Case Studies

Eltham College.

Cloud Design Box is working with Eltham College to help them with their long-term digital strategy and overall move to the cloud.

Our team has worked closely with the college to achieve their goals by designing and building SharePoint sites for teaching and learning. We also created areas to replace network shares, supporting the college’s administrative and management functions. The implementation was supported by user adoption reports and training needs analysis.

We are now providing further training and extending the classroom with Class Dashboard and Microsoft Teams.

About the school

Founded in 1842 as the School for the Sons of Missionaries, Eltham College is an independent day school for boys with a co-educational Sixth Form. From September 2020, the College is to be fully co-educational, welcoming both girls and boys into Years 3 and 7.

“Our Cloud Design Box-designed SharePoint site is transforming the way that we work – for the better!”

Susan Roxby, Eltham College Bursar

Challenges Overcome

Eltham College needed a system that supported members of staff from a wide range of departments.

"We needed the structure to work well in both our Junior and Senior school academic departments, as well as for our support functions," she continues.

"The new system also had to be recognisable to staff who were used to working in network folders."

The Solution.

Cloud Design Box spoke to key stakeholders in the school to understand how each department worked and what the system needed to cater for. By doing this, we were able to design a product that is tailored to Eltham College and works seamlessly for staff and students alike.

"One of the challenges we faced was getting departments to identify relevant tagging options and help them understand how this feature would add value to the sites," Susan reveals.

"However, the team at Cloud Design Box were always available to deal with our queries and feedback, and were quick to respond as needed."

We continued our conversations with the school's SharePoint Lead to further support the design of the sites and make additional tweaks once the main rollout was complete.

The build of the initial SharePoint sites is just the beginning of Eltham College's long-term commitment to move resources to the cloud.

Long-term strategy.

"We're rolling out BYOD (bring your own device) with Year 9 from September 2019 and expect this to take our use of SharePoint as a mechanism for sharing resources and engaging with students to a new level," Susan adds.

Eltham College's move to the cloud ties in well with its mission to nurture each child and help pupils to explore their abilities and thrive. Now pupils and teachers are able to collaborate more effectively as students are empowered to take charge of their own learning, in and outside of the classroom.

"We are looking to extend our understanding of the potential of Microsoft Teams as a teaching, learning and collaboration tool for groups of staff. Over time, our Cloud Design Box-designed SharePoint site is transforming the way that we work – for the better!"

Long-term strategy.

Looking forward, King’s is working towards the rollover of the academic year, reviewing, and refining processes and building on what they have created over the last few months.

“For us, Office 365 and its suite of integrated tools, such as Teams, SharePoint, Office and Outlook, was irresistible,” Robin enthuses.

“Everything is in one place, stored in the cloud and backed up by us. In addition, we have now pushed out Surface Pro devices to all academic staff, which further enhances the use of these tools.

The next steps for the school are to focus on getting the user and timetable data correct in iSAMS, matching accounts correctly to AD, and following workflows to help setup Team and Class Notebooks.

“We’re so grateful to the Team at Cloud Design Box for the onboarding meetings, online calls, planning, implementation and technical support, as well as for their unwavering commitment and help throughout this process,” says Louise.