Holly Meadows School
The school were reviewing their ICT provision with a view to look at replacing an ageing server and equipment, but on a tight budget. ICT Solutions were approached to give consultation on what options the school had going forward.
After meeting with the school and demonstrating what a Microsoft 365 cloud platform looks like and how the additional Office 365 applications such as Sway, OneNote and Teams integrated with the cloud platform, it was agreed that school would look to moving a cloud-based platform but in the meantime work on a hybrid on-premise server/cloud based system. This was with a view to replacing their server to a lighter server in the future would reduce the cost of buying a full-blown on-premise server. Moving to the Microsoft 365 platform would also modernise their ways of working and communication within the workplace.
ICT Solutions then proceeded to create the school their own Microsoft tenant and move their "generic" emails such as head@ and office@ to their own platform. All staff members were then given an email address which allowed them access to the 365 platform.
The school received a session from a Microsoft training partner to introduce the staff to the new platform, specifically Microsoft Teams which included collaborative working - not just in the classroom but for the administration team and accessibility options in applications which would help dyslexic and English as a second language students.
Within Microsoft Teams, Team channels were created for the various areas of the school, the initial one being the management team. Documents were moved from the local server to the Team channel, this now means the management team can now access and collaborate on files from wherever they are in the world.
Jennie Wildsmith-Garton, Headteacher at Holly Meadows said:
'Thank you for setting us up with Microsoft Teams. We have been able to access all of the files we have needed to carry out our roles remotely and securely. We have been able to set up and share rotas for key worker provision easily and collaborate to sort things like the distribution of school reports which is usually a mammoth task at school.
I really like the chat feature within Teams and we are looking forward to a virtual meeting too.
We are noticing how much less paper we actually need to use for school admin if we make the most of the tools within Microsoft office.
Looking forward to getting the children into teams now that we are building staff confidence!'