Techucation - Live@edu: Notes from the end-user training

My name is John McMillen and I am the Chief Information Officer for Graves County Schools in Mayfield, Kentucky. It is my charge to build and maintain a state-of-the-art technological environment to support a world class education for our students and those who shape and support their education.

I also host of Music From the Front Porch on 91.3 WKMS in Murray, KY. The show airs every Saturday morning from 10 AM until 1 PM but I am only able to do every other weekend... so check in and listen to the stream at the above link.

I have a degree in Business Administration and Marketing from Murray State University.

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May
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Live@edu: Notes from the end-user training

Sitting in Alexander Hall watching the end-user training for our upcoming migration from our in-house MS Exchange environment to a hosted Live@edu cloud service. This is a HUGE project as the entire state of Kentucky public schools will be moving to this service.

We have seen a few of the administrative training sessions and today we focus on the end-user portal service. With the new Outlook Web App (OWA) coupled with some in-house challenges, this will be the first time that our district has moved exclusively to OWA only access. This will be a true cloud service and will be the first time that many of our district users have depended totally on a cloud-based solution. I am hoping that with the maturity of OWA couple with the fact that our end-users have been using a previous version of OWA for out-of-district access we won’t see too much of a challenge.

With the new service there will be some great features previously not available to OWA users. The first being a 10GB storage space. In our legacy system we had a maximum offering of 50 MB to the majority of our staff and 5MB to students. Once we migrate, all users will have 10GB of space.

Shared calendars is also a great new feature in the new OWA. Couple that with the ability to see side-by-side calendars and the ability to create multiple calendars and this new feature becomes a powerful tool. This provides the ability to create new calendars for various resources and then share that to multiple end-users so that they can see the availability of those resources in real-time.

OWA offers many of the “Rules” for managing incoming mail that some have grown used to using in Outlook. For instance, if you want to create a sub-folder of your inbox and call it Faculty you can then create a rule that automatically moves mail into that folder for future incoming mail. This feature will not run on existing mail already in the mailbox.

You also have the ability to use the “Tasks” features in the OWA tool that we were able to use in Outlook. Those tasks are then added to your calendar.

Many, many improvements to the OWA tool. I think its a great time to move exclusively to this tool.

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