Committee onboarding

Welcome! If you're reading this you're either joining the CSS committee, or you're nosey. This document is to help you get set up with all the different services we have, and to hopefully ease the burden during handover.

The first step you need to do is to do your committee training, and importantly the GDPR training. Without it, you can't be added to any of our internal services. https://canvas.bham.ac.uk/enroll/LWGCTK

You will be invited to join our GitHub organisation. This hosts the repository for cssbham.com, where you'll need to add a bio for yourself on the committee page. Of course, you can ask someone to do this for you, but it is best you learn to do this yourself.

Once you've completed your GDPR training, let the rest of the committee know and you can be added to our Google Drive. You will need to have your own personal Google account for this. This is where most of our forms are kept, along with meeting notes, photos, planning documents, etc.

You'll want to make yourself familiar with what's in the Drive as there is a lot!

In addition to the Drive, you'll also be given access to three different calendars within CSS - one is the main event calendar that is visible to everyone, but you'll be able to alter the dates and times on it now. The other two are the internal and deadlines calendars, which will only be visible to you, but are immensely useful for tracking when things are taking place. The internal calendar can be used for tracking university holidays, provisioned event dates and important EDI event dates, whilst the deadlines calendar can be used for publicity deadlines, grant deadlines or anything else with a strict timeline.

If you don't often use calendar apps and aren't sure you'll be able to reliably check it, Google Calendar (and other calendar apps) can have a widget set up on your phone so that when you open your phone screen, you'll be able to see the calendar at a glance.

Next, you should be added as a user on Vaultwarden. Vaultwarden is our password manager and keeps account credentials for all the different services we use, like the Guild webmail, Canva, Google Drive, etc. You should have received an invitation to your student email, but if you haven't (or it has expired), then let the rest of committee know.

If you want browser or device integration, then you can download one of the many Bitwarden clients.

It probably doesn't need to be said, but please choose a strong password and/or enable 2FA. Our Vaultwarden is a public instance.

Previously, we had a single login for a shared mailbox, which was only accessible via an online portal. CSS has now been migrated to M365, meaning each individual committee member gets their own M365 account, email address and inbox, which is then subsequently given access to a shared mailbox. All emails should still be sent through the shared mailbox for consistency.

There is currently an issue where if an email is sent from either Outlook for Windows or Outlook Web, despite sending the email from the shared email, the item will be placed in the individual users' “Sent” folder, rather than the sent folder on the shared inbox. This is a known “feature” of M365 and can be fixed in configuration by the Guild, which we are still waiting for them to do. Committee members are recommended to copy all emails from their sent folder to the sent folder on the shared inbox, but this is especially important for important or urgent emails so all of committee can monitor and respond if needed.

The guild uses a provider called MSL to handle back-end for essentially all guild systems - including societies. Once you are recognised as a committee member (that is to say, when you've completed the guild canvas training and the guild have granted you access) you'll be given access to the admin panel for the society. To access this, a “Admin” button will appear in the top left of the guild website when you're logged in. Unfortunately this does not show on mobile, so the only way to access this on mobile or a small device is by going direct to the following url: https://guildofstudents.com/organisation/admin

MSL also have a basic set of help pages that detail the different functions you will have access to - this can be found here: https://knowledge.ukmsl.com/kb/organisations/support/

A large number of the widgets listed on the MSL support pages are not actually accessible to us - for the simple reason that the guild doesn't feel like it. I (Matty) have been bothering them about this for years and nothing has changed, so take that as you will.

Finally, if you're quite technical and are happy to do the sysadmin-y stuff, then ask to have your SSH key added to our server(s). We have a lot of self-hosted applications which will need maintaining, so the rest of this wiki will be of greater importance to you as it contains (hopefully) up to date documentation on what is where. You'll also become responsible for making sure that stuff doesn't fall over, and that this wiki is kept up to date. Good luck!