Schools' Interest In Content Filtering Grows

More than ever, these public-sector IT chiefs are turning to outsourcing to filter Web sites and monitor usage. That's good news for veteran companies such as Duffield, Va.-based Cornerpost, which has carved out a niche with its patented filtering software, Chaperone ISA, and subscription-based monitoring services for schools and local governments here and abroad. "Our main focus is on education, and it has been a booming business," says Ryan Elswick, COO at Cornerpost, which was founded in 1996 by Ryan's father, Paul Elswick, and Alan Hughes.

Without question, it's a jungle out there on the Web. School principals fret over making sure their students use those nice, new computers for researching history reports, not viewing pornography online. Managers at state, federal and military levels endeavor to block Internet gambling sites, while contending with employees who hog network bandwidth with MP3 music files downloaded during their lunch hours. E-mail monitoring is a whole other can of worms.

Talk to anyone dealing with this problem, Elswick says, and you'll get an earful about the unending, 24/7 battle that comes with monitoring and filtering inappropriate material online. "It means that we have to move even faster, updating our filters every two hours to keep up," he says.

Cornerpost's Windows-based Chaperone ISA software, which also works to monitor e-mail on Exchange servers, is installed at customer sites on their local servers. From there, however, the relationship evolves into that of an ASP, with Cornerpost regularly updating the list of sites deemed inappropriate, based on an exhaustive reconnaissance process that takes place at its own data center. The company's software operates two patented technologies, an agility filter and a "smutfinder," that crawl the Web to scout out questionable Web sites. Once found, the sites are brought to the attention of Cornerpost's human reviewers, who make the final call on blocking and filtering. The regular updated lists stream down, encrypted, to the customer's servers. The subscription model spares schools and other agencies from having to play the role of spy and gatekeeper, something that is not feasible in today's era of shrinking budgets, Elswick says.

One such school system is the Lemon Grove School District, just west of San Diego, which made online filtering a top IT priority when it set the wheels in motion six years ago for an ambitious technology plan. Control was crucial to Lemon Grove officials, primarily because of the scope of their tech rollout: Lemon Grove, which has been nationally recognized for its technology initiatives, has managed to achieve a 1-to-2 ratio of PCs to students. And the PCs are kept right on students' desks. Darryl LaGace, Lemon Grove's director of IT, says the school hooked up with Cornerpost through Lemon Grove's partnership with Microsoft. Lemon Grove is hosting the Chaperone software in its own data center not only for school usage, but also to filter Internet and e-mail content at the town's local police and fire stations, and town hall.

LaGace says he likes Cornerpost's filtering service because the school is able to set different parameters for site-blocking, depending on its users. Elementary-school students have much different thresholds than town-hall staffers, for example. The solution also allows the school to run reports to analyze the sites most hit and slice and dice data on individual and classroom usage.

"It has been a tremendous application for us, in the sense that you can go in at any given time and stop the negative things, but also get a pulse on the interesting things that students are doing," LaGace says.