Q1) Why do I need a managed solution? Many schools do not possess the resources nor inclination to concern themselves with day to day maintenance of an in-house server. In addition, few have access to sufficient bandwidth to provide a quality user experience for parents and students accessing from home. A managed service provides full configuration, around the clock monitoring, data backup, support and Internet bandwidth; all within our purpose built, secure data centre. Q2) What's the difference between a 'Shared' or 'Xclusive' package A G5 Xserve is capable of supporting up to 5 secondary or 10 primary school's so it's very economic to deploy multiple VLE's on a single server. All data remains secure with no danger of cross over between the separate application instances. We call this a 'Shared' package Where customer requirements grow beyond 2,000 users we recommend the use of a dedicated server under an 'Xclusive' package - hence the name. Q3) What is the minimum contract duration? Twelve months. We offer preferential pricing for two and three year terms (typically 12-17% discount). Xclusive servers contracts are automatically upgraded to a new server when you commit to a third year ensuring increased performance and sustained reliability. Q4) What happens when we need more bandwidth? There are significant discounts on bandwidth utilisation for heavy load situations. We provide full reporting and analysis of your servers storage and processing load along with summarising traffic usage patterns. Q5) Why do you use Apple servers? Four reasons; 
All of which allow us to keep costs down and service levels up. Q6) May we move our data to host internally at a later date? Yes. If you decide to move to an internally hosted deployment we will provide a complete copy of your Studywiz data and application directories. We liaise with eTech's technical team carrying out the work out of hours or over a weekend to ensure migration is completed with the minimum of disruption to your users. Q7) How fast will access be? Our data centre is served by multiple 100 Megabit Internet connections enabling many thousands of simultaneous broadband connections. We monitor bandwidth utilisation and prioritise traffic to ensure end users benefit from low latency and class leading access speeds. Q8) What if we want to have our own server hosted with you? If you already have your own hardware and wish to deploy under a co-lo contract we are happy to help. Prices start from £149.00 per month. Q9) What happens if we lose our school Internet feed? Although your campus will lose access to the VLE (unless you have a backup connection) access from elsewhere on the Internet will be unaffected thus teachers, students and parents will be able to carry on as normal. Q10) What happens to our data if we decide to use another VLE in the future? Studywiz supports SCORM™ for data modelling and distribution. Furthermore, all of the content stored within your VLE can be exported and repurposed into other compatible VLEs. Q11) What if our teachers and students don't have broadband at home? Whilst the users' experience is greatly enhanced by broadband one can still achieve usable performance from a 56k modem or 64k Home Highway (iSDN) dial-up - especially if one merely needs to upload assignments or take online questionnaires. Q12) Do your prices include the Studywiz license? No. You still need to purchase a license dependant on your type of school or organisation. Contact eTech Group. Etech's typical license costs are provided on our packages page for illustrative purposes only; we do not sell the license(s) on behalf of Etech. Q13) How long from point of order will it take for our VLE to be operational? To a greater degree this depends on you. Once you have a domain name available to host the VLE at we can have the server deployed, ready for use, within 72 hours (subject to server availability). |