Primary school email

[beany1]

So I should just ignore it and use it?

[Joanne]

I think with primary school age kids, you might be best off using an internally hosted mail service. Many of my schools use 2simple e-mail. Not sure if it is still available to buy, or if it comes with all that purple mash stuff... could potentially solve your problem?

[elsiegee40]

So I should just ignore it and use it?

 

If Michael has been using for years, I would go for it. It is a pretty basic requirement of email for Primary to be able to block external contact. We use gmail and do it having also escaped the clutches of EasyMail.

 

Internal hosting is not necesary in primary... and is likely to work out expensive given that many primaries are 1 or 2 server operations at most!

[Michael]

I think with primary school age kids, you might be best off using an internally hosted mail service. Many of my schools use 2simple e-mail. Not sure if it is still available to buy, or if it comes with all that purple mash stuff... could potentially solve your problem?

 

That's the beauty of Office 365 though - everyone's using the same domain, however you can set rules for groups of users. Either restrict all incoming mail for pupils, or only allow them to receive e-mail from other pupils at other schools - call it pen pals if you like. It's always nicer to send/receive e-mails from real people and not just machines or software

[Cache]

I think the information box is there simply because you can create a Rule with Rights Protection to a message, which is the bit that uses RMS.

 

For RMS you need A3 or higher. Mail Rules are included in A2 and we use them for various things as well (otherwise, that's a large part of simple Exchange functionality gone).

[beany1]

Ok, thanks everyone for the help.

 

After waiting another day for Microsoft to get back to me, they have now stated "A2 Plan that you have has the rules options under that mail flow tab. It should not cause you any issues. Rule can be created and it should work fine. "

 

So I'll ignore the first two Microsoft employees, and take this advice

[Michael]

Happy Days

[SchoolsBroadband]

Afternoon all,

 

Not sure where to put this.

 

Currently in the process of moving over to Schools Broadband, having read the nice sales man email "Our solution also includes Microsoft 365 email with as many email addresses for staff & pupils as required" I didn't give it a second thought and assumed this would be suitable for our pupils.

 

I know that our current provider (LLN) filters emails based on keywords etc. to make emails safe for children, looking into Office 365 the safety is not that comprehensive...I was considering using mail flow to block external emails, but have found that to be licensed to use this you have to be on the A3 plan - which for amount of staff/pupils would be way too much (going from completely free A2 to around £9000 A3 is ridiculous licensing). I have contacted Schools Broadband but they never got back to me.

 

If anyone has any opinions that would be great, I know other primaries are with Schools Broadband so would be interesting to know there thoughts. Is our only option to buy into some type of pupil safe email / VLE package? Or would Outlook on Office 365 be OK in this environment? Is there any guidance/restrictions email solutions for children?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

 

Hi Beany,

 

sorry for the late reply. I've been at Fortinets Global Partner Conference in Mexico for a week. There's lots of nice new features coming your way in v5.2 which we'll be looking to roll out probably around April / May time.

 

I'll get one of my techs to answer this for you as unfortunately I'm no Office 365 expert.

 

I'll be in touch.

 

@synaesthesia, as a secondary school we can setup Office 365 for you no problem. Only our gold package comes with Office 365 for primary schools or for a small fee we'll upgrade them. If you've got quite a few you'd like to upgrade to do let me know and I'll get your account manager Craig to do "a special" for you

 

Cheers

 

Dave

[synaesthesia]

No worries, we've already got O365 in place at our secondary, one of the primaries also via their Academy chain are similar. Cheers

Mexico though, eh? It's alright for some!