Pros and Cons of moving from a .county.sch.uk website and email address?

[kennysarmy]

We have had a request to the head that we change our email address from .county.sch.uk as it's too difficult to tell people over the phone.

 

I am guessing they think it's just a 5 minute job to change it over

 

Has anyone done this move?

Why?

What needs to be considered?

 

We run our own Mdaemon email server internally and mail routes to us via the SWGfL.

 

Cheers

[FN-GM]

Ours was scrapped years ago. Our new domain is much easier. Its shorter for one, and easy to tell people address over the phone. Also people are used to a .com address and get muched up with .sch.uk

 

From my Mdaemon days it should be really easy to change. Not sure about the SWGfL.

[zag]

Ours also went years ago.

 

We simply registered a .co.uk name and moved to it. Was very little hassle. Google had indexed our new website within few hours to the top of the ranking.

 

We allowed staff to use their old webmail address for 6 months during the changeover but insisted they put and out of office reply on it.

 

We turned it off at the end of the 6 months and now those long complicated email addresses are a distant memory

 

We moved to Office 365 in the process so it was a simple switchover as I could set it all up independently while the old (local exchange) system was still running.

[SovietRussia]

It may look more professional coming from a .sch.uk email address?

[pantscat]

Can't really see why it's not a 5 minute job...

 

But in all seriousness - it's just a case of registering the domain name - setup your DNS records and then update your firewall/mailserver - so not really a very long job.

[IrritableTech]

It may look more professional coming from a .sch.uk email address?

 

I think for those who know what sch.uk means, yes it is a little more professional. @GrumbleDook wrote a blog on why schools shouldn't give up their sch.uk addresses which gave some positives for sticking - EduGeek.net - The Importance of Domains

 

The biggest advantage I can think of is that only schools can register a sch.uk domain. Therefore nobody can sit on a typo domain and grab your traffic (schoolA.com - schoolAA.com), and if you forget to renew your domain a drop catcher can't pick it up and hold it to ransom. It also gives geographical info on the school, which may help identify the correct school when dealing with common names.

 

Sadly the advantages are rather outweighed when you have to tell someone over the phone what your email address is.

[FN-GM]

Sadly the advantages are rather outweighed when you have to tell someone over the phone what your email address is.

 

Agreed. The fact they are so long is a pain. Just this reason for a shorter domain name trumps using .sch.uk in my opinion.

[twin--turbo]

probably 10-11 years since we ditched ours.

 

On a few ocasions various management have asked for a long winded domain name, we simply ask them to spell it to us over the phone and an alternative is found

 

Rob

[Edu-IT]

You could just use both? Have a short one, and a long one, and give people the preference?

 

With proper setup you can have everything ending up at the same place.

[Boredguy]

We've stuck with our .sch.uk one, even though we have had the SWGfL redirect it from our local MDaemon server to point it to our new office 365 one.

It's not too hard to get it changed, but there is a few hoops to jump through for the grid to enable it as you might need to pay for another SMTP feed.

 

Setting MD up to support both isn't too hard at least

[matt40k]

Personally, all schools should be forced to use the .sch.uk, it's only a one time setup cost and like people have said it's only for schools. All publications should display the full .sch.uk address, such as signs, business cards and so on. I don't see how it's hard to remember, school name dot county dot sch dot uk. You also don't get into the whole repeat of school names, st marys for example. I know of a few cases where it doesn't always work as nicely as it should, like when you get 3 st marys in one county, but it doesn't stop you have a second domain and have that as an alias. So you could say email me at [email protected] but when you reply it comes from the [email protected]. The key is to promo the .sch.uk as it's written in stone and use the other ".com" as a quick and dirty to tell people.

 

The other annoying part of this is when they do it cause the other school has done it so they don't have an actual reason other then it looks cool, so my tax money is being wasted on looking cool rather then educating - also it's teaching bad practices:

 

.com = international company

.org = international not-for-profit

.uk = uk based

.me.uk = person in uk

.sch.uk = school in uk

 

Just saying, school should teach the standards

[Boredguy]

Well Matt40K, we do have a .co.uk address dating back to the old freenetname dialup days, but I only use it as a alternative on our mail server since the blackberry device our new head had couldn't cope with the full .sch.uk domain name in the e-mail field.

 

I do know where you are coming from though.... was a little miffed when one of the staff outsourced our school website to a 3rd party without our knowledge and got an org.uk account... it's like WTF.... can't even use it for an e-mail alias since it's not owned by us so it's completely out of sync with everything else we publish on the web.

[twin--turbo]

Personally, all schools should be forced to use the .sch.uk, it's only a one time setup cost and like people have said it's only for schools.

 

I don't see any good reason to force schools to use it. We don't even have a .sch.uk domain as we are an Academy.

 

we use @abcd.org.uk

 

We have 4 main email domains, 1 for each of our 2 schools, one for the overarching federal staff who are not affiliated to a specific school and one to our 6th form.

 

 

1 peg does not fit all holes and schools need not be dictated to on this.

 

Rob

[matt40k]

only use it as a alternative on our mail server since the blackberry device our new head had couldn't cope with the full .sch.uk domain name in the e-mail field.

 

Is this still correct? Surely it should support it!! If not, time for a upgrade to a proper smartphone!

 

the staff outsourced our school website to a 3rd party without our knowledge and got an org.uk account... it's like WTF....

 

You own the domain, you can move the DNS to a proper provider like Mythic Beasts - UK-based shell hosting, co-location and Virtual Dedicated Servers who let you do what you want with your domain. You sign a three-way agreement with .uk domains - between you, the end user, nominet and whoever you throw the money at, so your pretty covered as far as them locking you in. The only issue will be with the the source code of the website, I guess they limit it to run on their own servers as they don't want you to find out it's a cheap theme they bought, or something they reuse over and over again, or even if the CMS (like wordpress) is out-of-date or whatever. Hopefully they're not crooked and they just spoke with someone who didn't know what to ask so they just went with the default. Regardless, you can normally take over the DNS\nameservers and just point the web site at their servers without too much trouble.

 

 

 

We don't even have a .sch.uk domain as we are an Academy.

 

Your not a school, your an academy, your more of a business then a school. You have to fight for pupils. Academy have basically gone you're holding me back with your rules man, let me breath so I may fly. It's a good and bad thing, bad is bl00dy risky, good you lose some of the politics, it's like someone offering you a shed load of Surface RT, as a (LA) school you have to look at it from a number of points of view, is it ethical, are they just trying to get you to sell the football pitch so they can build a new office for example, would it right to go all Microsoft, would you have to buy a load of Apple or Google devices so your not Microsoft centric. Could you support it going forward. With an Academy, your head can go, thank you very much and that's pretty much the end of it, very much a dictatorship in some regards lol

 

I am very pro LA, mainly because I can see how it can and does work, how a good template with a little bit of flex can work, I've also experience how too much flex can go horribly wrong, like a 10gb backbone when your max traffic is 200MB on your backbone at peek times, and how you end up with 100+ laptops in a small village primary. I'm not say individual schools don't have great ideas, it just they need to be channelled correctly so you get the best effect, so you don't get a really good network in one school but a really good VLE in another, I'd rather have all of them with a really good everything. The other main key is knowing when to stop, you tend to find school do something stupid once they get the perfect network, they go out and get some gadget that never really works but costs a bomb and creates more problems and they never really needed it in the first place. It's also better for the staff, I know alot of technicians would rather setup servers then reset passwords and like wise I know a lot of technicians that brick it when they need to replace servers.

 

Just say, come to the dark side, we have more fun

[elsiegee40]

My governor school is an academy and has retained its .sch.uk domain

 

The converting academies that have joined our trust both have .sch.uk domains for their new websites and emails too.

[fs171]

Its also important to get the web address change working correctly, there is a school i know that you cannot access when using 'nameschool.com' requiring you to enter 'www.nameschool.com' which kind of ruins all reasons for changing. And also confuses parents and students when trying to access from home.

[Boredguy]

Is this still correct? Surely it should support it!! If not, time for a upgrade to a proper smartphone!

 

Well our SMT have all been given iPhone 4S, so does that count as an upgrade to a proper smartphone (says a Android user )

[GrumbleDook]

An Academy is a school. https://www.gov.uk/types-of-school/overview gives a layman's overview of the types of school and What is an academy? - Schools gives more detail.

 

The Education Act 2011 covers Academies (and gives amendments to the Academies Act 2010) but an Academy is still a school. It my have a charitable arm, a trading arm, federated schools, etc ... and there are relevant domain names which can be used for these, but a school is *not* a business (not even a not-for-profit).

 

Have both domains ... it is not as if it is a lot of extra work to have the .sch.uk domain as a fall back for certain things.

[twin--turbo]

So who is the registra for the sch.uk domain?

 

Rob

[mats]

Nominet is the registrar iirc but other companies will deal with them. CS New Media did a good job moving one of mine over.

 

And to echo earlier comments, when I see .sch.uk , I think 'school'.

 

When I see '.co.uk', I think 'business'. Depends what you want to project.

 

As for 'it's too long' - domains are a bit like phone numbers. I rarely have to type or remember them because machines remember for me.