gszech

I'm impressed how the Northern Ireland Education Authority (EA) made such a big decision. All the 1100 schools don't need to go through a procurement process, compare platforms, price, modules, etc. It's all decided for them.

Huge win for Bromcom in terms of earnings!! Good for them and hopefully they will invest more money for servers, developers and support staff. At one point CAPITA had SIMS in most of the schools, it's not that this made SIMS any better... quite opposite. If Bromcom decides to add NI Bromcom to the UK servers this would be a massive blow for UK schools. The UK server cluster and the scaling struggles as it is.

Sorry but this post would state otherwise: /forums/mis-systems/233791-bromcom-sso-issue-slowness-13.html A lot of schools mentioned in the post they regretted migrating from SIMS to Bromcom. For some reason you are constantly defending and glorifying Bromcom, where the reality is that the Bromcom is struggling with server performance and scaling in the UK. As a result the MIS is not working, or it's super slow when the schools need it the most (taking register time, etc).

They mean https://status.bromcomcloud.com/ but yet again this is another rookie error on their side. What bothers me is that all other countries are green, but their main UK market status page looks like a rainbow. Also can't see Ireland on the list .... https://bromcom.com/news/bromcommis-northern-ireland

We had a trial and we simply decided not to order the product.

We tried Senso for one month and only had problems with it.

Saying: "Rest assured we are working to resolve any outstanding issues" sounds like an empty promise at this point. Could you please give us some dates when this will be sorted? Someone pointed out that the Bromcom slow performance was already reported in 2021... "/forums/mis-s...eak-times.htmlDate of thread."

The article says that Arbor ‘continue to fully support’ United Learning. I wonder if in 3 years time when the contract expires, do they need to go through the same process again of comparing Arbor / Bromcom or just renew Arbor ? Schools had SIMS for years and never had to compare other platforms when they renewed the contract.

Our pupils like this model: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0BL9CF97Y The pictures on Amazon are wrong for this and you will actually receive a full glass, touch screen model. If you are after faster spec try Chromebook Plus https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0CFM5SG9B It's a new standard where the device needs to be at least: - 12th gen or Ryzen 700 CPU - 8 gig of RAM - HD webcam - Full HD IPS screen I've used the above Chromebook Plus Chromebook on a daily basis for the last two months and apart from fan kicking in occasionally (something that you don't hear with normal Chromebooks) the unit is superb, especially for the price. It's also robust, but not as robust as the proper Education Chromebooks.

Would love to help but our school is using mainly Chromebooks and our secondary phase pupils can access YouTube (strict acces). My suggestion is to block YouTube with another product like GPO policies or Antivirus admin panel like Sophos or whatever you are using AV to block youtube.com This is a long shot, but in Custom Policies can you add a rule to block: hubblecontent.osi.office.net for pupils and allow the same link for staff?

We moved away from Smoothwall as the reports were just too hard to read. We are using Securly now across all our schools.

There is no need to re-architect their platform to cope with demand. They got this covered: after years of poor performance schools will simply move from Bromcom to other platforms. This will offload the servers and solve the slow performance issue for other schools. Problem solved Revenue is also not an issue - just sue a few more trusts and collect millions of £££ from tax payers money.

Updated, thanks. Agree. Trusts like this one with almost 100 schools offer their own procurement service. For a project of this scale they should be very transparent. Saying this single schools or primary schools can't afford to hire their own procurement team and decisions like this are done by the business manager that is also covering HR, Finance and MIS manager role.

Agreed. The article also says: "Bromcom is also suing Academies Enterprise Trust, another large trust, and took high court action against both Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire councils around ten years ago." I guess this is how they work. I wonder if schools can only include Arbor, iSAMS and SIMS (cloud if it exists) for the bid and just ignore Bromcom completely. They can't take you to court if you are not part of the bid

Old news but more information was revealed: "Ministers handed England’s biggest academy trust £1 million to fight a legal challenge from a tech firm “with a history of litigiousness” in a bid to protect the wider academy sector, documents obtained by Schools Week reveal. However United Learning Trust (ULT) went on to lose the High Court case against Bromcom over a £2 million contract to provide its schools with a cloud-based management information system (MIS). The new information came to light after Schools Week obtained the business case for the funding, written by ULT chief executive Sir Jon Coles last year and submitted to the Treasury, which approved the deal." https://schoolsweek.co.uk/academy-trust-got-1m-indemnity-to-challenge-edtech-firm/ If only the trust would use an argument "but the Bromcom system never works" in court and point to this: /forums/mis-systems/233791-bromcom-sso-issue-slowness.html That would be a 100% win for them

This is on my things to do list. So all of the pGina and Ventoy is required because GCPW / Windows Credential Providers can't process 2FA YubiKeys ? If so can I just use Google Authenticator or SMS text message to authenticate. I've had a go at GCPW which worked fine. The only thing that didn't work was the fact that I've had to use two step verification each time to login to the same device.

Rule 4 blocks Quic protocol on UDP. It doesn't disable the whole UDP. That would be silly. You need this otherwise all Apple users don't even need VPN to access any website. They can enable private relay on WiFi and browse whatever they want. Try it: Just pick up any iPhone connect to your BYOD and enable Private Relay and panic! More info about this here: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph499d287c2/ios

Yes you can: https://www.securly.com/site/assets/pdf/dns-deployment-best-practices-guide.pdf

There is a massive problem with Securly and YouTube filtering. I was told that their dev team works on a new addon that will solve this issue, but this was an update from a few months ago. I agree that their support sucks and all our complaints about YouTube being slow were just passed to dev team and then ignored. DNS filter works, but you need to follow their best practice guide - page 9 - 11 I personally prefer Securly vs Smoothwall as there is no box to worry about, all cloud. Reports are easy to generate and to be honest we don't really deal with web filter anymore as this is all Safeguarding team job now.

We dropped ClassCharts and Edulink One.

They fixed yesterday's problem. Today is another day, so it doesn't count even if this is the same issue.

Probably that's how today's issue was fixed. Here is the server...

With this many complaints from all the schools this post should be pinned by now

We use the whole UniFi portfolio (Firewall, CCTV, Phones, Switches, APs, Cast) across our trust. Dream Machine hosts our network appliances, UNVR - CCTVs. We looked at Official UniFi Hosting plan which was released last month in the UK (don't' confuse with Cloud Key) which is ideal for large business that just want UniFi network devices - this can manage up to 1000 devices. Ideally you need the UXG series gateway for the above to unlock all missing network options. https://uk.store.ui.com/uk/en/pro/category/all-cloud-keys-gateways/products/unifi-hosting There are some rumors that UniFi will release an upgraded version of Dream Machine soon, which would be ideal for secondary schools. If you are only using network appliances from UniFi you're missing out on all the advanced L3 / firewall functionality.

Our UniFi handles all our school devices and pupils/guests mobile phones (around 2373 devices connected daily) without problems. They do sell their devices via resellers, we got ours from SystemActive with quite a large discount. They also offer a warranty in the UK where they will just send you a replacement unit and collect faulty one free of charge. Check out UniFi cloud hosting - this might be good for your 20 different campuses. As for 1:1 my suggestion is to visit some schools and ask a lot of questions (mainly about insurance). 1:1 is not as good as it seems.