experience of kamar hosted?

[trevor storr]

Hi All,

we are reviewing our SMS provision.  Is anyone able to comment on their experience of using a hosted instance of Kamar.

In particular I'm interested in the hosting provider, if the instance is simply a hosted server (school does the server software maintenance)or a fully maintained Kamar instance.  Also, was the access via RDP or simply a TCP/IP connection to the hosted instance?

Lastly, has anyone done a recent cost/benefit of hosting vs on-site?

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cheers

Trevor

Trevor Storr
Director of eLearning, CantaNET http://educo.vln.school.nz
Waimate High School
Waimate
New Zealand

[Alistair Baird]

We have our data on site, and staff access it via VPN and RDP to a server when at home for the reason that we don't want student data held off site by any third party. And the data is not on their device/laptop.

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Alistair Baird

IT Manager

St Peters College 

p 06 354 4198

m 021 990 259

e bai...@stpeterspn.school.nz

[Tim Harper]

Hi Trevor,

when we first started looking at Kamar I ran the trial system from a server hosted by Otago Poly.  Access via the IP:Port was too slow for us even thought he VM that the KAMAR server was running on exceeded the specs recommended.  I also looked at other external hosting options but the pricing was too high - in particular the cost of bandwidth to the hosted server.  We simply had to shift it in house.  Now that we are running it locally I offer both Remote Desktop Application and IP:Port access but RDA access is faster.  I suspect this reflects the sheer amount of data that is being transported between the Kamar server and the Filemaker client.

I have no issues placing the data on a server external to school.  In fact that is one of the things being investigated by a large group at the moment that has already caused debate on this list - but not for the reasons that Alistair outlined!  

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 0800 755 966 option 2 then 3 (SchoolZone)
Phone 03 443 5167 (DDI)
Mobile 027 443 1236
Fax 03 443 0491

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

[trevor storr]

Thanks for that Tim.

Does anyone know of a school that is using a hosted instance that I could chat with?

[Mike Etheridge]

For what it’s worth, hosted solution for KAMAR should become a lot more viable once the client is a web browser rather than the FMP client app. This has been stated as the future of KAMAR at more than one conference. Can’t wait…

Mike

On 26/06/2015, at 12:00 pm, trevor storr <tre...@storr.org.nz> wrote:

Thanks for that Tim.

Does anyone know of a school that is using a hosted instance that I could chat with?

On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 9:50 PM, Tim Harper <t...@mtaspiring.school.nz> wrote:

Hi Trevor,

when we first started looking at Kamar I ran the trial system from a server hosted by Otago Poly.  Access via the IP:Port was too slow for us even thought he VM that the KAMAR server was running on exceeded the specs recommended.  I also looked at other external hosting options but the pricing was too high - in particular the cost of bandwidth to the hosted server.  We simply had to shift it in house.  Now that we are running it locally I offer both Remote Desktop Application and IP:Port access but RDA access is faster.  I suspect this reflects the sheer amount of data that is being transported between the Kamar server and the Filemaker client.

I have no issues placing the data on a server external to school.  In fact that is one of the things being investigated by a large group at the moment that has already caused debate on this list - but not for the reasons that Alistair outlined!  

regards,

Tim Harper

<snip>

[Kelvin Maine]

Hi we too have set up a instance of KAMAR in the cloud for a very small school (10 staff) this worked ok but we do not believe it would scale well due to the read/write requirements of Filemaker.

RDA works well for most uses of  KAMAR but we still host internally for all of the schools we work with.

Have a good day

Kelvin

ITed Services Limited

 

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[trevor storr]

Thanks Kelvin,

Has anyone used (for example) New Era's private cloud or Norcomm's Hosted Service?  Both advertise as offering a service.

Indeed is anyone from from Kamar, New Era or Norcomm able to produce success stories of Kamar being hosted off-site?

[Kevin Whelan]

We used one for 12 months hosted by TTS in Auckland which used Citrix

was the worst 12 months of my life,
had dual logons and required their imput to add users
remote print issues
slow clients and disconnects
unable to access the backend easily to download reports or edit the server databases directly
so unable to do recoverys or rollbacks etc  by ourselves
nightmare to link to kamarportal or accessit ,
list just went on and on


moved it back onsite and made it a microsoft remote app which seems to be the most idiot proof for end users.
Windows 7 and 8 have all the client built in and can be configured through group policy so its dead easy.
we have 100mb up and down and it works perfectly, the microsoft client is very good
but obviously your going to be affected by fibre,server ram and amount of users so your mileage will be completely different.
It is only used remotely on occasion and usually for report time so I would describe our usage as light
cost of server to host onsite was cheaper in the long run than rental of cloud and having full immediate access to the backend is crucial.

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[Pete Mundy]

Heya guys

My 2c is about Filemaker native hosted databases themselves and not specifically about Kamar (I have personally never used or seen Kamar). I would avoid them where a more elegant solution exists. To me 'more elegant solution' probably means based on web-based technologies and hosted.

I've had experience supporting a couple of commercial businesses with custom in-house Filemaker databases and a couple of others who license and run a NZ-written job/inventory/shop management solution for the pre-press industry that is also based on VM. Invariably doing any FM stuff remotely is slow and painful compared to running on the local LAN.

I'm talking about direct TCP/IP connections from FM client to FM server (either directly-routed or via VPN encapsulation). FM just seems to be affected badly by the small increases you see in latency on today's WANs compared to today's LANs (eg +30-100ms). My guess is that it does not efficiently use TCP session setups, but that's just a guess. Maybe one day it could leverage Google's QUIC* to improve things?

In any case, if I had to deploy anything based on FM these days, I'd seriously consider creating a solution around the users remoting into something like a Terminal Services or OS X server sharing or something similar to run instances of the FM client that are 'close' to the FM server. That would, in my opinion, give a better user experience for any who spend a reasonable amount of time accessing remotely (eg teachers around reports time).

But I'd still probably park the whole FM idea and go for a nice web-based cloud solution if that alternative existed! :)

As always, ymmv.

Pete

* For anyone who don't know what QUIC is, I recommend this video from the recent NANOG64 conference:
(warning, 28 minute highly-technical talk)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSNT88_gedw

[Tim Harper]

100% agreement from me there Pete!

QUIC is a marvellous technology too - it really makes things better.  If you are using Chrome there is a QUIC/SDPY extension that you can install to see if the site is using either of those systems.  See:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/http2-and-spdy-indicator/mpbpobfflnpcgagjijhmgnchggcjblin?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 0800 755 966 option 2 then 3 (SchoolZone)
Phone 03 443 5167 (DDI)
Mobile 027 443 1236
Fax 03 443 0491

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

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