Firefly replacement - Sharepoint with CloudDesignbox?

[alanteece]

Hi - we have Firefly as a VLE albeit in an environment that is totally MS with 365, Teams etc. What are the benefits of using someone like CloudDesignbox over just vanilla sharepoint? or would folks suggest other options?

[archiebaitup]

I would really like to know if others have made this move too - cost-wise, it's a no-brainer, however SLT didn't seem too keen. I'm having a meeting with one of the CDB team who knows a bit about Firefly, with our senior team to try and get them on-board.

 

Subscribed to see others' comments too.

[Alastairb25]

We tried CDB, looked good, however we faced internal issues with Staff acceptance.

We visited a School that used it successfully, however they did have a Senior member of Staff on Teaching side who handled the implementation from a Teacher perspective.

 

We do not have that so likely that is where it fell down for us

[MartinT]

My old school switched from Firefly to SharePoint with Cloud Design Box.  The design phase went smoothly enough, with a nice site created and lots of training from Tablet Academy.

 

The real problem was the notion that each department would be given a target date to transfer all their own material from Firefly before it was shut down.  It just didn't happen and I remember thinking either we change something or this project is going to get very stinky.  In the end, we (IT) took on the transfer of all departmental data, setting up of shared calendars etc. and it only took a couple of weeks because we became quite proficient at it.

 

There were still complaints when we shut down FF but they had been told many times and had plenty of chances to ask for more help.  I took a fairly hard view with them and said 'a deadline is a deadline' to some of them, which they didn't like.

 

The project was a success by my definition, all data transferred (and backed up) and FF shut down by the end of the contract.