the schools we use Securly with 'just work' and we don't need to get support, it's the 5% where things are complicated (multiple schools sharing a Google tenancy etc) that we've had issues but the main issues are now fixed.

Hi Tom, I've just filled out the partner application form, would be great if we could get some options as we have a number of imminent Securly renewals that I would like to switch for something more fit for purpose!

We're a education-focused MSP with around 20 schools on the Securly Filter platform and the support is just getting worse and worse - time to resolution is now measured in weeks and often takes over a month to get things fixed. The school's won't tolerate this any more and it's become embarrassing recommending them, so looking for alternatives. Senso looks like it might be fairly similar and have better support? I've spoken to them and it sounds like their support team is much easier to communicate wiht (Securly have removed telephone support and it's tickets only, no way to get immediate help any more...) Our requirements are fairly simple - need to be able to filter ChromeOS and Windows devices with transparent auth (whether by user-injected PAC like Securly or deploying an agent) and basic DNS filtering for guest users. Needs to sync to Google for users and needs to be KCSIE-compliant.... oh and needs to not be significantly more expensive than Securly. Open to any suggestions! Thanks!

Our experience with deploying Securly to several schools as an MSP has been similar. The sales people are decent, but the onboarding session promised is non-existent and there's a bunch of settings that you have to go through support to change which is not helpful when doing a migration over a weekend. Expected more for the cost really...

I had this problem and tried all the usual fixes to no avail. Just when I was about to launch the computer through the window, I noticed that it only affected users with mandatory profiles (ie, all our student accounts!). Without the profiles the logon scripts ran, with them they didn't. It turned out to be a permissions problem on the registry hive on the mandatory profile. I'd already set it so that Authenticated Users had permissions over the hive, but I hadn't propagated that change through the hive in the usual NTFS-y way. I did that with regedit and now the scripts run - Hooray!

Hi All, Currently running Moodle 1.9 as an experiment, and using the windows share web client thing to give remote access to home directories and shared areas. It works nicely, and gives people 1-click access to the folders as authentication has already been done (LDAP auth). Looking at upgrading to 2.0, though, and 1.9 plugins don't work in 2.0! Has anybody seen a way for users' home directories to be made accessible using Moodle 2.0? This is a primary school so it has to be very straight forward... for the *teachers* to understand it!

We have 2003, and we're beginning to get issues with the kids all having 2007/2010 at home and being confused by the 2003 interface. I've looked at the cost of upgrading and it is substantial! What do people think, is it worth upgrading to 2010 for familiarity's sake, or should I stick with 2003 which does the job and which the teachers understand!

Yes, I'm sure they would be better. I'm currently discussing this with one of the sales droids, hopefully she'll come back with something appealing!

We're a small primary school with only 200 pupils, so our requirements are really quite basic. Sophos meets the Becta standards and from talking to another techie who's used it at schools, it seems to mostly do the job. I know it won't be as flexible as Smoothwall, but we don't need anything fancy!

I do indeed mean content filtering as well as anti-virus. I do like the look of Smoothwall, but it is *considerably* more expensive than the Sophos option. And I mean considerably - the annual licensing fee for Smoothwall is 3 times that of the Sophos solution! Our LEA is offering their centralised basic filtering package (which wouldn't allow us any control whatsoever) for £180/year, so if I'm going to persuade them the school to choose local filtering instead then it needs to be cheap!

Hi All, Currently getting quotes for a new filtering system as our LEA is kindly withdrawing our current Websense server. Has anyone any experience of the Sophos appliances (WS100, WS500 etc)? The licensing appears to be considerably cheaper than Smoothwall!

We are tied into a county arrangement (Oxfordshire) paying £2600/year for a 2mbit SDSL link. This does not include filtering, we have to either pay the county extra to use theirs, or provide our own (but it has to be BECTA-compliant...) Does anyone else think this is excessive? We only have 200 pupils, so a maximum of about 20 people using the connection at the same time. I reckon straightforward ADSL would be faster!

All 5 of our older boards, bought in 2006, do *exactly* the same thing, though they're SB680s rather than 660s. The newer SB680 R2 is perfect. Driving myself and the teachers crazy!

It was, but I believe you had to register them within a certain timeframe and foolishly I didn't. It's weird. The R1 boards seem to just randomly lose their alignment, but the R2 board we have is completely fine...

Hi All, We have a number of ageing 600-series Smartboards which are all begining to lose their accurary around the edges and lose their alignment and generally p*ss the teachers off. They are 4 years old and thus out of warranty, and nobody seems to repair the damned things, so I am considering replacing them. Has anybody had any experience with the Smart 685ix widescreen board? I like the concept of widescreen because it will improve their suitability for watching DVDs etc, but I'm unsure about the Unifi projector. We have a Hitachi ultra-short-throw projector already which is amazing and I'm not sure the Unifi would match it... Does anybody have any experience of these boards? (or of places that recondition older boards!) Cheers, Matt