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IT onboarding checklist for Stile schools

  • Updated

This article is intended for IT professionals at schools using Stile.

It provides technical details to assist in network configuration and troubleshooting. While the majority of school IT systems do not require any configuration to use Stile, some firewalls or proxies will require adjustment. We encourage you to look through the checklist below and make any configuration changes necessary. Head to the bottom of the page for a list of available integrations.

 

What is Stile?

Stile is a modern web app for teachers and students, intended for use both within the classroom and at home. It can be accessed via any modern web browser on any computer or tablet device. Stile provides teachers with tools to quickly design and deliver interactive lessons to their students. Students individually log in and complete those lessons. All work they complete is stored against their username for later access.

Stile is an HTML5 and Javascript powered web application. It is designed to be 'single page', such that the page is rarely reloaded in the browser window. This Javascript thin-client connects directly to our REST-based API.

You can read our Privacy policy here and access our Security and Privacy Guide here.

If you have any technical questions or issues, please don't hesitate to contact us. We're here to help! Technical staff are available at our Melbourne, Australia office to answer any IT-related enquiries.

 

Allowlisting quick list

This quick checklist covers all domains for allowlisting and proxy consideration. Continue reading for further explanation of these considerations.

  • Approve stileapp.com, *.stileapp.com, stileeducation.com and *.stileeducation.com through your firewall. Read below if your firewall does not allow wildcards;
  • Approve *@stileeducation.com, *@stileapp.com, @stile-af68f45750ac.au.intercom-mail.com, @xero.com, and @post.xero.com domains on your email server and any associated third-party spam filters. Intercom is our customer support platform and Xero is used for sending invoices to your school's financial decision maker. More info on emails from Stile is available below;
  • Approve these domains from Intercom to ensure effortless support for your staff: *intercom.com, stile-af68f45750ac.au.intercom-attachments.com (for email attachments like screenshots and instructional PDFs);
  • Exclude stileapp.com from any traffic shaping or student download limits. Ensure large file uploads (preferably up to at least 500 MB) are allowed at your proxy/firewall for stileapp.com and *.stileapp.com. Read more about our traffic profile below;
  • If your teachers rely on Youtube or Vimeo to embed informative videos directly into Stile, then please approve these domains. Some of Stile's supplementary lessons also use Youtube videos: googlevideo.com, ytimg.com, youtube-ui.l.google.com, ytimg.l.google.com, ytstatic.l.google.com, youtubei.googleapis.com, gdata.youtube.com, m.youtube.com, youtube.com, www.youtube.com, vimeo.com, player.vimeo.com;
  • Ensure your staff and students have the latest versions of Edge, Safari, Chrome or Firefox. Read below for more info on supported browsers and settings.

 

Firewall/proxy considerations

Where available, we recommend adding stileapp.com and stileeducation.com to your firewall or proxy allowlist. Most schools find this to be the most simple and effective way to ensure their users have a consistent and reliable experience.

If your firewall doesn’t allow wildcard allowlists, be sure to include domains both with and without the ‘www’:

  • www[0-9].stileapp.com (i.e. www0.stileapp.com, www1.stileapp.com, etc)
  • stileapp.com
  • www.stileeducation.com
  • stileeducation.com

We’ve gone to considerable effort to ensure all resources required to run stileapp.com are available from that single domain. This includes all images, videos and other documents your users embed in or upload to Stile. The exception to this is YouTube and Vimeo, which when embedded into Stile lessons will access their respective domains as needed.

 

Traffic Profile

An un-cached fresh hit to stileapp.com will download approximately 1.1 MB of data, however, most of this data is cached, and so subsequent page loads should be less than 10 KB.

In addition to basic website and API traffic, user uploads and downloads of large files, including images, video, documents also occur on stileapp.com. Stile supports the upload of large files (we’ve tested up to 2 GB) and encourages users to do so within the interface. Note that even when users upload large movie or image files, we automatically transcode them to a much more reasonable size for consumption on the site by other Stile users.

If you have implemented any form of bandwidth throttling on your network, please keep in mind that our servers will disconnect IDLE TCP connections after 60 seconds, thereby interrupting downloads or uploads that have been artificially delayed (by throttle) without keep-alive.

SSL (HTTPS)

Firewalls/proxies must allow SSL on stileapp.com and stileeducation.com on port 443 (standard SSL port). It is not possible to connect to Stile without SSL.

Non-standard HTTP headers

Firewalls/proxies must allow non-standard HTTP headers as per RFC6648. Presently, all non-standard headers are prefixed with “X-“.

HTTP Verbs

Firewalls and proxies must allow all standard HTTP verbs (GET, HEAD, POST, OPTIONS, PUT, DELETE).

 

Email

Stile will send emails to your staff and students for password resets or enrolment notifications, or to respond to their support enquiries. Emails from Stile will only ever come from @stileeducation.com or @stileapp.com addresses. To ensure users receive these emails, we strongly recommend both of these domains be allowlisted in your email server. Don’t forget to also add the allowlist to any spam filters you have running against your email server. Users with Student accounts will never receive marketing emails.

We occasionally send many similar-looking emails to a broad number of your users, particularly when teachers enrol whole groups of students for the first time. Email servers can think this is spam and start limiting us in some way. This will result in either delayed or non-delivery of our emails, which is frustrating for users. If you are aware of your server doing this sort of shaping, please consider white-listing our domains from this process.

 

Usernames

Stile requires that usernames be in the form of an email address. If it isn’t possible for your students to have email addresses at this time, they can create an address with the @edustile.com domain. Edustile addresses are not connected to inboxes and cannot receive any emails, so these users will rely on Class codes for enrolment and teacher-issued temporary passwords for password resets.

We also offer Single Sign-on (SSO) integration for individual schools as well as multi-school or multi-campus networks.

 

Supported Browsers and Settings

Stile leverages the latest web technologies to deliver its user experience. As such, some older browsers cannot be used to access the app. It is important to keep your staff and students' browsers up to date for both functionality and security.

Cookies and Javascript must be enabled.

Warning: iOS 11 and under are no longer supported. Consider updating your iPad to the latest compatible operating system or upgrading your device.

 

Configuration and integration

Stile is configured by Stile staff prior to deployment at a school. General administrative tasks such as adding new students or staff are done inside the Stile interface by users with teacher access or admin access. Typically, teachers do this individually on a per-class basis, alleviating the burden on IT staff to have this pre-configured. 

We also offer schools direct access to their data via our REST HTTP API, allowing the creation of custom integrations with Stile. Please get in touch if you would like more information.

Click through for more information on the following integrations:

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You may also be interested in the following resources: