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Science Across the World is offering workshops based on the new activities it has developed in partnership with WMnet. The activities enable students around the world to undertake research into climate change in their own country and to exchange their findings and opinions with other students around the world. The workshops are of interest to teachers of KS3/4 science, geography, ICT and languages, as well as those looking to add an international dimension to their teaching.

These workshops are subsidised by WMnet and are offered free of charge to participating teachers. The courses will be run at schools within the West Midlands area (subject to local demand) or a science centre in the region during the week 15th – 19th October 2006.

Further details can be found on the WMnet website or downloaded from here.

Digitalbrain’s major platform update to Java based code is near to completion; the new Calendar and Webmail applications are finished and currently in Quality Assurance. Users will be migrated to the new services from the old Calendar and Webmail applications as follows:

Calendar Migration

Migration to the new Calendar is envisaged to begin week beginning the 28th of August and will last for approximately ten days. All users will be migrated during this time as this is not expected to be an extensive task.

Email and Contacts Migration

There are over 20 million email and 4 million contacts to be migrated, therefore the migration to new email is an extensive process. The new email and contact or ‘shared address book’ applications are currently undergoing final QA with a target release date of the week beginning 28th of August. This migration will take the form of two phases:

1. The migration of users who have logged into the portal over the last 180 days (active users). This process is expected to take up to four weeks (depending on portal usage).

2. The remainder of currently inactive users will be migrated upon log-on. The process for each account is expected to only take 10 seconds on average. Email will be unavailable during this time, although all other portal services will remain unaffected.

It is difficult to predict a precise timetable of users/LAs within the five week period, as the time taken will be determined by the size of individual email accounts. However, in order to alleviate any uncertainty, Digitalbrain will communicate progress as follows:

1. Each day during the migration period Digitalbrain will update progress against target on updates.digitalbrain.com. Updates will begin from the 29th of August.

2. Digitalbrain will prioritise migration of all top level accounts first, giving a showcase for each LA /school, for training and communication purposes .

3. In addition to the above, any admin users will also be prioritised. The training material for the new features will be distributed to LAs and be available at help.digitalbrain.com/help/helpfiles/ prior to migration.

Please note that the dates above are subject to final QA and any changes to these will be communicated on updates.digitalbrain.com/