NEIT2008-2A

Thank you for taking the time to provide us with the opinions expressed in the open letter. We are sorry to hear that you have experienced problems with our software. We appreciate your feedback. This letter is to respond to your concerns as well as offer some potential solutions and additional support. SMART Technologies takes customer satisfaction very seriously. We have built our success on a strong foundation of quality product and excellent service and we want to ensure that our customers are completely satisfied with the products that SMART offers. To that end, I want to assure you that we hear you and we recognize that you are dissatisfied at this time. We are committed to improving your experience of SMART Technologies products now and in the future. In response to feedback received regarding our Notebook v.10 for the Macintosh operating system; we have been working on a service pack that is dedicated entirely to improving Notebook’s support of the Macintosh OS. The release date will be spring 2009 and we anticipate that this will solve any problems you are experiencing. We encourage you and your group to interact with us more closely to ensure we are addressing your concerns. We would like to invite you to participate in a conference where we have our representatives on hand to address any outstanding concerns. We value your business and any feedback obtained will help us to improve our future product releases. Another way to offer feedback is to participate in The Exchange, our online forum for customers (http://exchange.smarttech.com/forums). What we are most interested in, however, is getting a face-to-face focus group together. We hope you feel the same. As an additional resource, Chris Klein is a Macintosh Specialist and Education Consultant here at SMART. Chris would also like to extend an invitation for any of you to contact him directly so he can answer any questions or address any your current concerns. You can contact Chris via email at cklein@smarttech.com or phone at 314-803-4008. Thank you for letting us know about your concerns about SMART Products; we will be in contact soon to provide more information regarding our upcoming conference. Sincerely, Sandra Coates VP, Services SMART Technologies

** Smartboard Petition** - Please sign!
Here is the list of our issues: • Warrantee expires if you don't register; registering not easy and it's not obvious that you have to register. • 9 vs 10, save as • PPC Mac vs. Intel Mac • 45 seconds to start service in 10 after logging on to computer. (in Leopard) • One local user vs. network users vs. roaming laptop users • Orient on every login (with network home directories) • 680 I -2 missing scratchpad thing (we loved this feature) • Other USB devices (printers, scanners, etc. can cause inference) • Powered USB extenders needed • Don't beta software, 1st releases don't work • Stop changing document format in different versions • vendor sales and support relationships • Notebook crashes • Better support (Canadian vs U.S. support) • Works better on Windows than Mac • Need serial number to download software!!! • Elmo document cameras don't integrate with Notebook.

Chris Mulios Ethical Culture Fieldston School cmulios@ecfs.org

usb extenders

http://www.cdwg.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=570691

usb over cat5 or cat 6

http://www.cdwg.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=1359251

Chief Project mounts

link later today

Just reading through this session and realizing that all of these issues are issues that our school had to deal with also. We started with 3 Smartboards and after two years we were very disappointed and switched over to a company called Promethean. Promethean carries a product called Activboards and uses a software called Activstudio. We have been with Promethean for 7 years and we are very happy with our relationship with them - we are a Mac school and the support from software to professional development has been outstanding. Here are a couple of links about this product:

[|http://www.prometheanworld.com]

[|http://www.prometheanplanet.com]

If you have any questions about Promethean and the Activboards please feel free to contact me.

Danny Harkins Media Specialist Eagle Hill School 45 Glenville Rd. Greenwich, Ct. 06831 203-622-9240 ext. 609 d.harkins@eaglehill.org


 * Please also register to participate in the discussion to further explain and to remedy the issues raised in the Smartboard Petitio**n. **The best way to get resolution is to not only sign the petition but to participate in the discussion towards resolution. Send your email address to keith@tequipment.com and he will add you to the shared workspace for the advisory/resolution.**