e-portal

John Sugrue

Hi all,

We're trying to introduce ePortal in our school. Every time we log onto our accounts, it logs us out again straight away and tells us that our 'session has become inactive'.

We're waiting for help to come out to us but I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced this problem and maybe there's a simple solution to it.

Thanks. Any help would be much appreciated!!

boogle

We use ePotral and it's glitchy as hell. Never been timed out that quickly though. In any case, most problems cannot be solved by an individual teacher in my experience, as you need to have admin access to the network.

spurious

We have a fair bit of trouble with ours due to the antiquated central server ours is running on.

whiteandlight

It's been glitchy in most schools I've worked in. Biggest issue I have with it is it's lack of mac support. It'd be a hell of a lot more convenient if I could do eportal rolls on my iPad and not lug my laptop around. It's only supported for ie.

evolving_doors

Ours was a bit dodgy at the start but i think that it was just old servers.. work fine now but thats probably cos we have new servers and relatively good IT support..

For the Mac I downloaded an emulator called crossover which you can run windows explorer on... only works for 28 odd days though before you have to pay..

Has anyone tried it on smartphone? parts of it work on Samsung Galaxy S, bit dodgy for entering someone absent though (will submit if everyones present!!)

TheDriver

we have a good server and rarely have issues

wingnut

We have it on a horsey server and never have any issues. If it is giving trouble try starting and stopping the facility service on the server. If you don't know how to do this reboot.

Another consideration is that it does not play nicely with browsers other than IE.

If you like me and use chrome all the time you can use an extension called ie tab.

roxychix

hi just wondering if anyone knows any other systems similar to e-portal or if there are any. i know there is facility. also any other companies other than secro that install it. trying to introduce it to my school. but want to price around
any help would be great
cheers in advance

derb12

As far as I know, e-portal is the web-based interface to Facility and they are both from Serco.

Inspector Coptoor

VS- Ware is what we use.

It's very good.

roxychix

ok cool will check them out

wingnut

As states Serco make facility and ePortal is the web interface to it. VSWare is cloud based so you don't have to install any hardware on site, there is for and against this. I think VSware charge per student.

VSware will set up a demo for you. If you ask for Patrick when you contact them he will sort you with a demo.

Delphi91

Careful before you go down the road and buy a different system - the DES only accepts Sept/Oct Returns from certain software. Check out any alternatives to see if the DES accepts them first.

wingnut

Delphi91 wrote: »

Careful before you go down the road and buy a different system - the DES only accepts Sept/Oct Returns from certain software.

VSWare is one of the many companies making use of the fact the department have opened up the NEWB database formats to any vendor.

Delphi91

I presume that you're referring to the P-POD system? If so, that won't be available until October 2014.

In the meantime, especially for Sept Returns (i.e. Timetable data), the only products which have been evaluated as compatible are Facility Administration, Facility Timetabler and gp-Untis.

I've nothing against the use of other packages and the opening up of the market. All that I'm saying is that before someone goes off and spends money, check that the software is compatible and acceptable to the DES.

TheDriver

things will change dramatically in the next year or two, serco seems to be winding down, less support etc so I think they know the writing is on the wall........

Evac101

Not to 'tattle outside of school' but there's more support staff in Serco then there were 5 years or 10 years ago. Quality of support? That's debatable, there's two or three that I prefer to deal with there but how much of that is my own bias I can't say. As to their future, they seem to be talking very big about their next 'cloud based' service, whether that's feasible in Ireland with our infrastructure is something I'd have concerns with but until we actually see it 'in the wild' I couldn't comment either way about it.

Evac101

Just as an aside I came upon this page searching for a solution to the issue referred to in this thread so if anyone else has had the same experience I posted our investigations conclusion to it.

Evac101

Investigated exactly this issue for a client earlier today and discovered it was opening fine if:
a) we used the IP address rather then the server name (indicating that the issue has some relationship to the DNS resolution)
and
b) we used IE (as recommended) for opening the session - the issue didn't present itself in other browsers, even if they were installed post the issue appearing and pulled their initial settings/favourites/etc from IE as part of the set up process.

As our workaround we simply changed the desktop short cuts to ePortal from using the format of http://servername/eportal to using the server ip address, e.g. http://192.168.1./eportal - we still investigating the root cause to this but it appears like issue is rooted in the way which IE handles DNS resolution requests and it seems to be post dating the information being sent to the ePortal server to it appearing to be old enough to cause ePortal to log the account out immediately as being inactive.

Weird and up until the weekend didn't happen on the client site prior to that so we're currently investigating what services on the server updated over the weekend, whether any server restarts which might have had updates queued for implementation, etc.

** Apologies if this seems like thread necromancy to the Mods - it just seems relevant and as a search on google this thread comes up as one of the first results for the search thread I used so I assume it'll also happen to others, therefore helpful info would be...uhm...helpful? **

Edited to change my references to rooted from routed which, given the context, was an incredibly nerdy 'funny' typo. I already admitted that it's terribly nerdy okay?..

spurious

Threads merged.

gaeilgebeo

Just wondering if someone technically minded can help!
I'm trying to access ePortal at home.
I can log in no problem but there are certain things I can't do(which I normally could).
I remember the IT teacher telling me the last time this happened that I wasn't in the right browser.
Does anyone know the best browser for ePortal?

vamos!

gaeilgebeo wrote: »

Just wondering if someone technically minded can help!
I'm trying to access ePortal at home.
I can log in no problem but there are certain things I can't do(which I normally could).
I remember the IT teacher telling me the last time this happened that I wasn't in the right browser.
Does anyone know the best browser for ePortal?

I remember having the same problem inputting results at home. I think it's google chrome that doesn't work and internet explorer works? I may have that the wrong way around.

ccazza

You need to use internet explorer for all options to work.

gaeilgebeo

Yeah, tried explorer and it still won't work fully.
Is my version of Explorer wrong maybe?

Evac101

Should work fine in IE 9-11 in my experience, advertised as working in Safari on iOS devices and a school I deal with uses it in the Chrome app on an Apple device (iOS 8)