This section provides information on CASPA from a technical perspective, and is aimed at IT professionals based either in schools or at the Local Authority.<\/p>\n
CASPA has been designed to be as simple and robust as possible and has proven itself over the years to be extremely reliable and require very little technical support. CASPA is exhaustively tested before every release as we have every incentive to ensure that support requirements are minimised; as a result, we receive few technical queries and decisions about purchasing and installing CASPA are rarely driven by technical issues.<\/p>\n
CASPA is designed for networked installation and supports multi-user operation; for more information on how CASPA caters for schools with separate admin and classroom networks, see Installation types, below.<\/p>\n
CASPA is a native Windows 32-bit executable and installs to a single directory tree, with no registry settings and no dependencies on external runtime libraries. No separate work-station installation of CASPA is required; enabling other users that can access the installation location to make use of CASPA simply requires creating a short-cut on their desktop. For information on running CASPA under operating systems other that Windows, please see the sections ‘Running CASPA on an Apple Mac’ and ‘Running CASPA under Linux’, below.<\/p>\n
CASPA makes very few demands on IT infrastructure but the following are required:<\/p>\n
We take the security of your data very seriously. All CASPA database files are encrypted to ensure that access to information about your pupils is possible only via the CASPA application.<\/p>\n
CASPA has a number of levels of security over and above a school’s PC and network-level security and uses a scheme supporting individual user names and passwords, with an extended range of role-based privileges; by granting appropriate privileges to users, users will be able to view and report on data within CASPA but will have their ability to change data restricted to the most appropriate level.<\/p>\n
At the database level, the database files have their own encryption key which is not related to any passwords that users can create. The database files require a specific application to open them (CASPA) which in itself requires users to log in with their passwords. Database files cannot be opened by simply knowing or discovering a password. A determined violator would need to obtain the database engine and possess the encryption key so CASPA database files can only be opened by logging into CASPA with an account created for that installation. In addition, the encryption key is not included in CASPA’s database files and therefore cannot be extracted by using any form of password cracking software.<\/p>\n
Whilst CASPA does include surname, forename, category of need, etc, it does not include other, perhaps more secure, details such as home address, phone number, etc.<\/p>\n
CASPA is distributed as a download from our website using an installer to guide users through the few steps required to register CASPA.<\/p>\n
During installation, a wizard guides you through the process, and two documents are recommended for reading, which you can review here:<\/p>\n
CASPA pre-installation information (PDF)<\/a><\/p>\n CASPA post-installation information (PDF)<\/a><\/p>\n Updates to CASPA are published periodically to deliver new functionality and, occasionally, to correct errors and access to updates and enhancements to CASPA is included under the annual licensing arrangements for CASPA. Updates are made available via our update servers.<\/p>\n CASPA includes built-in ‘Check for updates…’ functionality that will periodically check whether updates are available and, if found, these will be downloaded and installed automatically. To support those instances where firewalls or security policies prevent applications connecting to the Internet, a fall-back ‘manual updates’ option is available. Support for authenticating proxy servers is included.<\/p>\n To allow CASPA to work with the full range of IT infrastructure found in schools, e.g. separate administrative and classroom networks with no inter-connectivity, CASPA offers a number of installation types, as follows:<\/p>\n To view a PDF document that illustrates a typical installation using these three installation types, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Whilst CASPA is a native Windows 32-bit executable and therefore will not run directly under the Macintosh operating system, we are aware that many schools are successfully running CASPA on Macs via products such as Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion.<\/p>\n Whilst CASPA is a native Windows 32-bit executable and therefore will not run directly under Linux, any Windows application should be capable of running on Linux using Wine; please note, however, that the operation of CASPA under Linux is not warranted. For more information on Wine, please refer to www.winehq.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This section provides information on CASPA from a technical perspective, and is aimed at IT professionals based either in schools […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":8,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caspaonline.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/179"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caspaonline.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caspaonline.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caspaonline.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caspaonline.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.caspaonline.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/179\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caspaonline.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caspaonline.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Delivery of updates to CASPA<\/h2>\n
Types of CASPA installation<\/h2>\n
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Running CASPA on an Apple Mac<\/h2>\n
Running CASPA under Linux<\/h2>\n