BrightSparks is based around a system called the BrightBox that sits in your school, replacing the proxy server. It is through the BrightBox that most of the BrightSparks Internet services reside. No longer do you have to share a central server with hundreds of other schools; your BrightBox looks after your school and only your school. The following is a technical description of your local BrightBox services and a brief description of how they work.

The BrightBox provides an extremely powerful, user-friendly Webmail system. Mail is delivered locally to this system from the BrightSparks mail hub on a high speed connection to the Internet. The local mail system scans mail for offensive keywords. If it finds anything it stops the message and notifies the schools chosen e-mail monitor.

The Webmail system is a fast user-friendly system with many features, some of which are:

A user must authenticate before being able to access any content, either cached or from the Internet. The group the user is a member of determines levels of access.

The default Internet Access settings allow only content listed in the Education Resource List (Education Channel) to be viewed. Modified access is possible if the school wishes to change these settings by allowing access to additional content or disallowing access to content normally allowed by the standard Education Resource List.

The school can also choose to filter access through a deny list which denies access to sites generally considered inappropriate. Like the Education Resource List, the school can make further modifications to this access.

Unlike many of our competitors, any changes made to the filters take INSTANT effect, allowing your school to implement changes to its access policy immediately.

School Web pages are hosted on a flexible web page development environment, using servers connected to a high bandwidth link to the Internet. Resources are available for schools to provide dynamic content with PHP and MySQL database access is also available upon request.

We can also provide routing into your school if you wish to make a local web server accessible on the Internet to complement or replace the upstream web service we provide.

BrightSparks can arrange a new domain name or re-delegation of your existing name(s) and updating of host records. Domain names other than the DE&T supplied school domain name can be arranged at additional cost.

Upon request, schools can use our mailing list server to create online communities via e-mail. The server is hosted on a high bandwidth link to the Internet. This is a free service to all our clients.

A user-friendly administration system, which is accessed from your web browser, is provided.

The local administration system allows the real time adding, removing and editing of e-mail and Internet accounts, either separately or both at the same time. The school's Internet access policy can be set up and maintained here. A local console interface is also provided for the administrator to maintain, configure or shutdown the system.

Click Here to see a sample of our Administration Tools.