Tom RansonNetwork & Systems EngineerSomersethttp://www.tauntonschool.co.uk/
Taunton School is an Independent Boarding and Day School for boys and girls from ages 2 to 18. Founded in 1847, the school combines a distinguished history with a modern, forward looking approach to education. Wireless technology is deployed throughout the campus, and Taunton's 16 ICT suites (serviced by Citrix™ thin-client terminals) are home to over 400 workstations. The user base consists of both pupils and staff and runs to approximately 1,500 plus visitors in addition to capacity for 200 remote Citrix™ users.
Taunton School operates a high speed Internet WAN with 1700 users on 400 PCs. The network environment is mixed (Mac OSX/Windows) with Microsoft Active Directory authentication.
Tom Ranson, Taunton's Network & Systems Engineer had identified problems with the existing network provision. The firewall, a Microsoft™ ISA Server™, was proving difficult to manage, and the content filter from Surfcontrol™ was proving costly to maintain and renew. Streaming Internet feeds were also unreliable through ISA, and the content filtering took painstaking administration to keep rules up-to-date. Taunton's Content Filtering Solution needed to be: - Affordable in the face of increasing licence costs from multiple suppliers. - Easy to use to reduce the growing workload of the ICT team. - Intelligent enough to reduce issues with under/over-blocking, spyware & malware. - Modular so additional systems for firewalling and bandwidth management could be seamlessly incorporated.
After a brief trial, Tom & the team rolled out their first Smoothwall Guardian system which once installed, was quickly integrated with the School's Microsoft™ Active Directory™ environment. Using NTLM login for single-sign on, users barely noticed the change and the ICT staff were delighted with the reduced workload. Guardian's Dynamic Content Analysis immediately showed its worth, reducing under and over blocking, with Tom summing up its performance as excellent. Spyware and Malware issues have already been dramatically reduced, and the SmoothTraffic module has allowed VoIP and streaming media to function correctly for the first time.
Monitoring web usage and making changes has proved much easier with the new systems in place. Email alerting and scheduled reports keep everyone in the loop, and controlled access to the Guardian subsystem allows staff members to easily make changes to the content filtering. Looking towards the next version, Tom and his colleagues are glad to know they've got SmoothWall on their side!
We were initially attracted to Smoothwall by the price - but when we tried the software we were really impressed by how simple and flexible it really was
Technical support always go the extra mile and the ability to feed back directly into the product development cycle gives us every confidence
Download this case study
