Overview ATS is delighted to be a Google Workspace for Education Partner Danson Primary School is a 3 form entry Primary School based in Bexley. ATS initially provided three 4 hour visits a week to Danson, they later took advantage of our “Fully Managed Embedded Service” which placed an engineer embedded in the school 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Once key metrics were met, and IT was at an agreed level, Danson moved to our Support+ package. They now have 3 x 4 hour visits a week plus additional IT Manager visits once a fortnight to assist on project and development work. ATS developed a 5 year plan in conjunction with the Senior Leadership Team at Danson with the following goals To decrease dependence on expensive on-premises servers Increase flexibility – the ability to work anywhere on any device Simplify collaboration Reduce paper resources There were frustrations with the schools outgoing email and calendar solution which had limitations as it was part of a wider system used by all schools in the borough. Solution Danson chose to adopt Google Workspace for Education as the appeal of Gmail with its built in Data Protection and Compliance combined with Google Workspace’s Calendar flexibility proved appealing. The school had also started to trial Chromebooks. Danson moved data and email to Google Workspace in two main stages: Migration of email and Calendar Migration of My Documents and Shared drives. They chose a fresh start to both with minimal migration of email and data. A cut-off date as to when email would start being delivered to Gmail was agreed, shared mailboxes and SLT mailboxes were backed up and made available offline for a period of time. As staff got used to Gmail and Calendar they started to explore Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms and found that the majority of tasks they did in their Microsoft equivalents they could do within Google’s eco system. Six months later the SLT agreed a small amount of the data on the shared and public drives that would be migrated to Google Shared Drives and that current data stored on servers be made read only and treated as an archive. ATS assisted staff in migrating their My Documents over to Google Drive where required As part of their strategy ATS also assisted Danson in moving their MIS and phone systems to Cloud hosted solutions. Result The schools decision to implement a cloud strategy early on paid dividends during the COVID pandemic as teaching staff were forced to deliver lessons remotely and admin staff carry out their daily tasks. The key systems were already in place to allow this to happen. Staff were able to plan and deliver lessons using Google Docs, Sheets, Slides as no software needed to be installed on their devices. Students worked effectively simply by logging in to their Google Workspace account on any PC, laptop, tablet or phone they had at home. The school has embraced the use of all areas of Google Workspace and continue to deliver resources and homework via it now. ATS have also assisted Danson in moving their telephone and MIS system to the cloud as part of their objectives Comments from the school Changing a system that has been in place for a long time was always going to be a little nerve wracking. It did take many conversations to ensure that all stakeholders were clear on how the structures would change and the timescales for when the changes would take place. Having the documents in the backup created peace of mind until we no longer needed them and are (almost) fully embraced into all things google! All stakeholders were able to switch to working remotely during the pandemic as we had cloud based measures already in place. Having many items based in the cloud means that ATS can support us remotely which has enabled us to reduce the amount of on site technician time, it also allows staff to seamlessly access the information they need when they need it. There’s always ways to streamline systems to get the very most out of them, but having ATS actively working diligently to support and guide us means that these can happen swiftly and effectively. Mrs L Hunter – Deputy Head