School ICT News Bulletin No. 226 - 23/08/2013

Published by ICT Shared Services

Smoothwall Internet Filtering - Important news update 23rd August 2013

Last week we said that following a pilot by BT with some schools, we are confident that we are able to move to the Smoothwall filtering solution.

To make absolutely sure that there was no impact from this change, on Saturday 17th August BT moved all schools from the Bluecoat filtering service to Smoothwall for final configuration testing. BT switched back to Bluecoat on the evening of Tuesday 20^th August to avoid any unforeseen disruption during exam results period.

During this time we only had 2 misconfiguration items logged with us, plus positive feedback from a number of staff in schools about performance.

This means that on Saturday 24^th August - BT will move all schools from the Bluecoat filtering service to Smoothwall .

The intention is that this will be a permanent move to Smoothwall however BT will continue to monitor the service from this date as more staff return to school over the following week.

In the event of any disruption then BT will roll back the service to the current Bluecoat Filtering service.

It is therefore important that if you have any disruption to your Internet service (i.e. speed displaying web pages, or pages being blocked that were previously available to you) that you contact ICT Shared Services Service desk on 0845 30 33 003 or email ict@norfolk.gov.uk with a description of the problem you are having and ideally the time this took place.

In the event that some schools may see this screen below - this is because of a misconfiguration on the filtering system, so please contact ICT Shared Services immediately on 0845 30 33 003 or email ict@norfolk.gov.uk with the following information:

Created on: 22/08/2013 15:57:22