UK (new draft)

Following hot on the heels of our recent announcement of the partnership we have entered into with Microsoft, we have already completed the first 45 school migrations from our old Netmedia/MySuite platform to it's learning with all mail and contacts moving across to Microsoft's Live@edu service.

Live@edu is tightly coupled with it's learning, allowing not only single sign-on to the Microsoft service from the VLE but also access to a summary of recent and unread emails from Live@edu via the user’s VLE dashboard. Also, whenever the school creates new user accounts within it's learning, new live@edu accounts are automatically created for those users. Our integration cleverly allocates different Live@edu privileges to teachers and pupils as those accounts are created. This is particularly important in primary schools as it enables pupils to be ‘ringfenced’so that they can only communicate with teachers and pupils from their own school – they are therefore protected from strangers and the outside world. In addition, we automatically implement the Becta approved ‘blacklist’of inappropriate words within Live@edu to protect children. Any attempt to send an inappropriate message is therefore blocked and the learning platform coordinator at the school is informed.

A major benefit of this new integration and migration service is that schools can now choose their own domain name. Some of the domain name structures previously imposed on schools were unwieldy so they can now choose a domain that is relevant to themand that can be remembered by their students.

The first 45 school migrations to the new it’slearning/Live@edu service took place just before Christmas in Central Bedfordshire . Their old mail addresses were anonymous and complex and so all but 3 of those schools took the opportunity to move to a new simple VLE mail domain specifically set up by it’s learning for schools in the local authority. Consequently those schools now have their own subdomain on a common parent domain giving all users Live@edu email addresses in the format of user@schoolname.cbeds.co.uk.

The result of joining together these two market leading cloud based systems is that teachers are now able to engage and communicate with their learners through a single integrated service with only one username and password to remember.