Reply,
We have over 400 MAC's in our district. We use Foolproof 7-12 and At-Ease K-6.
More than half of the machines are standalone. We have labs in buildings which
house 6-12 students. As our district technology resource leader, I get to hear
and try to solve all of the problems. Most problems come from a lack of
training for staff in use of the security software. This is especially true
with Foolproof. Teachers will turn it off so they can do something special,
then leave it off, either because they forget of just don't like it. The few
"Hackers" that we have quickly find that it is off and mess with settings and
things. You never know that it is off until a machine starts making fart sounds
(or worse) instead of dings and pings. Foolproof will not prevent students
from opening and changing documents which reside on your harddrive. For this
you need Undercover from the same source, It is a pain also, but it works.
Other problems come from poorly written manuals. At-Ease is my preferred
security package. There are a few tricks I have learned from working with it
that are not mentioned in the manual. You can organize the desktop for younger
students and teachers. You can assign different levels of security allowing
some users full access others partial. others just access to one application if
you wish. You can create alias' of certain control panels if you wish, and put
them is a set-up to allow access to that panel but not the rest.... If
teachers don't exit their set-up before leaving the machine, it can be set to
log them off after a certain time. If they just shut-down it restarts with
security intact. Our Apple rep told us not to try to run applications from
server using At-Ease. It seems that most problems I hear on here are related
to that.
We use both on local and wide area networks, they seem fine to me. You didn't
mention any specific problems so.... can't help there.
You need to keep up to date on upgrades. We all make mistakes(I do anyway), so
do software programmers. I wish they would just tell us about the fixes,
without us having to ask, but they don't, so ask!
For your consideration,
John Hemmerly
Technology Resource Leader
Pickerington Local Schools
Ohio
jmh_jr@pickerington.k12.oh.us