Moving to new provider

[new_user]

Hi everyone,

 

I’ve created a new account for this post as this is a little sensitive.

 

 

I have just been informed that we are going to be moving to another IT provider. The company we will be moving to has already be identified and the timeline has been set out.

 

I have been asked to think of the best way to move forward in terms of getting staff ready (they don’t know yet and won’t until much nearer the time, possibly a couple of days before) to use office 365 as we don’t currently use SharePoint / OneDrive etc. and also the best way to communicate the change of email addresses for the school.

 

In terms of the best way to communicate the change of email address my initial thoughts were an announcement on the school’s website nearer the time as well as emailing parents via our MIS. In terms suppliers etc. we would need to email them and inform them separately of the changes. We would have an auto forwarder on the old email address, but this would only be valid for 30 days.

 

The harder aspect would be the training of staff to use office 365 as this change is proposed to happen over the Whitsun holiday so staff would need to have some documentation or online course etc. they could look at over the holiday period to familiarise themselves with. As the changes won’t be in place, I wouldn’t be able to create custom user guides as we normally do here. I’m assuming that the new company will have SharePoint as a mapped drive so at least that will be familiar to our users.

 

Can anyone advise on how they approached this when they have been in this situation?

 

Are there any initial questions I need to be asking (final details of transition are still being worked on and I won’t really be involved much with this)?

 

The new company are aware of our needs and is working with the business manager to ensure these are all met. The new company will be providing support on an ongoing basis which is good as I haven’t had any training in new technologies since joining the school 6 years ago (never seen the Office 365 back-end etc.).

 

Any advise would be gratefully received.

 

Sorry I can't provide any more information but at the moment this is all I know.

 

Thanks

[PotNoodleTech]

Isn't it the new providers responsibility to do all of the above in preparation for the transition?

 

What is your role? If it's IT Tech or IT Manager and you are getting outsourced I am not sure I would be that inclined to bust a gut.

 

Apologies if I've got the wrong end of the stick!

[CHiLL]

We moved from Link2ICT's Zimbra service to Office 365 back in 2015 and it was one of the best decisions we made. Sure, Office 365 isn't perfect...but it integrates with AD and makes life much easier.

 

Can I make one recommendation before going any further? Look at purchasing SalamanderAD. It's an automatic provisioning tool for AD and Office 365 that will create/disable/manage users in AD by reading from your MIS (SIMS in our case). When a new pupil is added into SIMS, SalamanderAD automatically creates the account and puts them in the right OU and group membership based on their intake year, specified in SIMS. For staff it does the same based on the employment start/end date and whether the 'Is teacher' checkbox is selected. Is will also disable and archive users when they are marked in SIMS as no longer being in school. It will also automatically provision their Office 365 account, assigning your specified Office 365 licenses (because you don't necessarily need the Yammer, Teams, etc licenses enabled for your users). We generally just have Office 365 (mailbox and OneDrive) and Office 365 ProPlus (the Office suite). However Salamander isn't really configurable by yourself, it's basically just a bunch of Powershell scripts. Just call them up or email them and they'll make any changes you need. Their support has been spot on for us over the years. They have a stand at BETT again this year, if you're going.

 

I presume you have a non-AD integrated email service at the moment and it uses a different email format than your AD usernames? So your emails may be something like [email protected] and your AD accounts are JSmith (without the full stop), meaning your new email addresses would be [email protected]. Yes, this will be a learning curve for your staff, however it can be made smoother whilst in school by having a single sign on method. So when they're logged in to the computers, they don't need to authenticate through Office 365, because they're already logged in. Microsoft offer a couple of ways to do this. We're using AD FS, which I believe is an older way of doing it and it was superseded by Seemless SSO? I've also seen other schools have some form of portal that acts as a SSO method. So they log into a portal with their AD credentials (including from outside school/home) and there's a link from there to Office 365, meaning they've already authenticated so they don't have to again.

 

You'll need to ensure that all users have their email address entered in the email section of their AD account properties. You can also use the SMTP Proxy field to add alias addresses and specify the default. For example, when we transitioned from [email protected] to [email protected], we utilised the SMTP Proxy field to include the following;

SMTP:[email protected]

smtp:[email protected]

Note the difference in capitalised and non capitalised SMTP. The capitalised one denotes that that is the primary email address. The lowercase smtp is an alias address (which in your case would be your users old email format). Any emails sent to the address specified in the lowercase smtp would still arrive in the primary mailbox for that user. However this only applies if you're keeping the same domain name.

 

Another important implementation we made was a GAL (Global Address List). We were able to split the mailboxes into two sections, staff and students. The reason for this is because we want the staff to be able to search the directory for everyone, including students. However when students search the directory for recipients, we only want them to see other students. If they need to email staff, they can either reply to an email first sent by the member of staff to them or the member of staff provides them with their email address directly. This GAL separation was a management decision.

 

I can't think of anything else at the moment, but I'll update you if I remember more.

[new_user]

I am currently an IT Tech, I won't be getting outsourced. The current setup we have is Office 365 back-end so staff have office 365 email addresses etc. however we still use traditional network storage and we're not sure if staff will be able to comprehend the idea of Office 365 storage such as SharePoint etc.

 

I assume the new company will be addressing my concerns however I have been asked to look into them also just so know what we can do at the time.

[PotNoodleTech]

Ah I see I got the wrong end of the stick ad didn't realise you were just talking about your email system! Sorry!

 

Honestly, office365 is not difficult to pick up - there is very little to none training overhead for the basics. Most people have email accounts at home so have used hotmail or gmail.

 

Really the main issues are going to be a the back end. Setting up aliases from the old email domain to the new one if applicable, making users aware of their new usernames or passwords, making sure relevant email groups/lists are set up so that people can continue to do what they have been doing, the transferring of all the old emails to the new system as now with GDPR you may be asked to dig out an email from 3 years ago so you can't just "junk" the old emails.