ISG Blog

You will have recently started receiving the Cortana daily briefing emails.

The Briefing email helps you stay in control of your calendar and be intentional about your day. Within two hours of your workday (as set up in Outlook), you'll get an email about any relevant items to help you better prepare for the day ahead, including:

• Outstanding commitments, requests, and follow-ups to and from other collaborators in email that might have fallen through the cracks.
• Documents related to today’s meetings that you might want to review beforehand.
• Suggested focus time you can schedule to help get independent work done.

If you don't want to receive these, you can unsubscribe by following the link in the email you received.

If you want to know more about it, then follow this link for a little more information on the daily briefing emails.

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!!

As ISG migrates users to O365, a number of these users are being migrated to the E3 licence.  This is the licence that allows you to have the Office Products installed locally, rather than only having these available online (which is what the E1 licence offers).

As part of this migration, iSG needs to connect to each of the E3 machines to do the installation of the new software.  ISG have encountered issues when trying to connect to some machines as the power settings have been set to turn the machine off after a certain amount of time.  One really helpful thing iSG would like to ask our users to do, even if NOT going to the E3 licence is to take 3 minutes (maybe not even that) out of your day and follow the steps below.  This will be hugely beneficial to iSG but also to you for future updates that may need to happen with the ISG Rental machines.

Once logged in, go to "Start" and:

1. Select Control Panel
   
2. Then select Power Options
   
3. On left hand side of the window, click on "Change when the computer sleeps
   
4. A new window will appear and under the "Plugged in" column click the down arrow and select "Never"
   
5. Then just select "Save changes" and that is all iSG needs.  
   

Thanks for your help in helping us help you.  

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.  

There are some financial implications to centres with the implementation of Office 365 and as centres are finailising their budgets for the year, we thought we should explain this in detail.

So the easiest way to explain this is from the beginning of the New financial period (1 July) the following changes will occur:

• As we implement o365 we will be removing Microsoft Office 2010 from all desktops and laptops. Due to this, rental charges of desktops and laptops will drop by $5.00 (less $5.00 per device);
• Notes user charges will no longer be made against individual so this charge will also be stopped (less $4.50);
• As we start the new financial year we will start charging users for their o365 license of choice:
  • E1 (online only version) comes at a monthly charge of $6.50 and is the default for all staff (not officers);
  • E3 (fully installed version) comes at a monthly charge of $12.00. Officers have been automatically approved by TMB for this license. It is up to the centre manager/budget holder to decide which license all other staff should get and iSG will be requesting confirmation of this prior to the roll over.

So if we take the information above, the summarised version is, from the beginning of the new financial year:

• Centres will have $5.00 per device and $4.50 per user stopped;
• Centres will begin being charged for o365.
  • If users are given E1 licenses then this is $3.00 less per month, and
  • if on an E3 license then there will be a slight increase of $2.50 per user per month.

We hope this is helpful to those preparing their budgets.  

We are now entering the transition phase of the Office365 project.

Centre by centre will be moved from Notes to Office 365.  Again it's important to highlight that we are simply talking about emails and calendars in the main.  Storage of files is part of phase two, and all other Domino/Notes applications TSA currently use (eBoards, BiAS, SABS, Connected, etc) will continue to be accessed the same way as per normal.

Below is what has been organised and we list this to help you understand what process iSG is following:

BEFORE THE ROLLOUT:

1. Corps Officer/Centre Managers will be contacted by iSG with a list of all staff currently in our records for the site, and a full list of all rental machines being charged against your cost centre.
2. This information needs to be checked by the site (either by the Corps Officer/Centre Manager or a person of their choosing) and a response sent back to iSG.
3. Part of this process is also about confirming to iSG whether users are to have an E1 or E3 licence.  If no reply is received, users will be provided with an E1 licence by default.

 What are E1 and E3?