Features

Features In Detail

OWA Interface: The standard interface can be customised with themes designed by us and you can even purchase a custom theme using your school colours and with your school logo.

Staff Inbox: The inbox has a simple layout with the ability to right-click to interact with menus and you can drag & drop emails into folders. You can also view your inbox with extra details (if you have a large monitor). You can also move the reading pane to the right or bottom (or turn it off).

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Staff Calendar: Every staff user of Primary Email receives their own personal calendar; this can be used to schedule events or book meetings. The calendar can display different colours for different type of events allowing users to see what’s coming up at a glance.

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School Diary: With just one click you can access your school diary; this will give everyone a quick way to see what upcoming events are happening at your school.

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Ease of use: Primary Email Outlook Web-Access (OWA) has a nice easy to use interface; this reduces training needs we have online video guides to help with the basics.

Search: With OWA you can search through your email instantly, searches can be defined by subject, sender, body and many more which makes searching that much easier. The search feature is also built into a few other areas of OWA such as the Address book and contacts.

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Address Lists: When using OWA you will automatically be able to browse your schools Global address list, the global address list will have all the staff, pupils (if applicatble) and distribution groups displayed automatically, you can also view you personal contacts in the address book.

Contacts: Every user can create their own personal contacts, they is also no limit to the number of contacts you can have. Contacts can have email addresses, telephone numbers and full address details.

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Spell Checker: for those accidental typos, you can check emails for spelling mistakes before you send them. The spell checking feature can be turned on to automatically check for spelling mistakes every time you click send.

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Signatures: Staff members can add their own personalised signatures to their emails; this will attach a signature to every email the user sends out giving personal touch to email without any additional typing.

Sorting emails: create and customise your own folders and assign rules to emails. Rules can be to move specific emails from your inbox to another folder. Link to user guide for creating rules

Junk Mail folder: All users are given a junk mail folder by default, this folder will contain all emails that mightnot be SPAM. Most emails in your junk mail folder will be SPAM, if we think that it is SPAM it will be tagged as ****SPAM**** this means our filters have looked at the email and decided that it is SPAM but has a small possibility of not been SPAM, so it is dropped into the users junk mail folder for them to decide.

OWA for Pupils provides a simple, safe interface which makes e-mail fun

Making e-mail easy: the pupil interface is based on the same back-end systems as the staff interface but is segregated to provide extra protection against bullying, abuse and sexual predators. Any potentially abusive e-mails are flagged and sent to the school’s admin account for checks.

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E-mail games for pupils: the Primary Email wizard needs the help of anyone who can get access to e-mail! Year 3 pupils learn by playing our email games which cover all aspects of Unit 3E (from the ICT National Curriculum).

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How the e-mail service works

Automated Upates: Updating users every time someone new starts can be a real chore. We have created a small client that installs on to the schools admin server that updates new users every night from your school MIS system (Capita SIMS or Serco CMIS).

A list of new accounts and passwords is emailed to the schools office account every morning, the system will even let you know if the updates are not been received by us. These updates are done securely over the internet and data that is transmitted is always encrypted.

Spam & Virus FiltersPrimary Email knows that fighting SPAM is very important, because Primary Email is only for schools, our customised SPAM filters are excellent at picking out emails that are SPAM and emails that are legitimate. We also have virus checkers that check all emails sent to and from our systems.

Always on the move: Primary Email is a hosted solution, this means that all your data is stored centrally on our servers and will move with you everywhere you go. This gives all users the same experience no matter if they are at school or in a cyber cafe in Florida.

Security: We take your personal data very seriously. Primary Email never transmits data over the internet unless it is secure. You can be always in the knowledge that Primary Email is making sure hackers cannot get your email.

Easy Communications: As a part of the automated updates we will create distribution groups for all staff, admin staff and class groups which are accessible from the global address list.

Manage Your Accounts Using the Customer Control Panel

The Control Panel is a web-based system used by the Primary Email Admin(s) at each school (usually ICT / Admin / SLT staff). Here you can reset passwords, create new accounts and edit global settings, as well as use the functions explained below.

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Unlimited Aliases: using the Control Panel, Admin users can add aliases to users within their school, e.g. head@schoolname.gfl.ac.uk to go the head teacher.

Customised Distribution lists: you can add users within you school and external users to one distribution list that will be displayed in all staffs global address list.

Pupil cards: these cards are designed to aid teaching and learning by allowing you to print small business-card size help cards that contain each pupil’s login name, email address and password for Primary Email.

Customise the SPAM filter: our SPAM filter is designed just for Primary Schools and we block over 95% of all SPAM. Any email that possibly might not be SPAM (but are most likely to be spam) are delivered into the user’s Junk E-Mail folder. You can also select any external contacts to bypass the spam filter, ensuring the right emails are always received.

Benefits to Teaching & Learning

Complimenting the features of our email service are teaching and learning resources created to help teachers teach and pupils learn.

Sexual Predator and Bully Protection: one of our main features is the child protection and bully filter built into Primary Email. When any email is sent to a pupil within a school it is checked against a key words and phrases taken from our ongoing sexual predator research.

This means that every email sent to pupils is scanned and checked and if any key words or phrase produce an alert, the email is forwarded to the school contact. This allows schools to see any attempts of bullying or grooming from sexual predators.

Diagram: How We Protect Children

Lesson Plans & Pupil Games: we provide resources to help teach the ICT curriculum for Key Stage 2. With our Unit 3E lesson plans, teachers can use the Primary Email Games to help pupils learn how to login, send email, attach images and more.

Features available to Admin/SLT

Staff can access a shared email account e.g. office@school.gfl.ac.uk to allow one point of contact to be shared between staff. Any number of aliases (Head, Deputy, ICT, Office) can be created to allow email addresses to be published without personal names.

My School Diary: Admin/SLT can use the My School Diary feature to publish school events (assemblies, day-trips, special events etc.) to the school website, blog or VLE.

Outlook 2003-2007 Access: For connecting to Primary Email with Microsoft Outlook (or exchange enabled mobile devices), please see the Premium Section.

Chargable Features In Detail…

Technical Support: Unlimited technical support is available. Costs £50 per year and includes unlimited calls to our support desk and remote assistance.

Unlimited Storage: If you think you might exceed the 100Mb per mailbox limited you can purchase unlimited storage space for £100 per year. This will allow unlimited storage of emails (fair use policy applies).

Domain Name Hosting: We can find and host a new domain name for your school. You can also keep your current domain and use a new one too. The cost for the service is £50 per year, which includes registration and setup of your new domain.

Extended functionality with Outlook 2003-2007

Primary Email works hand in hand with Microsoft Outlook 2003 – 2007, users that wish to use Microsoft Outlook can integrate their Primary Email account with Outlook. This gives users all the functionality of Web based email, but with a much richer experience. In addition to the features of OWA users will also get:

Ability to add additional mailboxes: allows users such as admin staff / SLT to add the office email account side by side with their own email account. This allows users to view office emails and their own email account without confusing the two.

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Advanced Shared Calendars: display side-by-side calendars to view several calendars at once.

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Quick and Easy Access: with Outlook you can view all your emails in one window allowing you to quickly scroll through emails and you can minimize Outlook to the task bar or hide it in the bottom right of the screen, next to the clock. Outlook will then only pop up when a new email arrives, allowing users to continue working as if Primary Email was not even there.

Admin users: Any user can be granted Admin Permissionsallowing access to the Customer Portal, view emails sent to the school’s Office account and view any pupil’s inbox.

Always-on access with mobile connections to Primary Email

You can access your emails, calendar, task list and contacts on any exchange-enabled mobile device. All data will synchronise between Outlook, Outlook Web-Access and your Mobile, no matter which method you use. This ensures you can always stay connected and keep in touch no matter where you are. Devices include any Windows Mobile Phone and the iPhone 3G.

Exchange-Enabled Handset Bundles for Schools: Please contact us if you are interested in purchasing mobile phones with email connectivity, we can provide a competitive quote for any number of devices.

Print Details & Faxback Form: Fax Back Form

Request Quote: Request Quote

Primary Email Subscription Pricing

The table below shows the options available when subscribing to Primary Email.

Hover over each line for more information.

Online quote: Online Quote