After much time tinkering, testing and tinkering some more, we are pleased to announce that all PrimaryEmail and SchoolEmail customers are to be upgraded to Exchange 2013.
Here’s a short list of some of the new stuff, coming for you in Exchange 2013
When is this happening and what should I expect?
The upgrade process will be completed by the 1st of September. If you experience any problems accessing your account, make sure you try logging on from the logon page https://login.schoolemail.co.uk.
SchoolEmail Wizards out.
It was reported to us yesterday that OWA wasn’t loading properly. Elegantly put as ‘This looks awful, what have you changed?’ caused a little head scratching as no changes or major maintenance had been carried out. After some testing we discovered that when logging on to OWA through IE 11 only the light version, a stripped down offering with slightly reduced functionality designed for ease of access, was available as oppose to the full blown premium version.
A little searching later it turns out this is a problem that was first seen with Windows 8.1 last month that came bundled with IE 11, only in the last couple of days has the latest version been offered through Windows Updates. The problem occurs due to a change in the way the IE 11 identifies itself to web servers. This article nicely explains what’s happening behind the scenes.
At the moment there isn’t fix that we can implement on our servers to resolve this issue. There are only a couple of workarounds that are client based.
The first is to use a different browser. The latest versions of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox work perfectly with OWA with the premium version available.
Alternatively there is workaround if IE 11 is the only browser you have available, these are the step you need to take:
We will continue to work towards a server side solution to this problem but until then you will have to use one of the workarounds.
Nobody really likes spam. Although a few of the Primary T monkeys can be impartial to a Spam and egg sandwich but that’s a different problem altogether. I am of course talking about those annoying emails that people don’t want usually trying to sell you something or extract personal details under false pretences.
It has been a hard time for our spam filters recently, they have been getting sent more and more spam and viruses by very clever hackers. A lot of the messages recently were very short and had very little text which looked harmless enough on the surface but each had a zip file attached. In the zip file was a small executable which if run could cause you any number of problems. To combat this we sent out our system admins to upgrade and fortify our spam servers further.
After making some changes and a few refinements they have added additional virus checks, adjusted our existing spam checks to be more aggressive towards known spammers, and now reference more known virus databases. All in all this should now stop 90% more SPAM and virus emails.
So if you’re fed up of receiving loads of spam and want to know how we can help or are looking for more information about School Email, our hosted email service, get in touch with us here.
And this week we don’t, *wipes sweat from company brow.
Thanks to all the engineers who were doing on-site, pre-morning and evening support to ensure things ran smooth for the schools. For those that don’t know, if your school gets the “call” we supply an engineer dedicated to your school for the duration of the visit, completely free of charge!
Here is some feedback from one of our schools:
To All At Primary T
We would just like to say a big thank-you for your support when we had Ofsted last week!
We really did appreciate the security of knowing that Steve and then Owen were on site in case we had ICT problems.
Thank-you so much!
From a school:
We’d like to say a big thank you to the Primary Tech guys who have been in school during our OFSTED. Ros will be forever in Rob’s and Chris’ debt for sorting out her USB. Chris’ cautionary tale given to Ros about a virus has been repeated several times over in school and it still cracks us up. Primary Tech’s level of service and knowledge to date, not to mention their enthusiasm for the job, has left us all kicking ourselves that we put up with such poor IT support and service for so long. Please pass on our thanks.
Awesome 🙂 Now.. Back to work, we have servers to update…
Primary Technology has been awarded the most prestigious quality assurance mark available for technical support providers in education. We are extremely proud of this achievement.
The Naace mark is provided by Naace and signifies Primary Technology’s commitment to the education sector. Through the Naace mark certain service changes have been made. We now constantly audit and monitor our progress and processes inside of schools.
More information on the naace mark is available at http://www.naace.org/
For more information on Primary Technology please visit http://www.primaryt.co.uk/
Various Bradford primary schools have requested a “Home Page” for their school which has educational resources on and uses the “Google safe search feature”. We believe this will also be a good avenue to communicate with schools.
This service is free for use and available at http://www.primaryt.co.uk/google