No computer network at Valley Southwoods this summer

During the summer of 2015 –  there will be limited access to computers/internet at Valley Southwoods Freshman High School, as the building will be re-cabled during the summer.

 

Q1.  What… why wasn’t this announced sooner?
A1.  My apologies, I should have announced this last week, as it was determined last Wednesday that we needed to move forward with the re-cabling this summer.

Q2.  Is there a problem that this relates to?
A2.  Yes, staff and students have had slow log in periods all year long.  We made several changes throughout the year and now have the problem narrowed down to several factors that must be addressed – including the re-cabling of the building.

Q3. Will the entire building be shut down?
A3.  No.  Access to the building will remain open – but most of the building will be under construction through out the summer. This means the ceiling tiles will be off and contractors will be running cabling throughout the ceilings and into the classroom spaces.

Q4. What about the school office?
A4.  The school office will remain open – and we’ll work with them to get their section re-cabled with as little outage time as possible.

Q5.  What about the athletics/band areas, which are heavily used during the summer?
A5.  We have already re-cabled this side of the building – it was done during spring break, as we knew that there was a chance that we’ve had to work on the rest of the building and we wanted to make sure the athletics/band areas would be fully open.

 

Q&A about email transition to Google

Our district is transitioning from Microsoft Exchange over to Google for email.  Our staff email addresses will remain exactly the same, however, how our staff accesses their email will change (from Outlook over to the Gmail interface). This summer, all student email and Google accounts will also transition over to @wdmcs.org.

Information as of April 13th, 2015……

When are moving all staff over to Google email?
Updated on April 27th:   Staff will not be migrated to Google until June 2015.  Our original plans were to move during April – May, but the migration would have disabled the use of Google Classroom.

Previous update on April 13th:  An exact date hasn’t been set yet – but we are still targeting early to mid May.  Over the next couple of weeks, you may even noticed that some of your email is being copied into your Gmail interface.  This simply means that we are starting to copy your files over for you.  You won’t be able to use the Gmail interface until we are done copying everyone’s files – and we’ll let you know when that exact date will be.

In our last update, we talked about each person will move their own files over to Google, is this still correct?
NO… we have found a vendor that will move all of your email, calendar, and contacts over to Google for you!  You won’t have to move anything!

 Q1.  I’ve started putting events in my Google calendar and replicated them in Outlook so that I had them in both places (not critical mass and I was playing around).  When the calendar gets synced, will I have duplicate events (BTW – I have no future events).
A1. Yes, you will have duplicates in this case.  The migration sees the events as completely independent events as they were manually created in Google Calendar.  Our advice to you:  DO NOT try to migrate your own calendar information over to Google – we are going to do that for you.

Q2.  If an Outlook user has created an additional calendar, shared it with their staff.. what happens to this calendar during the migration.  Example:  building principals builds an additional calendar specific to their school, shares it with staff..  does this get migrated or just the person’s main or personal calendar?
A2: Yes, the migration will bring over any secondary calendars that were created in Exchange – as well as the permissions for whom they were shared with.

Q3.Users currently have their email stored in folders.   How is this converted over to Google?  Are the folder structures moved over or are the emails just moved to Gmail and stored in a single folder?
A3. Folders will be migrated over and will appear as labels in Gmail. (Gmail’s equivalent to folders)

Q4.When calendars are converted – does everything convert?  For example . . . all past events or just future events?  Do all events or just non-recurring events?
A4. Yes, everything converts, all past and future events.   If you have recurring events in Outlook, it will migrate over, but as individual events.  This means if you have to make a change to a future recurring event AFTER migration to Google Calendar, the change will have to be manually replicated for every event that was recurring in Outlook.

Q5. What about contacts and/or contact groups (distribution groups)?  Do contact groups stay intact once the shift is made to Google, or will folks need to recreate their own groups? (e.g., principal has several groups with student email addresses as well as parent email addresses)
A5. Both contacts and contact groups you have made will be migrated.

Q6. When outlook folders are converted to labels – does google labels accept spaces? special characters? Outlook allows odd characters.. does google labels?
A6. For the most part, Google will convert any name to a label.  The fewer the special haracters, the cleaner the migration will go, so you may want to get rid of any special characters in folder names.

Q7.In outlook you can have parent/child folders… what happens to parent/child folders when converted to google email?
A7. They become nested labels (very  much like the nested folders you had in Outlook)

Q8.  What about TASKS, are they moved over to Google?
A8. No,  tasks are not moved over to Google.

Q9. When we move our email over to Google… will a few people be moved at a time or will everyone be moved at once?
A9.  Everyone will be moved at once.  In fact, once we settle on an exact date/time, then all staff will no longer be able to use email through Outlook

Q10.  When we move over to Google – will my cell phone and iPad still connect to my work email?  Will I have to reconfigure them?
A10.  As soon as we move our email over to Google, yes, you will need to reconfigure your cell phone / ipad /tablet to reconnect to get your work email – it will not automatically happen.

Q11.  After our email is converted over to Google, will I still be able to use Outlook to access my email?
A11.  No.