Studentnet News

08 November 2012


Studentnet Remote Offsite Server Backup Solution

Studentnet has been refining its offsite backup offerings. To bring you all up to date we'd like to list the following features of our backup services:

  • Genuine offsite backup solution - that is the backup and the school's master are geographically separated and reside on different networks that are fully isolated from each other
  • Continuous backup process
  • Genuine cloud based solution with server maintenance and management provided by Studentnet
  • Backups and supporting infrastructure housed in enhanced Tier III DataCentre (GlobalSwitch, Ultimo)
  • Full Backup and restore management available to school's IT staff via web based user interface
  • Bare metal restore capabilities for each server that is backed up
  • Restore individual files and folders
  • Ability to browse and select files and folders on your server that you want excluded from backup in your Data Protection Policy
  • Simultaneous restores - Restore while replicating and run multiple restores at the same time
  • 24x7 monitoring & emergency response
  • Backup of the backup datastore to offsite physically separate location
Speak to us about your custom offsite backup requirements - we'll tailor a solution to suit your needs.

New Features for NextMail: Google Independence & DotNetNuke Support

Recently we had an interesting use case for NextMail defined for us by one of the schools in our community. Can NextMail be used to provide account maintenance and Single SignOn benefits for a school's parents for whom a GMail account will not be required? Oh and by the way we want the parent portal to be a website developed in DotNetNuke(DNN) that works in conjunction with Moodle. This use case required two new features for NextMail: Independence from Google and support for DNN.

Google Independence

As NextMail started out in life as a way of enhancing and simplifying the webmail offerings of Google, it was a major effort to separate NextMail's core code base from them. Of course we have retained full support for GMail keeping all of the enhancements and administrative aids that we have introduced over the past 3 years.

Separating NextMail from GMail delivers very real pluses to NextMail as it now means that we provide a complete stand alone SAML Identity Provider service to you - our client schools. In addition it means that your schools can assemble flexible solutions on a mix-n-match basis utilising all of the SAML based web services that are now available.

DNN Support

By design, NextMail has been built from the ground up to be flexible and compliant with open published standards. So when we were asked to provide support for DNN we were brimming with confidence that we would be able to comply and set out on our search for an off the shelf DNN solution.

Little did we know that our search would take us half way around the world to the University of Florida. UF's development staff had just released a DNN module enabling support for Shibboleth SignOn authentication - a protocol with which our code was compatible. We made contact with the UF developers and went to work, customising, debugging, testing, tweaking and adjusting.

After 3 weeks, numerous email exchanges, upgraded modules, several webex sessions and late nights on both sides of the world we successfully married an out of the box DNN install to NextMail's SSO capabilities - just in time for the DNN World Conference in Florida in October! This combination of new capabilities further enhances your school's ability to build and deliver innovative solutions for your use case with NextMail.

Studentnet: Highly Commended at the 2012 ANZIA Awards

At a Gala Presentation Dinner held in Old Parliament House Canberra on October 10, 2012, the Australia and New Zealand Internet Awards winners were announced. We are proud to announce that Studentnet received a High Commendation at the 2012 ANZIA Awards.

Quoting from the 2012 ANZIA winners announcement:
"Studentnet specialises in Internet services to Australian schools and has created an IPv6 collaborative network for schools based on delivering IPv6 networking infrastructure into the school environment. The judges felt it was quite encouraging to learn that students could enable IPv6 access in their campus networks on World IPv6 Day in 2011 and the World IPv6 Launch in 2012. The judges agreed that Studentnet has been a pioneer in the use of IPv6 technology for several years and should be rewarded for its efforts to educate 'next generation' end users with new IP protocol and also Internet security issues."

Studentnet is proud to have been Highly Commended at Australia and New Zealand's most prestigious Internet awards event. We look forward to continuing our program of innovation so that we can deliver better quality technical solutions at lower cost to the school education community.

Best Regards
The Studentnet Team

STUDENTNET®     ABN 90 001 966 892
Suite 1, 89 Jones St, Ultimo NSW 2007, Australia
Email: info@studentnet.net     Site: studentnet.net
Tel +61 2 9281 1626         NOC +61 2 9281 3905
Highly Commended: IPv6 - ANZIA Awards 2012