It’s not every day that I read about something in the paper and find something mentioned that can have a major positive impact on my job. That happened yesterday, though, when I read a story in the Wall Street Journal about companies trying to manage online video use by employees and the effect it has on network performance. A service called OpenDNS was mentioned and I went to check it out.

Schools that receive federal funding for Internet access must comply with CIPA regulations (Children’s Internet Protection Act), which include measures to block or filter Internet access to sites that are considered obscene or harmful to minors.

This has always meant purchasing firewall equipment with expensive annual content filtering contracts from companies like Sonicwall or Astaro. There are a few free options available for schools, but I hadn’t found any that really met all of my requirements.

OpenDNS addresses content filtering in a different way, one that doesn’t require any dedicated hardware or specific software on each client. This made it easy to set up and configure using a simple web-based administration page and a few changes on the local school server.

Today was the first day of use at HSRA Los Angeles and after a few follow-up tweaks, it seems to be working great. Best of all, the service is free–OpenDNS makes it money from advertising that appears on the page that is displayed when a site is blocked or can’t be found.

I’m anxious to see how it holds up the rest of the week, but so far I’m very, very happy.

Bravo David Ulevitch!