Primus

Sorry, I don't agree, to filter effectively you need to SSL intercept. As others have said, they are issued 4G hotspots and encouraged to use them if they need to, the WiFi thing is simply a courtesy we extend but you definitely don't want to hang yourself by trying to be too accommodating.

Try CCS G-Cloud 12

And yet we've seen reports of inspectors having a list of "interesting" sites and seeing if they can get on them. Anything I provided them would be exactly what I give to a normal guest - VPNs blocked, SSL interception in place and identified by individual usernames with appropriate filtering for a guest adult in a school. I'm wary about trying to be "too helpful" with Ofsted.

I think this is where Edugeek might be able to help - also ANME. Perhaps with a public letter signed by the community and copied to places like Schools Week, the TES etc?

We've bought loads from KRCS over the years.

I spoke to them, but at the time we'd already made the decision to leave, so my feedback to our account manager was "We're leaving and there isn't anything you can do to change our decision, to prevent others leaving you need a cloud product as soon as possible." I think I even said it had to be a properly new cloud product not a remote desktop or other cobbled together solution.

Buy them the USB tokens, they're not that expensive. The added security is well worth it.

We've taken the view here that MFA should be used everywhere, there are lots of reasons why simply trusting an IP or location are a bad idea. If nothing else it trains staff in a conistent manner - ie. "If I do this I always get an MFA prompt and it looks like x" then when something out of the ordinary happens they're in theory more able to spot in and avoid phishing etc. Across various schools we've had very little pushback with MFA - nowhere near what you might expect. You may need to be firm with locking of PCs, enforce it after a certain period of inactivity and tell staff if they're not actively locking when they leave a PC then the inactivity locking period will keep getting reduced - it's for a very good reason, data protection - they have access to so much confidential data that the school needs to take reasonable steps to protect it.

Ours all log out and it still doesn't clear them. We've seen it on single user devices!

What was their reaction? I must admit I've been putting off doing the CE stuff for a while and it is definitely a good idea in principle but this makes it unworkable and means lots of organisations will completely forget about it. I get security is hard, I get there are compromises etc but they need to be realistic with their expectations.

Did anyone point out that this is incredibly difficult and will make CE a massive non-starter for people?

So glad we've already switched 1 school and are in the process of switching all the others by the new year!

Sadly, as much as it will pain you, it's now time to junk them and move on.

Is delaying updates by such a long period of time really a good idea - in the current climate you'd surely want updates pushing out ASAP - obviously testing them first but operating a full month behind seems to me to be a really bad idea.

Maybe but we've seen devices lasting an awful lot longer than they used to, I think it's less than 4 years now to EoL for Windows 10 - isn't it October 14th 2025?

My worry is MS's documentation on it potentially not receiving updates - I can't put it into production if devices suddenly stop getting updates, they're effectively forcing schools, businesses etc to buy new "compliant" hardware even with their so called softer stance.

It isn't working as intended, Google themselves have said that. Chromebooks have always been cloud first and multi user, this is a retrograde step. Even if it was using lots of cloud space, Edu tenancies now have a limitation on the free amount of space and filling the on board storage leads to significant issues with the Chromebook not working properly once it's 100% full and it then stays 100% full.

So YouTube doesn't work properly which is a direct result of their changes. They're big enough and had long enough to properly scope this out, implement and test it. They recently made some kind of change to Chrome OS which is causing Chromebooks to completely fill their storage and then stop working properly - even after months they can't replicate this despite numerous schools on here replicating it and us seeing it even with single user devices. They recently changed the default storage location for screenshots and screen recordings to on device on Chromebooks rather than Google Drive - a completely stupid change given the whole point of a Chromebook is to have everything cloud based. These just off the top of my head.

Keith at this point I'm reminded of the Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” You must surely be aware that staff in schools are less and less likely to have come across anything like the UI of your product as every year goes by? Schools like businesses are already "cloud first" and many will become cloud only. Moving your product to the cloud improves the usability massively, when I think of our timetabler having to ensure she takes home the correct version of the current work in progress timetable, then ensuring her laptop has the same version of T6 as her desktop at school etc etc. Our MIS is cloud based, all the services we use on a day to day basis are cloud based, there is no good reason why your timetabling software cannot be cloud based other than you don't want to rewrite it - that much is clear from the UI which has failed to keep up with about 20-odd years of UI improvements and changes to Windows. I know your product is very good, but honestly on first impressions the UI is the most dated product we have seen in over a decade and the website alone needs a refresh with at least some more modern stock images.

If at this point you're still discussing moving your software to the cloud then you're somewhat behind the times. I know you'll say the current software works and I'm sure it does but, as a prospective customer, the incredibly dated UI is very off-putting. The UI might have meant that in the past it behaved consistently when compared with other software but that hasn't been the case for a very long time now. I understand and appreciate that moving a legacy product into the cloud can be time-consuming and challenging, but one of the timetabling options will move to the cloud and whoever is first will steal a large proportion of the market while the other options struggle and rush to catch up. Whether or not a timetable is single user or multi user is irrelevant, there are very few products we use now that are not cloud based and those are all now migrating to the cloud.

Depending on where - Starlink might be an option - the latency is a lot better on that than traditional satellite broadband.

It seems like software rolls out across VLSC gradually, it only appeared on ours over the weekend.

As others have said, if you don't get your software into the cloud someone else will come along and steal your customers - see SIMS, losing customers in an accelerated fashion.

Profiles can be very delicate things - I've seen them wiped out just by monthly updates, this is why we redirect folders either to a file server or to OneDrive.

You'll want to go through one of their approved Edu partners such as KRCS.