supportman

Yes we do this.

Took a quick look at the website, but couldnt see any screenshots or pictures of the apliances. It would be good to have some more info as I guess there are a few of us looking for reasonably costed Smoothwall alternatives.

Sharepoint + Teams

Not sure to be honest, we just bought everything There's a few details in the brochure. https://www.bromcom.com/Resources/Brochures/Secondary.pdf

There are 3 tiers to their pricing but you can just buy the basic system without the addons such as My Child at school. They should be able to sort you out with a usable web demo pretty easily. Its a good system from our initial impression, much easier to use than Sims and does a lot more. I went into SLT with the idea of convincing them and it took about 2mins of them looking at a fully web based system with inbuilt comms, room bookings, assesment and behaviour etc to be very impressed. The teacher app just made it look even better. The only real issue we had was we wanted the whole package but the costs are very high compared to looking at Capita Sims. But if you make the case for getting rid of all your 3rd party Add-ons it becomes easier to justify.

I've had both and must admit I thought the sophos was very good. I've just about had enough of smoothwalls non existant support and huge prices so will be looking at both Sophos XG and Fortigate at next renewal.

Bromcom has an open API and works great with Wonde

No, I think we are going to pay for the bromcom smtp server as I was just using this one as a test. Gmail and Office 365 have too many restrictions to use it globally such as a 30 email at once limit.

I could never get it to work with Gmail but I did with Office 365

I guess their Sims 8 will now be delayed again!! Glad we just moved away from Sims!

Backup the cloud, pretty simple but effective. We use Veeam though.

Yes thats what we do

We've been running loads of guest lectures and it all seems to work, we just invite them using the "add members" with their personal email address. Then promote them in the team when they join to presenter manually.

We created a custom one, but thats becuase we've been using it a few years and the policy packages are just a recent feature. I think using Education (Secondary school student) is fine.

Yes there is a powershell command these days as well, but you have to be careful as it makes all meetings default to presenter only so can apply to management meetings etc.

Yes simply schedule the meeting and change the meeting options to presenter only. You can also do it mid meeting now with the button in the top right corner

Big shame, we've had some of ours for over 10 years and they have been faultless! Such a good long term technology.

For us, simply familiarity to smooth the transition. I'd be interested in looking at E-Timetable next year for sure.

I believe Bromcom works fine with Nova T6 so we are continuing to use that for now.

Personally I would run a controller with those, ours is around 50 AP's and we run off a controller.

We have smoothwall and limit our boarders bandwidth during day times. Works well. 200mbit should be easily enough to handle 40 video calls. I would check your internal switches here as well.

As I mentioned earlier, we moved to Senso and its a infinitely better product and cloud based as well. Much more modern feel to it and hardly any maintenance or setup. It just works.

Yes the future is intune, but its not really ready yet in my opinion. That doesn't mean it cant be used though, just that it is still very early in the product lifecycle.

Awesome, i've just finished the site wide roll out in our school. Will be interesting to test the L3 switching, but I have no idea where to even start!

Good first training session today on Bromcom, I'm impressed with their training setup as its all automatic through their support system and in a webinar online format where you can ask questions. The trainer was good and very informed and could also answer the inevitable Sims questions as she had experience in using that as well. The training was informative and I am beginning to get an idea of how the system works. Some menus still seem a bit convoluted to me (there is a config menu as well as a modules >> setup menu) which as far as I can tell do the same thing but in a limited way. We also realized some data from Sims for users who haven't been given a contract end date has been migrated to bromcom. We will sort this on the Sims side. I am still unsure how we are going to handle pre admissions students for a September start, whether we admit them on Sims first then migrate or the other way round...