Please note this information is correct at the time of publishing
Local Administrator (LA) bulletin – 14 May 2021
NHSmail shared tenant IG Community and Teams Channel
The NHSmail team has recently started a new IG community and special interest group for information governance in relation to the shared tenant.
The channel and group already have over 500 members and provides a collaborative forum for staff on the NHS shared tenant for local IG leads and staff with an interest in IG related areas. Topics include links to support pages guidance, shared challenges, best practice and the latest news and announcements in relation to the services roadmap. The group to date has held two well attended live events covering a variety of IG related topics and is planning a further event on 3 June.
What action do I need to take?
We need your help in promoting this group locally within your organisation. The group aims to promote and encourage local IT operational staff to work together with local IG leads when deciding on local NHSmail user policy. Please do promote the group locally within your organisation, requests to join the Teams channel and group should be sent to feedback@nhs.net.
Licencing expiry/renewal
The Microsoft Enterprise Subscription Agreement (ESA) is designed for organisations that want to licence software and cloud services for a minimum three-year period and where the Public Sector and NHS discounts are applied.
The ESA option allows an organisation to effectively subscribe to the rights to use specific Microsoft products and services instead of owning them. The subscription option also enables you to increase licences as required during the year, or decrease subscription counts on an annual basis at the anniversary; this is referred to as a true-up or true-down.
An organisation’s ESA points to the NHSmail tenant to provide the top ups to the National Policy such as larger mailbox capacity with E1, or local applications with Apps for Enterprise for example.
Organisations who utilise the NHSmail platform have responsibility for making sure that they have enough active licences to cover the employees they have assigned to each of their user policies in the NHSmail Portal. As an ESA, the licence entitlement does expire with the contract and organisations must work with Microsoft and their Licensing Services Partner (LSP) to complete the renewal process prior to the expiry date, to ensure there is no break in entitlement between agreements.
When an ESA comes to an end, Microsoft will apply a ‘grace period’ of 30 days – this grace period is designed to ensure the continuity of service, with employees retaining access to the Microsoft applications and services they were previously subscribed to. This grace period is a technical provision and must not be seen as the period in which the renewal is done.
If the ESA is delayed beyond the standard terms and not renewed before the end of this grace period, your users will lose access to the applications and services previously provisioned and they could be transferred to your organisation’s National Policy.
What action do I need to take?
If you are not sure when your Enterprise Agreement is due to expire, please don’t delay – contact Microsoft directly or your licence reseller for further details and support. If your organisation wishes to discuss Microsoft licencing, managing ESAs or anniversary/renewals please contact feedback@nhs.net and ask to speak to the Licencing Specialist.
Further details are available by visiting https://support.nhs.net/knowledge-base/onboarding-guide-for-local-administrators/ on the NHSmail Support Site.
N365 shared tenant virtual training
We are running several live sessions themed on the N365 shared tenant capabilities which include:
- Microsoft Teams – an introductory course shows the fundamentals to navigate Teams, get your team up and running, and start having conversations
- Teams meetings – includes audio conferencing, video and sharing. This course will demonstrate key features of Microsoft Teams meetings
- Teams Breakout Rooms – With breakout rooms, meeting hosts can break participants into separate meeting rooms for smaller group discussions, then bring groups back to the main meeting
- Accessibility – There is no limit to what people can achieve when technology reflects the diversity of all who use it. This course shows how people can achieve more with the built-in accessibility tools and features in Microsoft technologies
- Power Apps – This is an introductory course within Microsoft Business Applications. Power Apps allow everyone to implement custom and powerful business solutions. It is a no-code/low-code platform for building apps that builds off concepts such as formulas in an Excel spreadsheet
If you would like to attend one of the events, please visit the N365 shared tenant virtual training NHSmail support page.
10% large mailbox quota update
As mentioned in this Managing Mailbox Quota article, we recommend that LAs review their organisation’s allocation of large mailboxes to ensure that their use is appropriate and relevant.
We are actively working with organisations who are exceeding their 10% allocation to encourage the use of the Online archiving feature. This should reduce the amount of mail accounts that need increased capacity.
Online archives are fully searchable via both Outlook and OWA and have an initial capacity of 100GB.
Organisations continuing to exceed the 10% limit who require further large mailboxes will need to procure O365 licences.
Exchange Online archiving
Following the NHSmail Refresh migration your users can experience the benefits of Exchange Online archiving.
Microsoft Exchange Online archiving is a Microsoft 365 cloud-based, enterprise-class archiving solution that now comes part of the offering provided by NHSmail.
It is a solution that enables you to store and manage older or legacy emails outside of your primary mailbox – freeing up quota space and improving Outlook performance. 100GB of automatically expandable online archiving storage space is available, alongside your standard 4GB mailbox.
For further information please read the guidance on Exchange Online Archiving Guidance and FAQs.
Privacy settings reminder when using Microsoft 365
The NHSmail team recently communicated to LAs regarding privacy settings.
It is important that you are aware of the privacy settings in the apps such as Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive and how to use them to avoid any risk to the privacy of your organisation’s documents. The default settings should always be private. Changing the settings to the public (allow everyone in your company) setting will publicly share content with all 1.5 million NHSmail users.
For further information please read the guidance on Private vs. Public for Microsoft Teams on the NHSmail support pages.
Planned maintenance 15 May 2021
Please be aware that there is planned maintenance to NHSmail Portal services on Saturday 15 May between 07:00 and 12:00. During this time there will be a limited period when LAs are unable to access Portal services or make any changes, however access to email will continue to be available.
Further details can be found on the NHSmail support pages – https://support.nhs.net/2021/05/nhsmail-portal-planned-maintenance-15-05/.
Updated Junk Email guidance
The NHSmail team have updated the Junk Email guidance to include how Exchange Online Protection enhancements have significantly reduced the number of overall malicious and spam emails successfully entering the domain.
The guidance also explains what measures organisations and third-party suppliers can take to reduce the likelihood of legitimate emails being marked as junk or spam.
Where can I get support?
There is a range of LA specific guidance available via the NHSmail support site. If your query remains unanswered, please contact your local IT department or the NHSmail helpdesk helpdesk@nhs.net for support.
Best wishes,
NHSmail Team
| Last Reviewed Date | 17/05/2021 |
