I joined the society as Marketing Secretary in 2023. The Society had informed me that they wished to modernise their IT systems as they were all quite dated at the time. Both Peter Witherow (IT Advisor) and I have worked in IT for many years, with my role being focussed on how users/people interact with IT systems and Peter’s role being much more technical.

Peter and I started by reviewing everything we had in place and documenting it all. We made some observations and recommendations to the committee mainly around our website, email system and file storage facilities. The committee approved the changes, and the new website was launched in October 2023. The new website had been created by Mark Sherrey, a former SCCS committee member, so that made our job simpler. We just had to make a few adjustments to the content and structure and launch the new website. We put what’s called a website redirect in place from the old .org.uk website to the new .com website. This meant that anyone typing in the old address would still be able to find us.

Once the new and shiny website was launched, we got to work on documenting and presenting a proposal to the committee for a new email system and file storage facility.  We took it to a vote and chose to go with Microsoft 365. The old setup basically meant that the society members were using their personal email addresses, which was open to lots of scam emails and looked unprofessional when we were replying to coal canal business. In January 2025, we launched a new secure MS365 suite including our own email addresses, allowing us to now send and receive coal canal emails from our new .com email addresses. This makes our society look and act in a much more professional manner. It also means the committee can keep all their canal work in a separate place. The new system has been set up with a much higher security level, using Microsoft Authenticator (a multi-factor authentication method which makes it much tougher for hackers to gain access). The MS365 suite allows us access to all other Microsoft Applications, such as Teams, Word, Excel, Outlook, OneDrive and Sharepoint, and the added bonus is, that we get all of this for free as we are a Registered Charity.

If you’ve ever emailed us in the past, it will have been to our .org.uk email addresses. We ask that you update any contacts you hold for us and use our .com email addresses for any future correspondence. They can all be found on our website here – www.coalcanal.com/meet-the-team/

If you have any questions about the recent changes, please feel free to contact me or any other committee member to discuss.

Tracy Craven