MS Teams - Weekly Parental/Guardian Digest Email

[mullet_man]

We had one parent who insisted we removed them from the weekly emails, so I had to contact MS who then talked me through that script to remove said parent.

 

It would be nice if there was a bit more controls over the weekly emails as it seems it's an all or nothing type deal.

[MD120]

I've dealt with our parent emails this week and this may be of interest...

 

I'm using salamander AD to create the csv files. They are pushed up automatically every day early hours.

 

Be mindful for your user provisioning flow with SDS uploads: check that any new student/teacher accounts ilare created in 365, and have a licence applied, BEFORE your SDS csv upload includes them. Otherwise SDS will have validation errors if new accounts included in the csv don't actually exist in 365 yet.

 

Next, check that Salamander filter which parents are included. In SIMS we have priority 1/2/5 for parent contacts. Our P5 are normally grand parents or god parents who won't want extra emails! Or contacts that are related but have no access to students for safeguarding. Queue GDPR complaints. We include only P1 and P2 parents in our csv now.

 

Finally, I can tell you that parent emails do not get removed automatically. If you stop uploading them, they still remain in SDS. You can see the parent emails in SDS if you go to the People list and open up a student. The guardians and emails appear at the bottom of the student fly out details pane.

There is a way to remove parent emails using a graph API script provided by Microsoft support. Once set up you can reset parents for a single student, or for all students. When your csv uploads again it will put only the parent you need back in again.

 

I am in the process of installing the script as a scheduled task on our server to run on a Friday evening, removing all parents. The next csv upload would be Sat early hours and contain the correct parents for the weekend summary to build.

 

The parent emails are processed by Microsoft from Saturday afternoon. Please appreciate the scale of this task! The entire world's parents all getting an email. It is for this reason that there are no controls over exactly when your tenant is processed. It just happens whenever Microsoft get to your tenant as quick as their servers can process it.

 

I feel like I have got to grips with SDS and parent emails now so if anyone would like a hand, drop me a PM!

 

Hope this helps someone

Hi cstreet.

 

We have salamander running the backend process of creating the CSV in sds and can see the guardianrelationship CSV file created on our server and in the sds profile 'sync option for guardians' is enabled.

 

On teams admin under assignments the guardian email digest is switched on and the class teams do have the setting enabled but emails aren't going out?!

 

Any suggestions where this might be tripping up or logs to try and see what the problem is?

[mobrien]

Locker/Ruler connect now has a version that creates the 8 csv files in the Ruler folder. These can then be used to set up SDS, linking the students with their parents. 4 of the csv files created are blank, so as not to interrupt the existing import of SIMs classes into Teams classes (there was a query earlier about this).

 

Once an SDS profile is created with these files, the sync works fine.

 

But, we enabled this early last week and no Guardian emails were sent out. Checked the settings in Teams Admin centre (the master 'switch' under Assignments), and also that each class had the setting for the email enabled and they are correct.

 

Not sure where to go to fix this

 

Got it sorted now - I'd left the parent designation field blank. Once I set them all as 'parent' rather than the default 'other' the emails got sent.

[agibson]

Hi

 

Sorry to resurrect this older thread, I am just wondering if anyone has a copy of a sample Assignments parental digest they could share (redacting any identifiable pupil information) - we are looking to adopt this but want to know what the report to parents looks like before we send them out.

 

Thanks in advance

 

Andy