Technical requirements

The main components of Glow are:

• a national directory and authentication system
• a national virtual learning environment (VLE)
• collaborative software applications
• support services.

There are some minimum requirements to ensure that all of the components can operate on school, local authority and personal computers.  

Client requirements and Glow supported browsers

Client requirements are detailed in the Glow Requirements document.

Firewalls

Some of the applications will require that specified ports must be open, on local authority, school and personal firewalls between the Glow datacentre and the network clients.

Each local authority and home user will need to consider the need to reconfigure firewalls with recommendations made by the Glow programme team. All Glow services will be hosted in the datacentre on a specific range of IP addresses, so firewall rules will only be required for these addresses.

Further information is in the Glow Firewall Requirements document.

Network bandwidth

Real-time applications that feature video, audio or large file transfer or streaming will have implications regarding network load. Local authorities should consider the effects on the installed infrastructure when deciding to roll out a particular service or application.