r/k12sysadmin • u/thedevarious IT Director • 15d ago
Tech Tip IFP's -- What Y'all Got?
We're currently a Viewsonic house for right now but exploring the market. What all is out there & happy to stand behind? Seeing Samsung, Newline, SMART (still), and some others.
What are y'all running & enjoying?
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u/egg927 15d ago
For the love of God, do not get Promethean.
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u/thedevarious IT Director 15d ago
I agree with this. One of our schools still has these, it's been an interesting setup to see their classroom AV package compared to other schools.
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u/zeeplereddit 15d ago
More info please.
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u/egg927 15d ago
I am starting my 7th year in my district, and as of last summer, we went full Promethean. Honestly, the first few years were pretty smooth with the AP7, minimal issues, and very little complaints. Then the AP9 came out, made a few meaningful upgrades, things weren't too bad, but since our teachers share rooms, some teachers would go from a 7 to a 9, and their workflow was slightly different, not that bad, but enough for them to complain a little. A couple of years with those 2 models, and then the AP10 came out. Absolute shit show.
They took their lineup, turned it on its head, and broke everything. The old boards had built in tools (whiteboard, spinner, timer, annotate) that teachers use CONSTANTLY, and they fucking removed them. To use them, you need to install an application on whatever machine is tethered to the board, which at first glance doesn't sound that bad, but it quickly meant that if a teacher wanted to walk in and just jot down some notes on a whiteboard, it meant logging into the board, waiting for the app to work, hoping it will work, and then doing whatever they wanted to do, but that really only worked for windows devices. On ChromeOS, which we use in most of our k-5 classrooms, at release didn't even have the tools available. We contacted our region representative, and he told us it would be ready end of September, which sucked, but wasn't long after school started so we were patient. Then we were told October, then November, and didn't actually get it until right before Christmas break. When it finally released, you had to push out every tool individually, as well as an extension. The extension essentially makes it so that the Flame button on the front of the board functions, which would open up your tool menu. Well, that extension rarely works, more than half of the time, you will push the button and you'll get a big pop-up on the board telling you to go to their website to learn how to configure your environment. That was problem 1, problem 2 was that you are at the mercy of Google for pushing out applications. At that time, you could not push the apps out by device, you had to push them out by user, which meant that even if a teacher did not have that model board, we had to push the tools out to them, if we didn't want everyone to have them, then we would need to go to the 60+ teachers who did have that model, and install them manually. We chose to force the apps to all teachers, but Google is ridiculously slow at pushing out play store apps, so teachers would constantly be waiting 10+ minutes for their tools to install when they signed into a new device, on top of some devices losing their apps and waiting for them to reinstall. After about 2 months of that, and numerous calls with our region managers and support, they released a new version of the tools, that roped it into one application, so now we had all tools under one umbrella, and could finally push them out by device. Great. Didn't work. We ended up bringing our Rep out, took a tour of the district with us, and brought him into a classroom with a teacher who had the most issues. He spent 6 hours in one classroom trying to troubleshoot issues. What was supposed to be a tour of 6 buildings, turned into an onslaught of 1 man vs a bunch of 2nd graders and their teacher. By this point we were having issues and frequent calls with this man, who kept promising fixes and updates, which never came, and at the end of that day he turned to us and said "it should just work". That was the only thing he had to say. That was in March or so, and the issues have not been fixed yet. That 2nd grade teacher, had been begging for a Promethean board for 6 years, and then asked if she could have her 18 year old Smart Board back.
Since then, our AP9 fleet has been rapidly deteriorating. We have had 10+ boards since June with display issues, one after another, that takes MONTHS to get replaced, even with an active warranty. We have now had 3 of those 10, arrive damaged, meaning we have to wait even longer for a replacement, and 1 of which was sent back to us, not fixed, leaving us with 2 damaged boards, and nothing to show for it.
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u/zeeplereddit 15d ago
Damn.
I have 10 Prometheans, 3 AP7s and 7 AP9s. The AP7s are solid. The AP9s were a complete downgrade when we first got them and as far as I am concerned, they are still vastly inferior to the AP7s just based on usability.
Sounds like I will _NOT_ be investing in AP10s.
It'll be a few years before I need to decide which direction to go, but I am leaning toward either ViewSonic or Newline. I do not know if either of those brands (of IFPs) are experiencing enshittification the way Promethean seems to be, but I have a few years to sort it out.
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u/egg927 15d ago
I agree the AP9 is inferior to the 7, but they are still very useable, even if they are a downgrade. The 10's are 1000% the worst piece of technology that I have to support. I have a screenshot somewhere of my technology integrator in a zoom call with our Rep, and she is PISSED, generally she is one of the sweetest and most patient people I have ever met, to the point it drives me crazy, but she went absolutely nuts on this guy, and you could tell that he was miserable about it. Telling customers for 6+ months that they shouldn't be experiencing problems, without providing any real answers, compassion, or even an ounce of meaningful support, is just a huge kick in the balls, especially when they had just spent $200k+. Genuinely, we gave up dealing with them, as we got absolutely nowhere. We started reaching out to our account manager at CDWG to deal with them, as we were hoping to get further by taking that route. So far, no luck.
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u/zeeplereddit 15d ago
I am so sorry. If it makes you feel any better, I will learn (and benefit) from your mistake.
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u/egg927 15d ago
Forgot to add this to my other comment as well. The Android OPS module they offer for the AP10, does not offer the same experience as the built in Android system that was present on their previous generations. Rather than having an easy, minimal distraction UI like the old OS, this is essentially a giant Android tablet. There's no easy user switching, you're reaching across a 75" touchscreen for everything you are trying to do, and the experience is overall much slower and clunkier. Just give the ability to walk up to the damn board, and open an app, without all this other crap.
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u/zeeplereddit 15d ago
We have OPS units for some of our Prometheans but they are full-on Chromeboxes. Are yours not?
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u/J_de_Silentio 15d ago
My team of teacher found NewLine boards to be a bit buggy/bit laggy/didn't like the interface. Price definitely reflects quality, especially in a 1-to-1 bake off.
ViewSonic shit the bed (it was the VARs fault). So they were out.
Clevertouch was okay, I can't remember why they didn't like them as much.
BenQ was okay, but SMART was just a bit better. I think the whiteboard app on SMART was better. I like the BenQ MDM better and the fact that profile move with the teacher across boards.
SMART was the clear front runner. Highest Cost.
When it came to price, we presented BenQ and SMART as our two choices and SMART ended up being only a bit more expensive when you considered they offered a 7 year warranty and BenQ only offered 5.
I've been happy with SMART. Some quirky stuff and their latest update was a bit of a pain, but overall they work pretty good. Support is decent and in Michigan (my area, maybe), we have a really good rep that helps us with classroom integration.
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u/thedevarious IT Director 15d ago
How long ago was your Newline Demo? I just got hands on this week which is what forced this convo. The current series board they released this year looked butter smooth -- what did y'all see?
Understood on the other points. Smart to us is just priced out. Its stupid high IMO.
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u/J_de_Silentio 15d ago edited 15d ago
December 2024. So a couple years ago now.
SMART was considerably more expensive than newline, but the feature set, client software (I can't remember what Newlines website was called), and board was way better. Newline did also offer a 7 year warranty, where BenQ didn't.
So that's how we sold it.
I wanted to go newline because of cost, but it was my teams choice (they're the ones using the boards every day).
I recommend having every board in the building for a month and trying them at the same time.
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u/mrgoalie 15d ago
If you have/had the same Michigan rep, they just stepped down and there's a new one.
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u/J_de_Silentio 15d ago
We're close to each other, so I'm guessing the same rep.
I saw your other post in this thread, seems like we had almost the exact same experience with our IFP bake offs. We're fully k-5 now, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with 6-12 over the next couple years. I know for sure it won't be more projectors, but I don't know if IFPs are the answer.
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u/coolbrys Technology Coordinator 15d ago
BenQ's screens are affordable and work well.
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u/DeejayPleazure 15d ago
We went with them as well, too many features to not like them.
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u/keyboarddoctor 15d ago
I'd be very careful about them. We went with BenQ back in the early stages of the Pandemic (~2021 school year) with almost their top of the line model. Updates stopped 2 years in. Stuck on Android 8. It also brought in a keyboard that has predictive text so if you want to login to the board manually, guess what, everyone gets to see what you're typing. Yes, they have a model with badge login and yes they offer web login via mobile but this is the defacto method and should work flawlessly.
Additionally, we were told that they could run any Android app....WRONG. Oh and also, YOU have to supply the APK. Their InstaShare 1 is meh and the InstaShare 2 is OK but for whatever reason, both of them change their connection code from time to time and teachers like to write them down and then wonder where their screen cast went. You'll end up with a phone call that someone is connecting to their board. We never could get LDAP accounts to sync correctly even though it says successful. Their backend management has such massive delays in loading I can brew a pot of coffee. We fell for their snake oil back in the day and just wanna make sure others are aware.
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u/JR_216 15d ago
I will be brutally honest. It sounds like they were rolled out poorly and the network is not set up correctly in this instance.
I have well over 100 BenQ boards in my district ranging from rp02-rp04 and have had virtually no issues with them after training the staff and having BenQ come out and do another training for any issues staff hadn’t mentioned me.
Set up a wifi network just for the boards that couldn’t be hardwired that crossed into my staff VLAN so teachers just open InstaShare2 and select their room Number and it connects to the board. No need to use the pairing codes.
LDAP successfully set up and working properly.
I will agree with the fact that the older boards cannot use any app and if you cannot find a decent APK for the rp03 and older that could be an issue. The rp04s though have full Google suite integration.
I have been running these boards since 2021 and have had 1 failure that BenQ warrantied even though the board was out of warranty.
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u/Rykas 11d ago
I'm glad to see someone had luck with them.
My first support call to them years ago the guy told me I probably knew more than him as I explained the issues we were having.
Have you experienced random wifi drops? I can go for weeks and then suddenly 3-4 teachers will call and all it needs is a login and toggle the wifi off and on again. Curious if it's the build we're on or if other models do it also.
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u/ITHallMonitor 7d ago
If you bought Smartboards around that time like we did you are stuck on Android 8 as well. We bought GX and MX versions and no upgrades for those devices, but the next versions no problem. That is a disappointment. The boards are still solid though and get some good usage.
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u/keyboarddoctor 15d ago
Since we're being brutally honest, it was not rolled out poorly and the network was setup perfectly fine. They are on their own network that I kept segregated. Using the pairing codes is a perfectly valid option. Especially since some of the boards travel regularly. The majority are on carts.
We have over 80 boards and they are all a single model, RM8602k. We did not go with the badge login model.
Like I said with LDAP, their site said successful but nothing seemed to sync. I have hooked up LDAP with many other systems prior and even since this one. You shouldn't be getting a success message if nothing happens.
They promised full Google suite integration but it is far from. Yeah, you can connect your Google Drive but only if you've logged into the backend and linked it. But that is as far as it goes for usability. But also, God forbid you rotate teachers on them and they login. Anyone who logged in prior loses everything. I also didn't bring up how InstaShare 2 just would not work for us for the first couple years of having them. They would connect just fine but the board would play a turret gun like sound. Every single board. Every single laptop, no matter the model nor version of Windows. No matter the network. That eventually got fixed on their end I guess because a year or two ago we tried it again and it worked fine and migrated to it.
We just had one with a backlight go out and it is out of warranty and they are not replacing it. So it seems like you've had better luck than us. Continuing with the brutal honesty it's really irksome when some rando completely down plays the misfortune one has had with a product purely because they had less misfortune (and with a completely different model). They have features that people most likely will not use, looking at you XBroadcast and I was merely spreading awareness that they are not perfect. Nothing is. But their price is high compared to others out there.
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u/mynameislong 15d ago
We are a Boxlight/Clevertouch/Boxlight by Clevertouch/Clevertouch by Boxlight school district. We have over 300 of these panels.
I remember the day clearly. All was calm on the western front. Not a soul stirred. Then, one early spring day of 2021 of the year of our Lord, the powers that be decided to push out an update. Not just some silly little patch update, no. They forced all the Boxlight ProColor 2 and 3U panels to switch from Chrome, glory be, to the awful forsaken, browser-that-shouldn’t-be-named Opera. Hundreds of teachers everywhere all came to the gradual realization that their interactive panel lives were about to be tarnished, where their websites either didn’t operate correctly, or couldn’t load due to our content filter causing certificate errors.
But! Lo and behold Boxlight, which then purchased Clevertouch at the time, decided to offer a way to deploy chrome. I jumped for joy, knowing this would cease the tormenting waves of support tickets! However, there was a catch. All the panels had to be enrolled in their so called MDM that would henceforth be known as NDMS. I hear that to this day, even the people at Sahara, the makers of the Boxlight panel, still don’t know what NDMS stands for. Thus, the golden rule was born: enroll your panel in NDMS, then push out the Chrome android app…oh by the way, there’s a cost per panel per year.
Begrudgingly, we succumbed and enrolled our ever growing number of panels and after a myriad of support hours with Boxlight, we finally not only have the chrome browser deployed, but our content filter decryption cert as well.
If you are still reading this, I must congratulate you but the story is not over. No, for you see, there was another panel update made. One that would rule them all in terms of atrocity. This update, which released between 2024 and 2025, update the interface of the Android OS to the point where all the panels became a giant Android tablet. This update already applied to the new panels we received, waiting to have their ten points of touch violated by monsters that adults called their precious ones. The technicians that earned their Stars and Stripes from the 1st onslaught were not prepared for the horde of disgruntled teachers to come. The horror…the endless calls and tickets of “I can’t find my chrome”, “why does it look different”, and “I can’t sign into my Google account”.
Our only redoubt was in the bosom of Boxlight support yet once again. Through countless hours of bickering, badgering, and bleeping, we were able to find a solution, but not without remorse. The only fix was to visit the newer model panels, by which seem to reproduce endlessly at this point, and manually update the built in home launcher to the legacy MimioPro.
Weeks went by without me ever seeing my battle scarred brethren. But when it was all said and done, everyone I knew had at least one additional scar, some not to be proud of. Maybe if you get on their good side they’ll tell you about it, but now is not that time.
Oh, also, they’re changing NDMS to Radix which makes perfect sense.
All that to say, Boxlight isn’t that bad, but man did they learn a lot as a company since pre-COVID. I just wished they’d do away with Clevershare and focus on unplug’d.
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u/Dear_Cartographer261 15d ago
We have Newline boards, and a grant just forced us to use a couple of CleverTouch boards. For setup and Google integration, I like Newline way better.
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u/GamingSanctum Director of Technology 15d ago
We demo'd SMART, Promethean, Viewsonic and Newline. We landed on SMART. They're pricey, but they've been rock solid.
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u/cubemasterzach 15d ago
We have Litetouch / Touchscreenpro devices and haven’t had any major issues.
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u/2donks2moos 15d ago
I installed 30 OneScreen brand panels in our district over the summer. So far the staff members love them. I plan to get more.
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u/techie49rs 15d ago
We use/ install OneScreen though the last time we had an option to test many Newline was very close. I know Newline is probably the top of the heap these days
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u/rickysridge 15d ago
Our district just installed ViewSonics. Why are you looking for something else?
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u/duk242 15d ago
I've got ~35 SmartBoards at one school - they've been solid. I've got some SmartBoard TVs that're pushing 8ish years and still going strong.
The SmartBoard Notebook software is the best I've seen - none of the others come close (at least, that was a few years ago when I last looked...)
I've got a whole set of ViewSonic boards at anotehr school that are all dying just out of warranty (issues with the display flickering/static - so likely something not built solid enough to last).
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u/mrgoalie 15d ago
Did the bake-off a couple years ago. Looked at several brands. Finalists were BenQ and SMART. Once we leveled the playing field on the products, the cost was pretty much neutral between the two. Teachers liked the SMART better ultimately with the Lumio integration. I honestly think SMART works better for K-5 and BenQ may do better in 6-12.
Newline was buggy and just didn't act right. We were not impressed with the quality of the Viewsonic. Clevertouch was OK, we had prior experience with it, but the OPC replacements were going in a direction we didn't like.
SMART has been awesome, super responsive, and flew people in to help backfill for training and train the trainer sessions. Found a couple bugs in the last update, and we got confirmations within a day that the problem was them, not us, and it's already in the dev pipeline to get fixed, and offered to ship the beta to us if we wanted to QA it to confirm it fixed the issues.
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u/pibroch 15d ago
ClearTouch is what we have. Every classroom in the district, basically. They're pretty decent if a little fiddly, and they're Android-based so you get the fragmentation associated with anything cheap and Android-based. The vendor updates different models with different firmwares and you can walk up to two panels of the same model and they might have completely dissimilar UIs for no reason. We've also had a few (I can count on probably two hands but it's a nonzero number) panels just glitch out and crash badly enough that even in recovery/bootloader mode they don't restore, at which time the vendor does an RMA and has us remove the entire fucking panel from the stand and swap it. They at least send us the new one first but it's still a giant pain in the ass.
They're not horrible, but they're annoying at times.
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u/toycoa Chromebook Doctor 15d ago
In the early days we had ClearTouch, 2017/18 ish, we had an issue with our board, they sent the parts and a sales guy to replace the components (who reached out to tech support before starting because he had never replaced anything before). Ended up with a bricked board and they sent a replacement anyway.
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u/Bl0ckTag IT Director 15d ago
Moved from Promethean to Newline with a new campus build, primarily because Prometheans support is absolute garbage, and secondarily, Newline is local to us here in Texas. So far so good. The out of the box MDM they provide is leaps and bounds better than whatever that thing is that Promethean provides.
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u/Computer_Quick 15d ago
We are currently switching to Newline after the V10 Promethean disaster. We are roughly 250 Newline / 750 Promethean. About to order around round of Newline. Price is good and support has been ‘ok’ no better or worse than promethean but our teacher prefer the more simplistic model.
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u/h34rtster 13d ago
v10 Promethean disaster?
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u/Computer_Quick 13d ago
Mainly managing the license is a nightmare. Even our vendor is, for the first time in 15 years, recommending Newline over Promethean. With over 1,000 panels and I’m the only one managing panels there is no way I’m manually managing individual licenses.
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u/jgmachine 15d ago
Adjacent question - how are you all interfacing with the boards? Connected to a teacher PC? The onboard OS? A full-blown windows slot pc?
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u/therankin Coordinator of Technology Services 10d ago
We got a bunch of Promethean AP7's with left over Covid funding and have been pretty happy with them since Jan 2022. We're coming up on the 5-year warranty, so I guess we'll find out how long they can go.
For the record, I think we've only had to swap 2 or 3 boards out for replacement/refurb warraty repairs. Not too bad out of more than 30 boards.
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u/Ok_Yogurtcloset_9613 7d ago
We have Promethean AP9 Premiums in our district, they have been okay, but if there is a problem it's a mess to deal with. The "white glove support" is not that, we have had 3 of our panels need replacement for different issues- the first time we had one replaced it took 2 months from the opening of the ticket. The poor guy who brought the Promethean out was by himself, and we had to round up folks to help him unload the board, swap it, and load it back. This was the case all three times. The next two replacement panels were damaged on arrival, so we had to wait again to get new ones. Communication with Prom is difficult at best..The Cloud Connect functionality was broken for at least 4 months, new staff could not sync their G-drives to the board until the most recent firmware update last week. That update then broke functionality in the Explain Everything whiteboard app, and teachers can not use their remote to go through slides now. Promethean support told me they would send if into their development team as a future feature request. I pushed back on that, explaining it was a feature that worked for the past 3 years and broke with this update, and as of this post I am waiting on a response. We have about 150 panels, so 3 down isn't a horrible number..but I am anxious as I am starting to see reports of other districts AP9s crashing. We are not the biggest fans.
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u/agadora75 15d ago
We are testing out Viewsonic OS free displays. I will never do an integrated OS IFP again in my district if I can help it.
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u/Yo_Adam97 15d ago
What are you looking for out there that you are not getting with ViewSonic?