The CDB Portal is designed to make life easier for our customers. It’s a central space where school leaders and administrators can manage SharePoint and Teams. Users with permissions can create new SharePoint sites, organise class cover and generate assignment analytics reports in just a few clicks.
Recently, we’ve given it a brand new look, so we thought we’d create this quick guide to refresh you on what you can do in the portal.
Quickly organise class cover.
With Cover Manager, you can temporarily assign a teacher to a class, giving them access to the Class Team and all the necessary resources to start teaching.
If they’re covering the class for a set time period, you can set a date when the teacher is automatically removed from the class.
You can set a date when the teacher will be automatically removed from the class.
- Select Cover Manager.
- Under Teacher, type in the cover teacher’s name and select the user you wish to assign to the class. You can search by display name, surname or UPN.
- Under Add to Class, type in the name of the class and select the class that needs a cover teacher. You can search by display name or nickname.
- Then, you can set the dates that the teacher should be added to and removed from the class.
- Hit Save.
You can see the existing cover in the Cover Log at the bottom of the page.
Create a new site in SharePoint.
You can easily create a new SharePoint site for your school or trust within the CDB Portal.
This tool gives you a good head start and gets the site ready for you, adding it to your school’s mega menu and adding your selected Owners and Members. Everything is set up and ready for you to start designing and publishing content.
You can also delegate site creation to someone at the school without giving them Admin rights in the tenant. This means that any sites created using the tool when using naming conventions are not listed as public sites.
- Select Create Site.
- Choose between Team Site or Communication Site.
A Team site is great for collaborating in small groups. It’s a fantastic alternative for replacing shared drives and folders as everyone has everything they need in one place, and it’s connected to Teams so you can set up online meetings and instantly chat with your colleagues.
Meanwhile, a Communication site is brilliant if you need to publish information to a wider audience – like a school or trust. It’s set up to only allow a few people to edit and publish the content.
3. Choose a name for your new site.
4. Fill in the form to start creating your new site.
You have the options to:
- Work from a Teams template.
- Choose which megamenu it’s visible in.
- Add Owners that will be able to edit and publish content.
- Add Members who will be added to the SharePoint site.
You can see an overview of what sites have previously been created in the Create Site History Log at the bottom of the page.
Create assignment analytics reports.
Assignment Analytics gives you a detailed overview of how well staff are setting assignments across the school.
You can see:
- Total number of assignments set.
- Number of active assignments
- Percentage of classes with assignments.
- Average number of assignments per class.
- A graph of assignments over a set time period.
You can also drill down into each subject and class.
- Hit Export to generate a CSV of the data.
Switch between schools in your trust.
If you’re part of a multi academy trust and have several schools to manage, you can easily switch between schools using the drop-down menu at the top of the portal.
Don’t have access to the CDB Portal?
If you need access to the CDB Portal, ask a Global Admin to give you permissions:
In a web browser, navigate to https://cdbadmin-prod.azurewebsites.net
- Select School Access.
- Hit Add.
- Choose the Access Level. School Manager allows you to do everything; School Leader allows access to Cover Manager and Assignment Analytics.
- Type the user’s name and select the user to grant them access.
Click here to share this guide with your Global Admin.
The CDB Portal is just one example of how we help schools and MATs harness the full power of Microsoft Education. If you would like to find out more about our Cloud Box platform book a free demo today.
