More than 25,000 schools and school districts are using OpenDNS today — including some of the country’s largest — to achieve CIPA compliance, make their networks better performing, save money and keep their kids safe online. We spend a lot of time talking to these customers and often hear questions about how other school districts are using our service. What are they filtering? How did they configure the service? We came to realize that not only is there not a place online for K-12 network admins to talk to each other about OpenDNS, there’s not really a place online for K-12 networks admins to talk to each other, period.

Aiming to provide that place, today we launched the OpenDNS K-12 School forums.

If you’re a network admin for a K-12 school, take a few minutes and check it out. Have a question about using OpenDNS in your state? Curious how your peers at other school districts are using OpenDNS? The new forums are for you. Since each state has its own unique network configurations (some of you get Internet connectivity from a state-run ISP, for example) we created a section for all 50. At very least, drop by to introduce yourself to your peers and say hello.

And if your state doesn’t yet have a moderator, drop us a line and tell us why you’d make a great one.

With more than 25,000 schools and school districts using OpenDNS today (including some of the U.S.’s largest districts), our service has fast become the standard among K-12 schools. Attend our 30 minute webinar this Thursday and learn why.

We’re thrilled to have Gavin Guynes join OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch as co-host. Gavin, a longtime OpenDNS user who runs the network for Mississippi’s Madison County Schools, will tell you all about how he set up OpenDNS quickly and easily and share the many benefits Madison has gained from making the switch. You’ll learn about how the free service can help you achieve CIPA compliance, save your district lots of money and keep your students and staff safe online.

We know you’re busy, so we’ll keep the webinar short and informative - just 30 minutes. When you sign up you’ll be prompted to invite colleagues, so help us spread the word!

“ABCs of OpenDNS for K-12 Schools in the 2009-2010 Year”
Thursday, August 20, 2009
10 AM PDT - 10:30 AM PDT
Register here

A few months ago we told you about a major milestone for the Domain Tagging system and the OpenDNS community - an impressive 5 million unique domains submitted into the system. And today I’m excited to tell you about another milestone. We officially now have 1 million domains verified in the system. That means they’ve been submitted, tagged, voted on and confirmed. (This is in addition to the millions of domains in the seven Adult categories from our friends at St. Bernard Software.)

When we introduced you to the Domain Tagging system, which powers our Web content filtering service, we explained it was better than any other filtering system for three reasons:

1. It’s more comprehensive. The system has more than 50,000 people submitting and voting on sites. This is in stark contrast to a mere handful of people employed for this job by security companies offering Web content filtering.

2. It’s faster-moving. New Web sites and changes to existing Web sites are constantly being published to the Internet. Other Web content filtering systems update only once nightly, or even less frequently, and therefore fail to catch and categorize everything right away. The OpenDNS community is always adding and tagging sites, so you benefit from real-time updates.

3. It’s free to use. No longer are you forced to pay top dollar to keep your network safe and secure.

I talk to you, our customers and our community, every day and hear how much you value a Web content filtering system that works reliably and keeps the people on your network safe online. Whether it’s businesses, school districts, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), hospitals or households, everyone appreciates the service our community powers and OpenDNS provides.

In the coming months, we’ll be working be working on improvements to the Domain Tagging System that encourage more voting. Perhaps even some prizes for the most active and accurate voters… But in honor of this milestone, take a few minutes today and vote on some domains.

Just a friendly reminder that the “OpenDNS for Schools: Free and Efficient Web filtering for students” webinar is this Wednesday, Dec. 3 at 11 AM PST. It’s free to everyone who wants to attend, so be sure to invite friends and colleagues who aren’t using OpenDNS yet.

The event, hosted by Founder David Ulevitch, will answer all of your questions about OpenDNS in a K-12 school environment. Here’s the description:

K-12 schools make student security on the Internet a top priority. Learn how to use OpenDNS to enable free Web content filtering and security for students, achieve CIPA compliance, set up OpenDNS in minutes without the need for expensive hardware appliances, as well as how OpenDNS differs from competitive offerings.

We like our webinars short and sweet, so this one will be just 30 minutes in length. And no worries if you can’t tune in live - we’ll have a recorded version posted to the site after Wednesday.

Invite friends and register here. See you Wednesday!

UPDATE: Watch the recorded webinar here.

Now that Halloween is over, we embark on the two month journey through the American holiday season. I love the holidays; it’s all togetherness and helping others and giving thanks from here.

In that spirit, I got to thinking about all the ways we’ve been working to make OpenDNS easier for you and yours to use. OpenDNS is really a service every network should be running, regardless of how large or small your network is. So this goodiebag of helpful tools has something for everyone — from households to schools to large, global enterprises. We’ll keep thinking up more ways to make OpenDNS better, but as always, if you have suggestions I encourage you to submit them at Idea Bank, post to the Forums or email me directly at allison at opendns dot com.

1. A brand new video tutorial. This is a biggie, and something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. OpenDNS is not always the easiest thing to explain. All Internet users relate to the frustration of unreliable Internet and slow page-load times, and see the value of free Web content filtering. When we say OpenDNS is a service that’ll make your Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable, free, everyone wants it. But the setting up part — the finding your DNS settings and swapping your ISP’s IP addresses for OpenDNS’s — sometimes presents a challenge. The video tutorial walks you through the entire process in under 5 minutes.

2. Schedule a Demo // Request References services. This one is not new, necessarily, but since we’ve never really called your attention to it, I figured now’s as good a time as any. The Schedule a Demo and Request References were really designed with larger organizations in mind. We’ve learned that when you guys make a decision about using a new technology on your network, there are often lots of different folks involved in the decision making process. Sometimes there’s even paperwork that needs to be filled out, and calls that need to be made to existing, happy users of the service in question. Scheduling a demo couldn’t be easier. Just tell us a bit about you and your organization to prepare the OpenDNS rep who’ll do the demoing. Invite coworkers and get all of your questions answered on one snappy call. Same thing for requesting references. We’ll match you with an organization that’s similiar to yours. Have you seen how many happy customers we have?

3. Expanded router selection. We’re always working to keep our selection of routers in the instructions updated, but recently we went big and added several. Today we offer instructions for 16 different router manufacturers from the well-known Linksys, NETGEAR and D-Links to some more rare models. The goal is to have every router represented, to make it as easy as possible for everyone to set up OpenDNS, so look for us to continue adding to our gallery.

Happy holidays, everyone.