ContentWatch in Salt Lake City, Utah offers ContentProtect, a web content filtering solution.
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Lightspeed Filter
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Lightspeed Filter (formerly Relay), from Lightspeed Systems in Austin, offers insights to help understand and maximize the use of 1:1 classroom devices, keep users safe and increase the educational return on technology investments. Lightspeed Systems aims to help users make decisions to enhance technology use, report up administrators, present to your board, reassure concerned parents, empower teachers, and direct students on appropriate use. According to the vendor, Lightspeed Filter powers…
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Pricing
ContentProtect
Lightspeed Filter
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ContentProtect
Lightspeed Filter
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Priced per student device. Quote available upon request.
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.
Lightspeed web filtering using the Chromebook Relay agent is amazing and does a great job for a cloud filtering solution. The reports that are available are great and can be customized and retains data for 90 days. Reports are easily shared with staff and/or parents for transparency and disciplinary reasons. The agent for Lightspeed (Relay) does not work well with OSX and works okay in Windows, but doesn't allow you to access local IP addresses in the web browser. There needs to be a way to bypass filtering for local network access. This can make it unusable in some cases.
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.
ContentProtect helps increase productivity by blocking inappropriate or time wasting web content. With the powerful cloud-based administration tools you can make changes and see reports anywhere and anytime. Best part is it is available on all platforms and hence the product is also scalable. Loved it over any product in the current market
The Lightspeed filter has done a much better job with false-positive flagging. We have reduced the number of reported false-positive blocks by about 20% with Lightspeed. The Lightspeed interface is more intuitive and easy to navigate and configure than iboss. The reporting with iboss was a little more extensive than the reporting with Lightspeed.
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.
