ContentWatch in Salt Lake City, Utah offers ContentProtect, a web content filtering solution.
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GoGuardian Admin
Score 7.2 out of 10
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GoGuardian Admin is a web content filtering solution from education software company GoGuardian in Los Angeles, provide web filtering on-campus and off-campus filtering.
If you are looking for something relatively inexpensive to lock down specific computers, it would be a useful tool. If the computers themselves aren't too locked down, implementation and management shouldn't be too difficult.
GoGuardian Admin took the pressure off of IT to deal with filtering and gave control to the building admin. No longer does IT have to check if the website is appropriate or if the building principal wants to allow it. They take care of it on their own! Put ownership of internet use back on the building admin instead of IT, since it was always a classroom management problem, not a technology problem.
Our primary policy is a restricted list, so that does as advertised. We had one location that had blocks based on categories (adult, illegal, etc). We continually had issues with sites getting completely blocked due to unrelated content. For example, Yahoo had a beer ad on the page, alcohol was blocked, so Yahoo became blocked for the period of time that ad was displayed. We had this happen multiple times and eventually switched to a different solution at that location.
I've had issues with their cloud portal not working. I don't have to edit our configuration often, but on numerous occasions, i was unable to get the configuration page to load after login, sometimes for days. The platform just wasn't stable when I needed it to be.
We run many of our remote rooms as frozen (after logoff they reset to the image). This works fine most times, but when content protect needs a configuration change pushed down, someone needs to go 'thaw' the computers, download the updated configuration, and re-'freeze' the computer. It would be nice if that information was just dynamic from the cloud and didn't need to be pulled down.
The categorization used for policies is very limited and not flexible or easily customizable.
The system cannot inform our team about cyber bullying or harassment.
Students can still play some games if those games are loaded to a Google Site.
There are times when a Chromebook that hasn't been restarted in a while will not show up online. This is problematic as students do not restart as much as they should.
Does what we need it to do and more in a very cost-effective manner. Relatively easy to use and great customer support. They are quick and clear and will walk you through things in real time.
At the time ContentProtect was selected, Forcepoint (Websense at the time) didn't have an inexpensive or cloud type product. The same can be said with Cisco, at that time. Recently, we have reevaluated and are going to be transitioning to Forcepoint's mobile client and removing ContentProtect from our environment. The cost is actually now less and we will be able to get both more dynamic control and also give us more detailed reporting on the traffic from clients.
GoGuardian is the industry leader in this space. We have been a client for six years and have never had an issue with the product or support. We've investigated other options, but have found the feature set, ease of use, and reliability is unmatched.
It was a relatively inexpensive and simple solution when we needed one relatively quickly, which is a positive. The inexpensive price has kept it in the environment.
The lack of reliable reporting has lead to the need for an alternate monitoring solution in a few cases. Network level reporting was used, which is a separate expense, configuration.
Time has been lost waiting on the portal and then troubleshooting support tickets when sites that shouldn't have been blocked have been blocked. It has resulted in changes for locations that needed dynamic category filtering as opposed to a finite list.
The blocking of sites based on add traffic or sub-sites (rather than just blocking that content like other solutions) has resulted in downtime during classes when those sites were listed in the lesson plan and had previously worked.
