Luton Borough Council E-Mail withdrawal...

[Koldov]

Hi Guys,

 

Some of you must be aware the LBC are pulling Luton School's Head's and Admin email accounts. These are the LEA's .gov.uk emails that they host and manage on their own Exchange servers.

 

The reason given is they are acting on a report which says the School shouldn't have email hosted on a .gov.uk domain I think...

 

The options given to us are:

 

1) The LEA Learning Platform which utilises OWA which teachers already use to some extent.

 

2) The LEA will transfer it to a sub-domain school.gov.uk

 

3) We sort out an alternative like O365 or something ourselves.

 

Looking at the huge number of O365 help threads here I'm not sure if I could take that on, however it is only for the Head and Admin accounts so I'm not sure if it's even worth it.

 

Security will be a big issue.

 

Any advice?

 

Thanks,

 

Kol.

[Michael]

I'd the say the most simple answer is option 1.

[Koldov]

Yes so would I, however the Head hates it with a passion due to some issues with the downtime and lack of control we had adding new users and such.

 

Kol.

[FN-GM]

I would use option 3

[localzuk]

I'd go for option 3 too - bring it in house.

[Michael]

I would use option 3

 

I would have said Option 3, however the op said they're not sure if they'd want to manage O365 themselves.

 

As a compromise, I'd say Option 1 in the short-term, then work towards Option 3 - if you're using just OWA and push mail, there's little else to worry about. Taking on a local Exchange Server however is a lot more work.

[featured_spectre]

Option 1 would be least hassle, but LBC is horrible for support on this platform as some of my friends in various schools in the area know.

Option 3 would be most hassle, but you can support it yourself and if things go wrong or smoothly, you gain a better understanding of its workings.

[witch]

Option 3

Setting up O365 was a real pain for me but with only two accounts you have only got to do it all twice. Worth a go, I'd say

[Michael]

On an unrelated issue, you have to seriously ask the question why and who in their right mind would setup an Exchange Server to host two e-mail accounts per school? Completely illogical in my opinion!

 

Whatever you decide, it's much easier to have all your accounts in one e-mail solution rather than two and two different domains.

 

You'd think also - especially LAs up and down the country, why are they still running local Exchange servers? It must be costing an absolute fortune to do this and is a waste of tax payers money!

[AlexB]

The question we asked when we left the County for email was.

 

"This is the second time in 4 years they have forced an email address and platform (less bothered re platform) change on us, would we rather run this ourselves to avoid future forced changes?"

 

Also you pretty much need your own O365 tenancy to hand out free office to students (Student Advantage)

[IrritableTech]

What kind of information does the LEA/Head send and receive from these addresses? Have the LEA considered that emails sent between themselves and schools could be intercepted as they traverse the public internet if they continue along this line? Do they have other solutions in place?

[Koldov]

Yes the LEA have considered it.... and decided to sell us DESlock+

 

Kol.

[Griff]

Option 3 matey