Category Archives: Email Migration

Email Migration from Groupwise completed

The Groupwise email server will shortly be closed down, please ensure that you are now accessing your email via Outlook in Glow Office 365.

All Education establishment staff and centre staff (including education admin staff) have all been provided with a Glow account that gives them access to a fully functional Office 365 with unlimited web storage, free Office 2013 downloads on home computers/tablets, a Glow email address and an extensive range of tools provided within the Glow environment.

The reason for providing everyone in Stirling and Clackmannanshire Education with this set of tools is to improve sharing and support, communication and collaboration between

  1. Educators across all establishments
  2. Establishments and the central education team
  3. Educators and Establishments across Scotland
  • All Education staff should view their Glow account as their primary or priority account, including school admin staff in all sectors.

 

A limited number of Education staff have been provided with a second account, in the stirling.gov.uk O365 environment.  This account is limited to email, contacts and calendar – it does not currently provide any additional benefits beyond this.

The reason for providing a limited number of Stirling O365 accounts to specified staff is to

  1. Ensure that establishments continue to have access to certain corporate services (eg servicedesk, e-financials, shared HT diaries etc), and corporate staff addresses
  2. Ensure the GCSX account holders continue to have access to GCSX mail
  3. Ensure that external ‘others’, including prospective parents and agencies can continue to get in touch using the long-established email addresses that are published on the internet and in existing school and council literature
  • Corporate stirling.gov.uk accounts should be checked for new mail from external agencies, used when accessing corporate services, and when the formal corporate email address is required or deemed to be the most appropriate, given the circumstances.

February Email Information (Education)

 

Final migration process

 

By Friday the 5th of February, there should be no school/establishment education users accessing Groupwise.  All education staff should be using Microsoft Outlook email.

 

What do I need to know?

 

How do I get help?

Final email migration

All remaining Education stirling.gov.uk accounts will be moved over to corporate Office 365 during the week beginning 1st February. All content including contacts, calendar and email will be moved at the same time.

This applies to HTs, DHTs, Admin staff, Technicians, School addresses etc,  it does NOT apply to teaching staff.  They have now moved full-time into the Glow environment.

Once this move has taken place, you will no longer be able to use Groupwise to access your email.  Instead you will be using the Outlook 2013 desktop application.  Look for the shortcut on your desktop,

Outlook

The program can also be found by going into your PC Start menu, then finding Microsoft Office 2013, Outlook 2013.
Your email address and password will not change, and you should use your existing details when you log into Outlook 2013.

This move has been planned for the w/b 1st Feb because it falls before the inservice/holiday week.

You can find help pages provided here: https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/st/sctech4learning/know-your-glow/know-your-glow-helpsheets/

and also pages provided by the Office 365 team:
http://inf.ad.stirling.gov.uk/site/?page_id=436

Once you have successfully logged into your stirling.gov.uk account through Outlook 2013, you will be able to do everything you could previously do with Groupwise, plus a lot more:
Including:

  • Adding your glow account to Outlook 2013 to access them both in the same place,
  • Sharing calendars and sharing contacts between your (and others) accounts.

HTs, SROs, & School Email Addresses

In discussion with colleagues in ICT and across other services, we recognise that there is a need to maintain links to the centre and a corporate identity for our schools/establishments. It is also critically important that we do not confuse, or cause unnecessary workload during this transition.

For these reasons, certain specific school accounts will continue to exist as part of the centre/corporate email service.  As the corporate accounts are migrated from Groupwise to Office 365 (corporate), these few accounts will also move across, providing an email service using the @stirling.gov.uk address.

What this means:
1. All the existing @stirling.gov.uk email addresses for schools (e.g. cowieps@stirling.gov.uk, wallacehs@stirling.gov.uk etc) will continue to exist and there will be no need for these to be removed from contact lists or the council website information.
2. All head of establishment @stirling.gov.uk addresses will also continue to exist.
3. Some other specified accounts (eg Secondary SROs and Primary Admins) will also continue to exist
4. All of the above postholders will additionally have a full Glow account with a corresponding @glow.sch.uk address and a full Office 365 experience
5. All other school/establishment staff will ‘only’ have a full Glow account with a corresponding @glow.sch.uk address and a full Office 365 experience

– Lynne Alexander (alexanderl@stirling.gov.uk) holds/maintains a list of these contact email addresses on behalf of education and other services. It is important that these addresses remain valid and contactable during the coming months.

Action
For those establishments who have created a “our address is changing” rule already for their school address, can you please remove it as soon as possible to avoid any confusion by centre staff, partners and the public?
You can continue to use a forwarding rule so that you gather all email in the one place for convenience.

– Please expect centre staff to continue to use and share your school and head of establishment @stirling.gov.uk addresses.
– This will reduce workload and stress.

For the purpose of clarity:
The GroupWise email system is being replaced across all services. All services will be moved into an Office 365 environment over a period of months and will all be using Outlook for email. Education establishments are moving first, and are moving into a specifically educational Office 365 (which forms part of the much greater Glow offering).
–>All establishment staff do need to move into Glow Office 365 for their email as explained previously and I would encourage you to ensure that all staff feel confident to move into Glow O365.

Please get in touch if you require any clarification , or if I can offer any support to you or your teams. Contact me at slavinp01s@glow.sch.uk

Glow Email Migration Update

The move towards Glow Outlook email has been progressing very well.  Most of the background work has already been done, and the following are the tasks that need to be completed by school staff as the final steps before final migration:

For teaching staff:
1) Ensuring that they know their Glow Login username, pw, email address and that they have successfully logged in over the last week or so.
2) Setting up a forwarding rule to push any new Groupwise email into their O365 (attachment)
3) Setting up a return rule to inform of the change of email address (attachment)
4) Sending an email to any specific contacts that they want immediately notified of change (example attached)
5) Logging into Glow Outlook Email and importing the School Address Book into their personal contacts (CSV spreadsheet)
6) Sending a test email to one of their colleagues

Additional ‘optional’ tasks for teaching staff
a) Either writing down, copy/paste, email forwarding existing personal contacts (outwith Stirling Council)
or
b) Logging on to the GroupWise Client and exporting contacts, then reimporting into O365

For admin staff:
1) Ensuring that they know their Glow Login username, pw, email address and that they have successfully logged in over the last week or so.
2) Setting up a forwarding rule to push any new Groupwise email into their O365 (attachment)
3) Setting up a return rule to inform of the change of email address (attachment)
4) Sending an email to any specific contacts that they want immediately notified of change (example attached)
5) Logging into Glow Outlook Email and importing the School Address Book into their personal contacts (CSV spreadsheet)
6) Sending a test email to one of their colleagues

Additional tasks for admin staff:
a) Logging on to the GroupWise Client and exporting personal contacts, then reimporting into O365
b) Emailing/texting parents and other stakeholders of the change of school address, and of the change to the (second part) of the staff email address, without necessarily revealing actual addresses.
c) Setting up distribution lists, in accordance with school structures (this process is straightforward and will be supported)
d) Using the Outlook Client

Additional tasks for tech support staff:
a) Setting up the Outlook Client on admin machines, adding O365 account settings and syncing data
b) Ensuring that, where required, multiple accounts are linked and/or the Outlook Client is setup to easily access multiple accounts  (this process will be supported if required)

Additional tasks outwith the school:
Migrating existing mailbox data from GroupWise Accounts into Glow Outlook O365 accounts

Report on the outcomes of the Secondary GLOW Lead Meeting 8th September 2015

1. 20#20 Strategy Overview

The principles of the 20#20 strategy were highlighted and re-affirmed;  Education Service’s commitment to the five National Objectives for the development of ICT in education are:

  • To change the culture of the use of ICT
  • To improve confidence in the use of ICT for learners, teachers, school leaders and parents
  • To promote new behaviours for teaching
  • To deepen parental engagement
  • To strengthen position on hardware and associated infrastructure

In order to achieve the above, the need to ‘go mobile’ and move into ‘the cloud’ is crucial:

  • The various solutions offered by the Glow environment were seen to provide the fundamental architecture for an online education cloud solution for Stirling & Clacks schools that is robust and safe.
  • There was recognition that the OneDrive product had matured sufficiently to offer import and export options from other educational software and mobile apps.
  • There was recognition that Groupwise was becoming increasingly limiting as a modern communication tool, and that the virtually unlimited scope of the Glow Outlook email offered significant benefits for learners and educators.

Planned migration from Groupwise to Glow Email

The consensus view was that such a migration was long overdue. An early migration was therefore greatly welcomed. Stirling High School and St. Modans High School expressed a desire to move as early as possible.

2. Migration issues and challenges

Glow Account Usernames

Naming conventions – still to decide

  • to be agreed sooner than later – before October holidays.
  • simplest approach may be the most successful, building on Clacks experience.
  • Input to be sought from the Glow national team and from RM.

Data Protection and Improving email practice

There is a need, and an opportunity, to address some existing email practices which do not meet with data protection guidelines, eg the direct sharing of personal sensitive data within email content. The consequences of data leakage from such practices put user, authority and young people at risk.

  • There is an opportunity to enforce new practices that meet data protection guidelines, eg putting personal sensitive data into SEEMiS and emailing to alert that such data now exists.
  • There is an opportunity to emphasise the DP role and responsibilities of establishments and users.

Distribution Lists, Staff Groups, Pupil Groups

Concern was raised about the management of groups of users in the new email system and the need for creation of address books/distribution lists for pupils/staff etc at all levels.

  • Current situation within Groupwise webmail is very limited distribution options, and there are no pupils within Groupwise.
  • There is currently the functionality to produce lists and groups within the O365 environment, both as distribution lists and as group users.
  • Need to clarify the scope and lifespan of O365 distribution lists. Information to be sought from the O365 tenacy product owner at Scottish Government.
  • Need for training for school admins on how to setup groups and lists
  • *discussion around Gavin Hunter (Lornshill) providing training on this.

Calendar(s)

Groupwise calendars, and group appointments are extensively used in the ‘centre’ but not widely used within schools and nurseries.

  • There was optimism that the calendar options within Outlook O365 will offer scope for team, staff and school calendars.
  • The ability to make a meeting appointment, an “online meeting” and use video-conferencing tools (Lync/Skype/Glow Meet) instead offers significant scope for improving network meeting attendance, developing professional learning communities, and improved communication links with the centre.
  • Need for to advertise, promote and support the use of online meetings
  • Need to setup distribution groups for intra/inter-authority subject networks
  • Need to provide a tech spec sheet for hardware to access online video meetings

Existing Contacts

There was some discussion about existing contacts (outwith the organisation) and how they can be notified of change of email etc

  • Need for a period of redirection or forwarding, after the migration
  • Options may include a closed mailbox rule, with a return message alerting any senders of the new address and failure of the initial message.

Pupil Email and Pupil Usernames

There was discussion about the most appropriate time to issue pupils with their own email addresses.

  • priority has to be to get all staff migrated, and staff confidence using Outlook O365
  • each establishment to be decide when is the right time for their pupils
  • There was discussion about the format of pupil usernames, especially within the context of finding pupils in yeargroups/classes.
  • similar to staff, but taking advantage of existing data; suggest possible use of an ST prefix followed by Glow year number, then surname and first name, eg ST15smithjohn, where 15 indicates a current Primary 1 pupil (2015 being the year of entry to school and Glow), 14 =P2, 13=P3, 12=P4, 11=P5, 10=P6, 09=P7, 08=S1, 07=S2, 06=S3, 05=S4, 04=S5, 03=S6 * Use of existing @glow.sch.uk
  • Accept the original numbering of “smithjohn3” if already provisioned.
  • Clearly retrospective modifications would have to be applied to all secondary pupil usernames, but would have the benefit of needing minimal modification of primary pupil names and also provides a consistent naming convention for future years.
  • Input to be sought from the Glow national team and from RM.
  • Need for training for school admins to be aware of the convention and how to modify individual usernames post-migration
  • Consider the possibility of developing/amending network logins to replicate Glow username conventions.

Glow Admin Support

  • need to ensure centre admin to support the Stirling Email Migration – propose the use of stirlingglowhq@glowmail.org.uk as a central point of communication for the Stirling Email migration.
  • need to ensure joined up thinking with Clacks Glow Email > propose the use of clacksglowhq@glowmail.org.uk as a central point of communication for Clacks staff? Or as a single address at stirlingclacks@glowmail.org.uk ?
  • need to ensure centre admin has full access to SEEMiS in Clacks and Stirling, and full GLOW admin rights across Clacks and Stirling

Technical and hardware issues

Browser setup in schools is the most likely source of poor user experience

  • need to ensure that all establishments are able to use Chrome or Firefox as the default browser.

New Users and Temporary Users

  • Need to consider how new (permanent) users will be managed within establishments – SEEMiS work record, network login and GLOW username, email address etc
  • Need to consider how supply and temp staff are given SEEMiS work records, network login and GLOW username, email address etc

Proxy access to diary and emails

Need to consider best method for replacing proxy access to Groupwise accounts. eg for school admins, secretaries etc sending email on behalf of, or checking and sending school email

  • Cluster Based Approach to rollout
  • Need to consider rollout order of email migration
  • Consider all secondaries first, followed by cluster sessions for primarys and early years
  • Consider piloting in Stirling HS and St Modan’s as both are very keen to move quickly