Content filters are expensive, they can degrade the user experience, add to your IT department’s work load, and generally they don’t work that well, especially with the rise of SSL traffic. For school districts, they are a necessary evil, the best we can do as an IT department is make them as minimally invasive as possible. For districts using Fortigate for their content filter in combination with Chromebooks, we can offer a little bit of assistance. Normally users of Chromebooks would need to authenticate using a username and password in a web portal to get internet access when using Fortigate. To make this slightly easier, we created a simple Chrome extension called Open Gate that will save your username and password, and authenticate on your behalf, automatically when you log into a Chromebook. This is a free extension that can be found in the Chrome Web Store. So if you happen to be a Chromebook district and use Fortigate, go ahead and check out Open Gate.
