epoch_roots

Civica Resource and it is trash. Seems to be written using Access circa 2003. Running it over a VPN is not supported and it has zero tolerance for jittery connections. Their "cloud" offering is just a RemoteApp connection.

thanks for the replies, it's encouraging seeing so many responses! i'll definitely keep them up the top of my list.

Thankfully our contract with Exa expires this year and we're able to move to a new ISP. I'm getting quotes in from all the major suppliers but Zen is one I haven't dealt with before. Their prices seem decent - around £5700 annually for a 1Gbps connection with the £2.2k installation being free on a 3 year contract. Can anyone share their opinion of them? Are they as reliable as a standard BT/Virgin leased line?

Well it's been 3 days since our last issue so time to check in! Today we seem to be locked out of the surfprotect panel (https://surfprotectpanel.exa.net.uk/panel/). It's returning HTTP 500 after logging in. Looks like more disruptions to our staff as we've been unable to unblock a site that was needed ASAP.

Anyone else having surfprotect issues today? It's blocking some sites with the "we're on it, site is currently being classified" message which just sits there refreshing itself indefinitely without ever classifying. It's not happening for all sites but randomly. It's just locked me out of admin.gsuite.com now yet it was working earlier?

Nope, but we did just have another outage caused by SurfProtect - seems to have cleared up now. Props to Exa for actually announcing it on their status page this time!

@exa_mark - our web access just went offline today around 3pm for 15 minutes or so. Our circuit was active as we could still ping the internet so it seems specific to Exa's filtering. What was the issue?

Ours was down again this morning. Apparently due to another update deployed last night.

Most of the issues raised in this thread are indefensible so they're probably just laying-low. A response would require an admittance of their issues and a plan for addressing them... I'm just glad that there is a recent thread where people can share their real-world experiences using their service to counteract the shilling that seems to happen all the time.

This is 100% the mentality I'm trying to understand. Most ISPs don't have issues, especially not due to the lack of QA on their products or downtime coming from simple hardware failure. If they do it is rare instead of weekly/monthly. It just seems like 'battered wife syndrome' and I'm curious why people are not only happy to accept the level of service we've received but actively encourage other people to get on board. I've worked in SaaS and I get that deployment issues happen, but that's why we'd send out an 'at risk' notification to our customers. Exas approach seems to be 'hey lets push this live without telling anyone and see what happens' - it's incredibly unprofessional.

Our internet is up and down today but it's been like this for a few months now. It's been multiple issues from the stormshield they supplied not being able to handle our load to their R&D team deploying updates that bring their network down or their filtering product deciding to stop working. Today apparently its a hardware failure as I'm guessing they have zero redundancy in their network. We've also looked for opinions on schoolsbroadband but they have similar issues from what I'm told. The issues aren't localised to us as we have another school around the corner that gets hit at the same time. I don't get it - they seem to get a lot love here which is probably the most perplexing part. I couldn't see them functioning as an organisation for very long if they were offering services to corporate entities. They'd be bankrupted by paying out for SLA breaches. Where does the love come from and why does everyone tolerate the service they provide? We're stuck with them for the next 9 months and I can't see it improving at all. Sorry if this is looks like a rant but I've come from Industry and had maybe two or three instances of downtime in 10 years compared to the 2 or 3 this week alone with Exa.

I'd only go with Exa if you're happy explaining to management why your school has no/intermittent every few weeks.

Yes, we get it - Ofsted want to see it on a spec sheet somewhere, good for them. Thanks for bringing that single point up 4+ times. As an aside our MAT has been through several inspections and not once was IWF mentioned. Use some critical thinking and pragmatism to decide what will keep our children safe, as simple-minded box-ticking compliance won't.

The IWF work to remove content from the internet which we all benefit from. I didn't say the work they undertake is negligible or redundant and for you to say so means you're really not understanding the point I'm trying to make. No one is handing the IWF awards for producing a list containing a handful of URLs provided to subscribers only. The list is like that tool you have in your toolbox that you haven't used since you bought it - nice to have but effectively useless. My opinion comes from working directly with the IWF & implementing their services for hundreds of thousands of users, analysing 70+ million items of user generated content per day, all within the context of safeguarding end users.

Yep, I'm not disagreeing with what ofsted would/wouldn't care about. What I'm saying is that I have empirically evidenced the efficacy of the IWF list and it is negligible at best, if not entirely redundant.

It's guidance though, not mandated/legislated. A list with a handful of URLs on it is no replacement for robust user monitoring & alerting procedures/policies. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather our blocklist contained the URLs (and it does), but to think that one product is superior to another just because it incorporates the list is not accurate. As mentioned I spent 3 years working for an organisation that analysed up to 70,000 lines of text a minute 24/7/365 within a safeguarding context, and I can't recall a single instance where anything on the IWF list was triggered. Typical regex matching, image analysis and creating user profiles that escalated reporting actions based on the severity of events they generated were the tools that we used to detect both bad actors and vulnerable persons. Compared to this, implementing IWF is a box ticking exercise.

I used to receive the list monthly from the IWF as my employer was a member and was in the safeguarding business. The overall perception was that the list wasn't much use but the membership was from a branding standpoint. Personally I don't think there is much value in the list and would not choose a specific vendor over another just because they incorporate the IWF.

Unless you're looking to intentionally leave your current organisation in a pickle, you should probably call your boss and let them know if you accept a new job offer.

Did you happen to look into the Azure application proxy https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/manage-apps/application-proxy when looking for a solution to exposing internal services externally? We've used it extensively and found it to be brilliant at what it does, as well as incredibly simple deployment of 2FA to applications that wouldn't have supported it otherwise.

Yeah, I've made my opinion clear in other posts so don't want to appear to be beating a dead horse. I'm just surprised someone would want to recommend a service they haven't used before.

Have you actually used them, though?

Greenshot is brilliant. 1 button press to snip a screenshot and upload to imgur - amazing.

ADFS is no joke and without proper resiliency built in it could cause more headaches than it can solve, especially if you plan on using it to provide access to services when users are connecting from outside your network. I'd imagine SQL Server licensing wouldn't be cheap either. Azure AD connect / seamless sso is a much better option when resources are limited, especially if you're already in the Office365 /Windows ecosystem.

My personal experience with Exa has been hit and miss and I really couldn't recommend them. I once asked them for our installation documentation (there was no handover when I took on this role) and their response was that I should go google it. Our account manager also stopped responding to my emails relating to a long term issue we had. Unfortunately it's not something I can address yet as we're locked in for another couple of years, but we'll be switching providers as soon as we possibly can. I posted something similar in another thread and someone from Exa did reach out to me, but I have so little faith in them these days that I didn't bother responding. Obviously this is my opinion based on the service our organisation has received - others only have positive things to say about them. With that said I can't recommend anyone else as previously I've always just picked up a leased-line from BT/Virgin and installed my own filtering product. Good luck!

I don't - we have internet/surfprotect provided by Exa and it has been down at least twice in two weeks. One time they didn't bother to update their status page so I had to ring support. It rang for so long without being answered that I ended up hanging up.