Tag: glowscotland

Posted on
by

I’ve just made my first post on Glow Connect.

Glow Connect is the information portal for Glow – a space for providing updates on the development and enhancement of the service and for sharing how teachers are using Glow. 

This Glow Connect will be a central area for keeping up with glow development.

Here is the contents of the post:

Glow Blogs Update August 2014

I’ve made a few posts over the summer about the Glow Blog migration, which give a bit more detail about what is happening:
Glow Blogs Summer 2014
Blog Migration Notes: Users
Glow Blog Migration Notes: e-Portfolios

This is a further update.

The blog migration project is well underway. There are three or four main chunks of work that need to be completed. The first development, by Code for the People, has been making exceptional progress. The hosting procurement has been completed, removing a bit of worry. Plans for migration of the data from the old servers to the new environment are well under way and some exploratory work is being carried out. Test plans are coming together nicely, and it is great to watch the whole project coming to life.

My role as product owner is making a bit more sense, and it is delightful to work back and forward with the folk building the requirements, developing and getting ready for testing. The attention to detail by the members of the blog team gives me confidence that we are creating a great ‘product’.

There is still a planned content freeze. This will cover the time the data leaves the RM servers and is installed and set running on the new servers. It is expected that this will be around a week. Given that the data being transported is sensitive it will need to be handled with care, encrypted and unencrypted. We are hoping to be able to give plenty of warning around the time of the content freeze. We also hope to have a plugin in place in the existing blogs that will add a message about this to the dashboard of every blog.

The continues to be a risk that the migration will not be complete before the old servers are turned off on the 3rd of October which could result in some downtime, however we are managing this risk very closely.

In summary, we’re making good progress and I will keep you updated on Glow Connect.

I’ve been posting some glow blogs information here, so in the future I’ll probably cross post in the two places.

Posted on
by

Lost Puppy

Lost Puppy flickr image by Tim Shields Creative Commons – CC BY-NC 2.0

Here are some notes around the effect that the glow blog migration will have on e-portfolios hosted on the WordPress instances. There are two main things to consider, users/members of blogs and links to access blogs.

User Management Issues

We are currently migrating the blogs, including e-portfolio blogs, to a new WordPress Server initially running the same version of WordPress 2.9.2

The set up will mirror the existing set up, an instance for each Local Authority. The URLs will stay the same.
The permission on the blogs and their private/glow only/ public setting will stay the same.
Only users who have previously visited the blogs while logged onto glow will have the same access.

Going forward the settings for blogs will be handled in the blog rather than Sharepoint. This is partially because the new Sharepoint is cloud based and cannot be customised in the same way as the old glow portal and partially because of the advantages of having blogs stand on their own two feet (see below for details).

Users who were granted roles on a blog though the old glow group in which the blog was created, but have never visited the blog will have to be added again. (There is no trace of these users in WordPress and therefore no way of migrating them). You can mitigate against this providing problems by asking those users to visit the blogs before the switchover. After migration Admin Users will be able to add these (or any other) users in in the blog admin dashboard.

I’ve covered more about User Management in a previous post: Blog Migration Notes: Users.

Finding your e-Portfolio

If users followed the advice on setting up glow blogs as e-Portfolios they would have created a group in the old glow portal to hold links to groups of e-portfolios. After the switch over to the new authentication in early October (3rd) the old portal will not be there.

There will be a need for teacher and pupils to be able to access blogs there are a few possibilities in the short term.

  • Lists created before the portal was migrated to O365 will still be there in your O365 group.They will be buried in the migrated content but can be resurrected.
  • You could copy and paste the list from old glow and paste into a new glow group.
  • You could recreate the lists. This would be my favoured option as I would distribute the work to pupils.

For the third approach you would need to create a space when pupils could add their e-portfolio URLs. This could be a links list in O365 or a share word document in OneDrive. Pupils would need to have permissions set so that they could add to the links or have edit permission on the document.

As a teacher I would not use links like this, too much work. I would bookmark them in my browser and put all the bookmarks in a folder. I could then log on to glow and open the folder of links in tabs. This would after a wee wait give me a set of tabs that I could quickly go through to visit each portfolio without clicks.

Post Migration Development

After migration it intended to move into phase 2 which will be an upgrade of the blog software from 2.9.2 to 3.9

Phase 3 will include improvements to the service, adding plugins and themes to increase functionality.

In Phase 3 it is the intention to improve the setup of e-portfolio blogs by improving the setup, improving how posts are organised and how the profiles are produced from those posts.
It hoped that this work should be completed by March 2015

WordPress only

The main advantages with moving the set up of blogs and e-portfolios away from Sharepoint to the WordPress server itself will be:

  • We will be able to keep the WordPress install a lot more up to date. This will allow users to benefit from new features as these are added to WordPress. With the old glow blogs it seems that it was to hard to upgrade WordPress.
  • The setup of e-portfolios will be shortened. currently I find it takes around an hour to go through the setup with a class of pupils assuming each pupil has access to a computer/device. Removing the Sharepoint element of the blogs will speed things up in the short term.
  • In the medium term the new blogs should let us develop new functionality which will speed things up even more and reduce the opportunities for making mistakes.
  • We should also be able to develop the portfolio functionality of the blogs though plugins. This could make the organisation of posts and production of the profile snapshot simpler.

Please get in touch if you have any questions about the glow blog migration.

Posted on
by

The Whole Gang, 50 Days old by Dean Searle Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

There is some background to this project in a previous post: Glow Blogs Summer 2014.

Before the migration of the glow portal Education Scotland suggested that schools did some pruning and tidying of their glow groups to make migration easier (less data) and so that users had less to sort through and sort out on the other end.

As the date for migration of blog gets nearer a few folk have been asking me about what is going happen to their blogs, if there is anything that they should be doing and what will change. This post will try and address some of the questions.

You should not need to do any pruning and tidying of your blogs. The intention is to migrate everything as is to the new system. I was always surprised to be asked about tidying up and deleting old posts from school and class blogs. for me a blog is for life, it is a positive that I could dive back into the archive and see some of what I was doing years ago.

The blog only knows about users that have visited already

One of the biggest changes will be the decoupling of the blogs from the old glow groups. In the current, old, system the users and permissions of those users are set inside the glow group that the blog was created in. Those groups will go away. After migration you blog will not be able to refer to the old sharepoint group to find out who has permission do do things (view, post, carry out admin tasks) the only users it will know about are ones who have already visited the blog when logged into glow.

For example:

  • Teacher A has set up a blog in the old glow for herself and 2 colleagues, Teacher B and Teacher C (not their real names) to share links about their subject with pupils.
  • Teacher A is the blog admin and The other two are contributors.
  • The blog is a public blog so anyone in the world can view it.
  • Teacher B has already added a couple of links by creating posts on the blog.
  • Teacher C has yet to log on to the blog.
  • After the switch over to the new authentication system and the blog migration Teacher A and B can log on, Teacher A is still an admin and Teacher B can log on and create posts.
  • When Teacher C tries to log on there is no entry in the WordPress database for him as having a role in this blog. If he has never used any glow blog he will not be in the database at all. Teacher C will not be able to log on or create posts.
  • At that point Teacher A will be able to log on to the dashboard, go to the users screen and add Teacher C as a contributor.

To avoid this scenario Teacher C would need to log on to the blog before the migration.

Japenese Spaniel by Muzik Hounds Attribution-NonCommercial License

New User Management

Going forward on the blog service the user management will be in the WordPress dashboard not in glow groups. This will develop over time. We are trying to have a system that is not dependent on other parts of the system, In the old glow the blogs were very much hooked into sharepoint in a way that made it difficult to upgrade. We ended up using a very out of date version of WordPress. In the future we should be able to keep the blog system up to date.

Unfortunately the standard WordPress user management is not really suitable for use in glow. This is based round email messages to add users to a particular blog. If for example 200 second years add their teachers to their e-portfolio blogs to allow them to see them each teacher added would get an email from each blog and have to click the link in the email to finish the process. It also requires you to add one user at a time. This is not sutiable and will not happen.

For the first stage of the new blog service the developers will add functionality so that if I add a user to my blog with a particular role they will be added but the email message will not be sent and the user will not need to confirm the addition. The interface will be changes so that I can add a list of glow usernames rather than just one at a time.

The main problem in this scenario will be finding out usernames. This is being dealt with by another team in the glow program. It may not be ready in time for the switchover. In that case it may be necessary to gather usernames is a manual way (get them sent in an email, find them in O365 or even get them written down on a bit of paper. Then make a list in a document to paste into the blog admin screen, save the doc).

It is planned that the class set functionality that was present in the old glow groups will be redeveloped. The second stage for the blogs will be that the class sets service will be an area where teachers can search for a class and them copy a list of usernames to paste into the user management screen in the dashboard of their blog.

The third development will be to bring the class set functionality into the user management screen directly. This will happen in the third phase of the blog migration and upgrade.

As the functionality is developed we will be able to make user guides for this process.

Please get in touch if you have any questions about the glow blog migration.

Posted on
by

One of the biggest frustrations working on the glow projects is the limits it places on open communication. I was expecting to be able to blog ideas and thoughts as I progressed through the blog migration. It turns out that this might have lead to procurement and legal difficulties.

A Very Excited Puppy by edanley Attribution License

I am delighted and excited that the blog migration project, which is what I’ve been spending the majority of my time on since January, is at a point where we can discuss our plans.

After a lot of work and investigation it has been decided that the best way to go forward with the blogging service is to continue to use WordPress for Glow Blogs. This might have seemed to be a no brainer, but we had to be sure we would not run into possible procurement challenges by assuming WordPress was the only solution.

How We Got Here and Why It Is Taking So Long

Current blogs hooked into sharepoint, use a very old version of WordPress.
There has been a lot of investigation on how the old blogs worked and were knitted into the sharepoint system of ‘Old Glow’ we now have a good understanding of the technical architecture and best way to move forward.

Things That Need to Be Done

Authentication, Blog Creation, User Management.

The new blogs will need to authenticate to the new RM Unify project. Blog creation is current done in the ‘Old Glow’ sharepoint portal. The new service will need to include an independent system for creating blogs. Likewise the old system used the old portal for user management, a new system will have to be created inside the WordPress platform. We anticipate that there are many opportunities for improving the blog creating and user management in the new system. We will also, hopefully avoid the problem of being tightly coupled to another service which should make future development of the blogs less problematic than it has been in the past.

We Have a Plan

We now have a full-time WordPress developer in the glow team who will have the role of overseeing the technical aspects of the blog project. We have procured the services of Code for The People to manage the migration process and upgrade to a more recent version of WordPress.

  1. Move: existing 2.9.2 blogs to new home, development of new authentication, blog creation and User management. This will reduce risk of any problems that might arise from trying to move directly to a new and up to date WordPress setup.
  2. Upgrade: to more recent version of WP We will, again to reduce risk, upgrade in stages. This should not be visible to end users.
  3. Improve: Phase Three…

The benefits of the new blog system should become apparent quite quickly.
Firstly here are many features of more recent versions of WordPress that will improve the system without any development. A better editor, better mobile experience, better handling of media.

Going forward into stage three, there should be an opportunity for a wider range of themes and plugins and the development of a system for requesting in installation of these.

We should be able to make pupil profile improvements. For example the creation of the profile blogs current take many many steps. It takes me about an hour to take a class through creation. We should be able to improve that, and perhaps other types of blogs site, by providing a wizard that is build into the system. We have the chance to develop a better system for producing the p7 & S3 profiles.

Aggregation, this could make the following and commenting on pupil profiles by staff much more efficient. Teachers could potentially have a page where they would see any new activity by any group of pupils they interact with.

There Is Always Some Risk

There are few possible risks which may result in extending the planned short freeze on the platform. If these push our migration date past Oct 3 the current blogs will not be accessible. Our current estimates are that we will meet our deadlines.

  • There is a potential period of blogs having a procedural content freeze or outage for a few days in the Summer. Possibly another content freeze in September or October. We will do our best to keep users informed about this. We have not yet identified length of these periods.
  • Things go wrong, exceptionally big project
  • I’d guess this is one of the biggest WordPress setups in the world, we are moving from version 2.9.2 to 3.9 or later this is a challenge.
  • There will be a great deal of testing of all stages in the migration, we will be starting the testing early to maximise benefit while minimising risk to delivery dates.
  • There are a lot of different aspects of Procurement that are hard to fathom before the exercise is complete. It is difficult to estimate times we have still to finalise the procurement of the hosting for the blogging system.

Class Sets, will not be ready for switchover time. RM unify does not currently have a way for the blogs to gather class and curricular groups to help with adding users to a blog and assigning them roles. We will develop interim solutions to assigning roles to multiple users (probably pasting in a list of usernames). This will hopefully be short term and be replaced by a more robust solution when class sets information is available in glow generally.

I managed to avoid ‘blog with two tails’ as the title of this post, but could not the puppy pictures;-)

Although this feels at times as if it is a long drawn out process, it has been (and is being) made enjoyable for me by working with (or mainly watching the the work carried out by) a great team of folk on the blog project. The first time I’ve worked with a Project Manager, Business Analyst, Technical Architect, Tester or Developers in a formal setting has been one of the best things in my secondment so far.

Posted on
by

Renameing Glow Docs

Here is a nice quick way to create short screencasts as animated gifs.

The one above was created because there seems to have been a change in the way you create documents in onedrive for business (ie in the MS 356 tenancy in glow).

Previously I got a dialog to name a file when I clicked +new in onedrive. Now it just created a new doc and takes you there to edit it. After saving you can rename the doc from the file list by clicking the elipse … after the doc name, but that is a bit of a fuss. It is easier to rename the doc when editing by clicking on its title.

LICEcap can capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to .GIF (for viewing in web browsers, etc) or .LCF (see below).

LICEcap is an intuitive but flexible application (for Windows and now OSX), that is designed to be
lightweight and function with high performance.

from: Cockos Incorporated | LICEcap

LICEcast is free and runs on windows and mac.

Screen-casting usually takes a fair bit of effort, sometimes using quite a complex application and needing some editing. This resulting vide may not play on different browsers or operating systems. Animated Gifs are pretty compatible. It only took me a few moments to create the one above and upload it.

Posted on
by

I’ve written here about FeedWordPress quite a few times and if you have spoken to me about technology for learning I’ve probably mentioned it to you too. FeedWordPress is a WordPress plugin that lets you aggregate, on the one blog, many blogs (or other sources that provide RSS).

FeedWordPress is used extensively on DS106 (Which I probably talk about far to much for my co-workers comfort) and we now use it on ScotEduBlogs to aggregate over 100 Scottish educational blogs.

I’ve posted about how I think this would be a great tool for learning in schools, allowing pupils to work in there own spaces but pull project related content from multiple sources together.

I’ve just found a wonderful example of this in use (somewhat more interesting than ScotEdublogs and easier to grasp than ds106)

This site allows 20 students to record botanical findings, they do so by posting to their own blogs. The results are aggregated on to Field Botany | Plants of the James River Park System, There are already 700 posts.

Belle Isle

The students can post photos and informatino straight to their blogs with mobile phones while in the field.

Tom Woodward on who’s blog I discovered this site explains the details:

This early days for the site but in the end the intrepid biology duo of Jill Reid and Dianne Jennings will worked with their students to create a site that local residents can use to identify plants in our James River Park System.

Tom goes onto explain how he set the site up and the plugins used.

Glow Blogs

One of the problems with suggesting FeedWordPress for learning is that it requires a fair bit of work to get going, you cannot use it on WordPress.com, edublogs or other sites that host blogs for you, you need to set up your own hosting and add and configure the plugin. As we work our way through requirements and procurement of the new blogging solution for glow the possibility of being able to offer this sort of factuality is very exciting…

Posted on
by

Glowgrind

It has been quite a while since I posted about glow. This is not what I expected, made a few posts before I started (here or here for example), where I wrote:

This should let me look back and think ‘how naïf’ or let other folk say, but you said…

I am still holding to the content and ideas in these posts, but I am feeling that I was naïf. I had no idea of the complexities of doing such a large project in a government environment.

I thought it was all about working in an agile environment. I hadn’t really understood that the agile bit would come in when developing happens in-house. Before that happens a lot of other ducks need to line up. Much of this seems to be meeting requirements for procurement. Understanding the best options and ones which gives best value to the taxpayer. For some bits of glow agile may never happen.

Blogs, blogs, blogs…

I am still spending most of my time on the blog migration and we are beginning to see some progress. The whole thing is, again, much more complex than I imagined. The current blog system relies on Sharepoint 2003 and the old authentication system both of these are going away. By relies I mean knitted into and this first needed unpicking. Some of this unpicking went on at the same time as we produced (and revised and revisited) the requirements for a new system. Both the unpicking and requirements have moved on.

We are now at the point of getting some WordPress expertise in to aid out Technical Architects. This required another procurement exercise! After we get advice from them, the Technical Architects will give advice on technical options. Next the requirements will get revisited. Finally the the solution procured (I’ve probably missed out many steps here, but hopefully it gives a flavour).

Meanwhile

We have been doing other things, there are other projects, much to discuss. One interesting way that projects develop here. A set of principles are laid down first. For glow Ian and I are involved in this process. Nothing that would surpass anyone who thinks about online education but it will be good to get them fixed in stone. We will be refining these alone with two new product owners, John Sexton and Christine Lamont when they start after Easter.

Wiki Requirements – Help

We are now starting to look at requirements for Wikis. I’d be delighte to talk to anyone in Scottish education interested in Wikis. Especially ones who have used Glow or other wikis in learning and teaching. Comment here, tweet @johnjohnston or #glowscot or get in touch inside glow (the O365 newsfeed for example) if you would like a chat.

Posted on
by

The Unicorn in Motion Rainbow

A wee bit of an update on the ‘glow product owner’ gig. The title is a bit of a mouthful and still difficult to explain. I should now be able to give an elevator pitch, but I am not quite there yet.

What I can do is give an idea of what I’ve been doing so far. We have started the business of creating teams that develop various aspects of the glow environment as projects.

The one I’ve had most to do with so far is the blog migration project. The main folk involved in this are: a project manager, a business analyst, a technical architect and myself as product owner. This is not a full time job for anyone, we are all involved in other projects, activities and meetings. We can also involve other people, say another technical architect with specialist knowledge or procurement experts.

We start by gathering requirements for the project, looking at what the blogs and e-portfolios do at the moment and what we would like them to do at the finish. A lot of this is understanding and unpicking how the blogs are connected to the glow service and authentication as it stands. This turns out to be quite complicated;-)

There are procedures for this sort of operation, with a standard way of writing the requirements. Luckily for glow I don’t directly do any of the writing, I just discuss, review and sometime make a decision.

By now we are near having a first draft of the requirements for the blog migration. Then this will then go for further examination from the technical and procurement experts. Then on through, options, ‘invitations to tender’, procurement and more.

I’ve probably missed a few steps and got some in the wrong order. The project also has dependencies on other projects, for example the authentication one, Ian owns that one.

A lot of this is not really what I am interested in, but more a way to get to what that is. That is things like, mobile blogging, better media handling, a quicker setup for e-portfolios plus some rainbows and unicorns. Things that will help learning. The whole project process is just a means to get from where we are to where we want to be through the procurement jungle and down the options river on a technical raft.

The other job I have is to decide when to drop a feature. This might be a blue sky idea that I love or something more realistic. The problem(for me) will come when that feature will have an impact of delivering on schedule, then I’ll have to move from giving ideas and advice to making the call.

The process is a fair distance from what my ideas of the job were. I had some sort of romantic vision of myself and a team of crack developers cranking out amazing services that just work. I now understand that there is a lot more to it. Before the crack developers start to work lots of other folk have their parts to play. Turns out that these folk are smart and a pleasure to work with. Maybe we will get rainbows and unicorns after all, it might just be it takes a bit more work than I though to get there.

The gif at the top of the pages is based on the public domain image from: File:The Horse in Motion.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia by Eadweard Muybridge.

Posted on
by

I’ve now been working for the Scottish Government as a ‘Glow Product Owner’ for a month. This has been an interesting experience on lots of fronts.

On a practical level it means 4 hours or so commuting each day. This is not as bad as it sounds for someone who likes spending a fair bit of time looking at screens most days. There is wifi on the main Glasgow to Edinburgh trains and they are reasonable spaces to work on. So I get to spend about half the commute getting some, work, email, blogging, podcast editing and reading done. I’ve replaced the train wifi with a 4g wireless router. Interestingly I get up to 4 times my home broadband speed at some points, others it drops to 3G and there are a few dead zones.

What is a product owner anyway?

The work itself is a very different role than anything I’ve done before. My expectations were pretty wide of the mark. The role of a product owner is becoming a lot clearer. Last week we (Ian Stuart and myself) shadowed Education Scotland’s Jennifer McDougall in this role working with a set of developers who are working on a prototype. This was really valuable. We could see the product owner in action, finding out how the role really works. In these sorts of meeting the role is to represent the users (learners and teachers) and make decisions on the work in progress.

The product owner is one in an agile team and it is this team development process that give me confidence and hope in Glow.

As developments will be taken forward there will be constant dialog between the developers and product owners. Hopefully this means than when decisions are made about, say, dropping a feature to insure that a project meets deadlines, that that decision will be made in consultation with the product owner.

This then puts some pressure on the product owners to do their best to represent and balance both the vision of the ICT excellence group and all the stakeholders (picking up some jargon on the job).

Project Management, and other things I’d not imagined

Another feature of the process that will give some confidence is the way the whole project is organised. I’ve not worked in such a structured environment. There are folks in the team doing jobs I’d not imagined, a lot of these are to organise the project, keep it on track, ensure testing of systems will be carried out in a systematic manner. The people in these roles do not, in the main, have education experience, but we have been constantly encouraged by the way they ask questions that expose what learning needs from glow.

A fair bit of time has been spent by Ian and myself explaining as best we can: teaching and learning, the curriculum, the ICT excellence vision and, the hard bit, how the current mix of services that make up glow are joined together. This has been useful both ways, seeing the services from another perspective has shown me both how much of the basic functionality of glow groups is powerful and how complex and baffling the organisation of the elements of glow can look. The baffled look on the face of someone when they are taken through the setting up of an e-portfolio blog for the first time is a picture.

Harder than I expected

We are also getting a bit of inside into the complexity of developing services that will meet the needs of learning, security and a multitude of stakeholders. My brain feels as if it expanding to the point of pain at some times.

Much to the horror of my previous self this is not going to be a quick fix, most of the things that Ian and I are involved in are long term projects. Even the short term ones, for example the blog migration (close to my heart), are not going to happen overnight. Factors I has not considered swing into play. Luckily we are surrounded by folk who do understand them are at hand.

As an example: think about moving large amounts of data from one server to another, I would have though, pull out a hard drive, take it to the new data centre and plug it in. It seems that this is not the way it works, other customers of the new data centre may not be very happy with a stranger on the premises and worse plugging a drive into the network their precious data is on. This means data has to travel across networks and this takes time. That of course needs to be planned for. And so on…

One last Note

Although I am not directly involved in the new MS 365 bit of glow we are using those tools for working and communication. This has increased my awareness of the new goodness that is already in glow. Just thinking about skydrive and the office web apps by themselves we have got quite a nice bundle. 25GB of storage in skydrive (not to mention 50, I believe for email) and word, PowerPoint and excel in any modern browser. These apps are fairly fully featured and easy to use. You also have the ability to have more than one person editing documents at the same time in the same sort of way as google docs.

Ian would not forgive me if I did not mention OneNote, this has been a revelation. Ian and Islay High school make heave use of this in their long running one-to-one project. The desktop version is like a wiki without a browser with very powerful multi-media facilities. Given the security in the government building we cannot use the sharing built into 365 with desktop applications, but we can use the web version. This feels to me like a very simple light weight wiki without any of the complexities. Not the multi media powerhouse, Ian is used to, but a way to simple build a linked set of ‘pages’ and ‘sections’ in a multi user document. The page and sections are made automatically so you do not need to understand links and title. The sections in the web app are limited to styled text, images and links, but that would be plenty of features to get collaborative knowledge building off the ground.

We have found that OneNote I’d pretty good for sharing information is a fairly messy but quick way. Coincidently Charlie Love posted a nice youtube intro to Skydrive in glow.

If I was faced with thinking of how to get some quick benefits from glow with learners, this is where I would start, the office tools and as an introduction to online collaboration and collective knowledge building OneNote is a good place to start.

After a month I think I am beginning to find some ground under my feet but just starting to appreciate the size of the task. Ian and I have had a lot of good wishes via twitter and other networks, we appreciate this, so thanks, we will need them.

Posted on
by

The problem

If you open a link to the new MS 365 bit of glow you are taken, if not already logged on, to the general sharepoint logon page. There you need to fill in your 365 user name, which is your glow email. When leaving the username field you are then taken to the normal glow logon page when you enter your username (not you email) and password.

This is not a problem if you are already logged into glow when you click the link. It is a problem if you click in a link in your email, don’t use glow for email and may not even know what your glow email is.

For example: https://glowscotland.sharepoint.com/sites/GlowHelp/SitePages/Home.aspx will show the problem if you are not logged onto glow.

This is default behaviour of O365 and not something that can currently be altered.

Workarounds

In the glow help there is a workaround suggested:

  1. Encode the URL, using for example: URL Decoder/Encoder
  2. Add this encoded url as a parameter to this url:
    https://login.microsoftonline.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0&wp=MBI_KEY&wreply=REPLACETHIS&whr=glow.sch.uk&CBCXT=out
    This will give in our example above:
    https://login.microsoftonline.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0&wp=MBI_KEY&wreply=https%3A%2F%2Fglowscotland.sharepoint.com%2Fsites%2FGlowHelp%2FSitePages%2FHome.aspx&whr=glow.sch.uk&CBCXT=out
  3. As an extra use a URL shortening service.

The help notes that is quite a complex fix.

A better workaround

I though it might be an idea to try and make a one click solution to the workaround above. It seems to work: Simplify Glow Sharepoint links.

That page gives a field to paste in a url, it converts this to the encode url and finally shortens this using the tinyurl.com service. The example above is turned into http://tinyurl.com/om8hohs. This takes you first to the glow logon and then to the correct page.

Warning: I am not a programmer, my knowledge of JavaScript comes form google, there is a php element in the mix too, it does seem to work and after sharing it at the Glow Key Contact meeting Malcolm Wilson added it to the Falkirk glow home page.

Improvements

Apart from someone who knows what they are doing editing the script, I though one way to make it more useful would be to make a bookmarklet. This lead to a fair bit of lost time as I could not get it to work due to glow using https and my files sitting on a non secure server (here).

A wee change of tack gave me this: GlowShortLink. Drag that to your bookmarks bar. Then when you are on a page which you want to link to. click the link. It will pop open a new window with a short link.

I’ve only tested this on a mac, using Safari, Firefox and Chrome. It seem to work fine. I’ll try it out on Windows and IE next week.

And here is one using bitly: GlowBitLink.