ISG Blog

As we all continue to work towards protecting the Salvation Army data and its networks, ISG will be implementing a change to incoming emails known as an external email banner or external email warning.  This system helps to alert users from clicking on malicious links, phishing emails sent by external senders.  It plays a vital role in protecting against spam and phishing threats.

What this means is that from Friday, 11 June, any emails received from senders outside of TSA NZFTS territory will contain a banner at the top of the message.  The purpose of this is to remind email users to be cautious of opening attachments or following links from external contacts, helping reduce the threat of phishing and malware.

On the Outlook client, the banner will look similar to this:

This banner will also appear in your Inbox on your mobile and will be similar to this:

Please note, that this will be for all emails sent from outside our Microsoft tenant (which includes other TSA territories).  It may also appear on emails that are created from within TechOne too.  The important matter is to pay attention to the banner and IF you are not expecting the email and it contains links, then check with the sender (if you know them) before proceeding.  

Should you have any queries on this, feel free to contact the ISG team and they will be happy to clear up any concerns with this.

Thank you for your assistance as we all work together to protect our client’s data and the TSA network.

This is just a friendly reminder to be wary of unexpected emails received, particularly from unknown users.

There continues to be a number of emails that are arriving in users Inboxes that are scams, or attempts at phishing information.

A recent one received within our organisation appeared to be an invoice with a pdf attachment.  Fortunately the user was suspicious of this because they were not aware of an impending bill and did not recognise the user.  When looking even more closely, the pdf attachment was not an attachment at all, but simply a link as per the picture attached below

The easiest way to check on such things is to allow your cursor to hover over the link, or the "attachment". The link will automatically appear either over the "link/attachment" or at the bottom of the window as per this picture

Thank you to all who are diligent and watchful as they continue to use technology to fulfill the mission of caring for people, transforming lives and reforming society through God's Holy Spirit's power.

1st world problems... Global problems!  Another win for those who bring their reusable bags 

Enjoy your weekend.

Today we wish to remind everyone of the escalation process for your various tickets and requests.  It is ISG's hope that you won't need to follow this process, but there are times when the team get busy with other matters and don't give you the attention you believe your problem requires.

In the first instance if your matter is urgent, feel free to call us on 04 802 6262. Whoever you speak to from Team iSG will be able to assist or will be able to pass you on to the person in the team who can.

All other matters should first and foremost be logged as a ticket. Our techs can often have "corridor conversations" but these are often not logged as many other "corridor conversations" can happen by the time they are back at their desks to log the ticket.  It's ALWAYS best if you log the ticket first.

When ISG receives an escalation request, the first thing that is done is to look at the information in the ticket to find the latest information in it and then we are able to check where we are at and what still needs to be done.  At the point of logging your ticket, you will receive an email notification with your ticket number which speeds up the process in ISG assisting you with the escalation request. 

The next option is to login to Supportal and simply add a note in the ticket for technicians to be notified.  To do this in Supportal, select "Requests" (on top bar).  This will take you to the list of all your currently logged tickets.  Select the ticket in question and in the "Actions" button, select "Add Notes".  Enter the information you need iSG to know about, ensure the box with "Email this note to the technician" is ticked and "Add Note".  The technician will be notified and will be in touch as soon as they are able.

Should you have already tried that and still don't believe you're getting the attention your ticket deserves, iSG recommends you make contact with Michael Cabatbat or Andy Jones. Michael is the OpsIT Team Leader and is responsible for directing the team to the most pressing matters each day. He is the person who keeps an eye on the Supportal and chases the team when required. Andy is the Data Analysis Service Team Leader and is responsible for any SAMIS, iMIS or TechOne related issues.  If your concern relates to these aforementioned systems, then Andy is the person to call. For all other matters Michael will be able to assist.  Their email and phone numbers are available in MyDetails or even in Teams (check Wednesday blog for a great tip on the use of Teams for how to do this quickly).

Alternatively you can contact Peter Hennessey if Michael or Andy weren't available or you don't think they helped. 

Escalating to us is helpful as it gives ISG the opportunity to review our processes to ensure we're doing the best we can. So any escalation provides us with a chance to improve our service, and for us to enable the mission for those on the front line. 

Thank you for assisting us in helping you.

With the transition to O365, you may have a bit more visibility of some of the phishing/scam emails that a so regularly received in our inboxes.  If you've been migrated, you now know how to block or mark these emails as phishing ones.  If you haven't yet, you will be shown this in the training we are providing at the time of migration. But just for a laugh, I saw this cartoon recently and thought I would share it ...

Enjoy your weekend!

So a little update for the territory...

The O365 migration is going well and all centres in the Central Divisional area have now been migrated.  iSG continue to work with Corps and Centres who are yet to be migrated confirming venues, dates and providing all the relevant information users need prior to attending the training we are providing.

From an iSG perspective, its great to meet so many of those who work day in and out of our "front lines" face to face.  We thank you for all you do in caring for people, transforming lives and reforming society.  And if we haven't seen you yet, we will soon! 

O365 is coming!!

Funny with grateful thanks to Danielle Strickland (FB)

Wishing you all a quiet (but not too quiet) and relaxing weekend 

From the iSG team

The Office 365 training sessions begins today.

The general plan is that users will be migrated as iSG move from training centre locations. What this means is, for example, training at Wellington City Corps this morning included staff from Wellington City and Central Divisional Headquarters and all staff at these sites have now been migrated.  The intention is so that after training, users can start using O365 straight away.

As we contact centres to confirm the training location we will be confirming the list of staff and officers to be migrated.  No replies to this request will simply mean that users will be migrated to the E1 (online version only) licence. 

The training is expected to be no more than an hour long and is set to update users with the upcoming changes to how to use emails and calendar and also provides an overview on MS Teams and the great functions available through this system.

ISG will be providing training geographically by divisional areas and so for ASARS and other centres that are not managed by DHQ's, you will be contacted to inform you of when we will be in your area and when migration for the users at your site will be happening.

This week sees the ISG team training at:

Monday - Wellington City and Newtown hub

Tuesday - Newtown hub

Wednesday - Tawa

Friday - Upper Hutt

We envisage the email, calendar and instant message migration to be complete just before Congress (with only one centre to be done after this event).

Thank you for your ongoing support of the work iSG are involved with and we look forward to working with you to enable the mission.

The long awaited Office 365 is finally here!

This post serves to update the territory on what has been happening over the past few months, and where we are heading over the next few weeks.

Phase one of O365 is about to start, moving TSA users from using IBM Notes to Microsoft O365.  This is primarily with regards your emails, calendar and instant messaging.  So far iSG have migrated a couple of pilot sites (Rolleston Corps Plant and Samoa RHQ), and have also recently completed the migration of all THQ (Cuba Street) users.  Overall, most have been migrated successfully, but it is fair to say some users encountered some disruption to their routine work as iSG assisted them with their move.  iSG have focussed their efforts in sorting any issues and putting measures in place to ensure we eliminate them from reoccurring with further migrations. 

Over the next few weeks each Corps/Centre will be contacted by someone in ISG to confirm details on current staff, what licence is to be assigned to them and what assets (SARMY machines) are at the various locations.  This will help us with a smooth transition for all users.  It is our intention to cover a region at a time and so iSG will let you know when your Corps/Centre will be migrated.

iSG will provide introductory O365 training sessions around the territory and in subsequent communications we will confirm where these are to be held.  Plan to be there!

We are keen to make this transition as smooth as possible, so stay tuned as we will be providing further communications on a number of related matters.  

A number of our staff and officers travel outside of NZ in their roles.  As you know, all mobiles on the TSA plan get global roaming as part of the package.

Vodafone has recently notified us that from 11 July 2019, the cost of the Daily Roaming service will increase from $5 to $7 a day.  At the same time, Vodafone will also be bumping up this service to include over 100 destinations, with popular spots like Vietnam and Cambodia coming on board.

For over five years kiwis have enjoyed the convenience of Daily Roaming and the ability to seamlessly use their mobile plan in many destinations around the world for a set fee.  Daily Roaming still remains your easy-to-use service, so you can be free to work like you’ve never left.

To find out more info and see all the new destinations click here.

In order to provide a consistent operating environment for TSA Centres, to keep updated with the latest security patches and to improve reliability, iSG are implementing a regularly scheduled “change window”.

This will be conducted on the first and third Thursday of every Month, from 6pm to 10pm.

During these periods, iSG or our affiliated support partners will perform operations such as system updates, firmware updates, operating system updates, software updates, patch application and reboot of managed devices.

These operations will be across a variety of systems supported and managed by iSG, including: servers, network shares, Avaya phone system, Aerohive devices (including Branch Routers, Switches and Wireless Access Points), websites (including Support Portal, SABS, BiAS, iBall, eBoards, Intranet, Webmail among others) and any other systems identified as requiring maintenance or updates.

ISG will identify the systems affected, likely impact and anticipated duration of each event and place a notice on the Support Portal before the commencement of the change window.

ISG will attempt to minimise the disruption to centres (especially those with a 24 hour operation) and strive to maintain systems availability as far as practicable.

ISG will not send an email notice to the entire Territory for each change window.

ISG may not necessarily perform any actions at all on any given first or third Thursday of a particular month, but having them regularly scheduled it is hoped allows centres to plan around potential outages or service disruption.

ISG reserve the right to perform updates at times additional to the regularly-scheduled window, if they are of a critical nature or leaving systems unpatched represents an unacceptable risk to TSA. If such additional “out of schedule” updates are required, iSG will attempt to advertise these as far in advance as possible via Support Portal notification message.

We wish to notify of an upcoming change to Supportal. In the next few weeks you will see a significant change to how the Supportal home screen looks.

This change is happening to assist users in getting better service from Team iSG.

Some of the changes that you will see are:

• the ability to receive email notifications and reply to these directly into your ticket from the email;
• the ability for technicians to fix issues on your computer without you needing to connect via the Remote assistance tool which will save users time and frustration with the current process;
• this system will also allow us to create e-forms which will streamline the process of the various requests sent to us. This will not necessarily be available straight away but is in the future planning project;
• functionality such as the Links Page and Ask Sally will still be available

This system is currently being tested by Team iSG with some of our 'live' tickets so you may get some notifications from this. However, we will send a further update to the territory once the system is ready to go live.

As promised last week, a troubleshooting document has been prepared to assist with this move and can be accessed via this link. If you can't get the link to work, then copy and paste this thread into the URL: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-M8XArSiMxBPPi-fOC0IxwHolWs6ONLxa-86nnnFzJ0/edit

As a reminder, here are the main points to remember about the work that is about to be done:

This change will happen tomorrow Thursday, 23 August 2018 from 6pm

• Your email address will change to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and will become your primary logon to The Salvation Army (TSA) systems. (Note the underscore becomes a DOT and there are no apostrophes (‘) or spaces!)
• All old email addresses will continue to receive email. For existing staff, this will be indefinitely. New staff will only have the DOT format email address.
• Continue to logon to your work PC with your S-ID (Sxxxx).
• From Friday 24 August, please logon to all TSA web applications including Google applications and TechOne Finance and Payroll with This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The exceptions are:
  • SAMIS – Continue using your S-ID
  • iMIS – Continue using your current logon
• Your Chrome Profile (logging into chrome browser) will continue to work with the old profile name however it will eventually ask you to re-authenticate. At this point, you must change the name to the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. format. Click on this link for further instructions.
• On your mobile phone you will need to re-log on to your Google account with the new format. Click on this link for further instructions.

As always, should you encounter any problems, feel free to log a ticket in Supportal and one of our team will be more than happy to assist with this.

Don't let the tools we use for work make us blind, deaf and mute to what really matters!  God bless you as you continue to fulfil your part in His ministry.

Enjoy your weekend ...

The iSG team are getting together again this week to work on ensuring we are all providing the best service we can to the territory.

At times this week you may be unable to call us as we will be in sessions getting some training, and ensuring we are all on the same page.  If you are happy to leave a message, your voice message will be automatically logged as a ticket and when the team are out of the session, we will be able to attend to the queries.

Alternatively log a ticket with us and ensure you provide as much information as possible so that we can get your issues resolved quickly and efficiently for you.

If you have an urgent matter, then feel free to contact Michael Cabatbat, OpsIT Team Leader, and he will be able to assist as needed with your urgent request.  His mobile number is 021 829 871. We respectfully ask that this be used only for urgent matters.  All other matters will be dealt with as soon as we are able in between the various sessions we are holding for the team. 

Thank you for your understanding as we increase our knowledge and skills in enabling the mission.

Disclaimer:  iSG do not recommend this, partly because your password needs to be at least 8 characters, contain both a letter and a number and not contain your name.  So in this case, the systems won't accept this password.

Have a great weekend!

Do you do a lot of texting?  Are you interested in connecting your phone to a web app that will allow you to text a little faster and able to see your texts on your computer monitor?  Then you might be interested in the Android messages "message for web" integration. 

This makes texting easier through your computer and with being able to connect to your TSA mobile, it means it uses the free texting plan.  You simply need to go https://messages.android.com/ and then scan the QR code to connect it to your phone so that you can send and receive the text messages through your pc.

For bulk texting, you simply need to create your group and then it will be very simple to send texts this way.  And because this is connected to your mobile, your contacts will be available for you to choose, you can use them in this system.

It's also worth pointing out that to do this you will need to use the LATEST version of Android Messages (made by Google): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.messaging&hl=en.  So you might need to update it if you're on an older version (visit Play Store) or change the app you use for sending text/SMS messages if you use a different one.

A word of advice though, make sure the mobile phone you use is one you are happy for the whole congregation to have to reply to you (if necessary).

Greetings

It has been a while since our last post and we are going to get back into the swing of updating everyone via our blog entries with a number of updates, tips, tricks and generally (mostly) useful information.

However, I wish to update you all on what has, and is, currently happening with the iSG Department.

The iSG Department always endeavours, to the best of its abilities, to 'enable the mission' of The Salvation Army in our territory. We are thrilled that users understand that the best way to receive the best service from iSG is by logging a ticket with us. This also ensures that when a ticket is escalated, there is a documented record of what has been done and this assists us ensure the ticket is dealt with as swiftly as we are able by the right member of the team.  Your continued assistance in asking those under your care to "log a ticket" will continue to be much appreciated.

There has been some changes within the iSG Department and over the coming weeks it's our intention to add team member profiles on the iSG blog so that you can get to know us and what we do to enable the mission. 

A recent change is that the Data Analysis Service Team (DAST) are now part of the iSG Department. A number of areas of service they provide are akin to what iSG provides, and over the past few years we have worked very closely with each other, more recently with the TechOne Cloud project. We do wish to make it clear that as far as the work DAST do, this move will not affect this at all and the expectation is that the service currently provided by the DAST team will remain and improve with this merge. This is just another way of streamlining and connecting with other areas of the Army to ensure we provide the best service possible. Major Bruce Edney remains the Team Leader of DAST and all contact methods remain the same.

TMB have approved a new ticketing system to replace current Supportal ticketing which will assist us all in having a more streamlined system that will help us process the various queries and requests more efficiently. Work has begun on the configuration of this new system and when this is ready to be rolled out, we will be communicating this via an email to all, but also through the iSG blog with various entries on how-to guides and tips for using the new system.

There are a number of other new changes in the wings for the territory and as we get these in place we will communicate further with you.  Please let all the staff you work with know that they can also subscribe to the iSG blog to stay on top of all these announcements.

I recently read an interesting article on Netsafe, and thought I would share it with you all through our blog. There are five tips they share, and so today we share the last three.

SHARENTING – SHARING PHOTOS SAFELY

WHAT IS ‘SHARENTING’?

‘Sharenting’ is a term used to describe parents sharing images or videos of their children online.

OUR TOP TIPS FOR SHARING IMAGES OF YOUR CHILDREN SAFELY:

3. CHECK YOUR PRIVACY SETTINGS

If you’re thinking about sharing a photo of your child on social media it’s important that you first check what privacy settings you have set up. Some social media networks default to public or more open privacy settings when you sign up so make sure what you’re posting can only be seen by the people you’d like to see it.

4. THINK ABOUT WHO YOU’VE GOT IN YOUR FRIEND NETWORK

A lot of people have social media networks that include people they aren’t close to anymore. Make sure you are happy with everyone in your social media friend network seeing the photo – if you’re not sure or if you’d prefer to share it only with a smaller group consider setting up a private social network group with friends and family or a group chat.

5. IS THERE ANY PERSONAL INFORMATION IN THE PICTURE?

Before you hit post, have another close look at the photo to make sure you’re not revealing any personal information about yourself or your child. Some things to look out for include: the name of your child’s school, your road or house number or any other personal or private information.

To view full article click on this link.