MITIE forum facts

1999 - 2007 eGroups + Yahoo Groups

In July 1999 Ian Scott who was then IT Manager at St Andrew's Cathedral School in Sydney, created our  first forum on eGroups. In August 2000 eGroups became Yahoo Groups after it was purchased by Yahoo. The name of the eGroup/Yahoo Group was ais_itmg_nsw reflecting our NSW independent school origin. The acronym stood for Association of Independent Schools, IT Managers, NSW. 

2007 - 2013 Joomla/Moodle

In 2013 we switched our forum and website to an instance of Moodle with a Joomla front end. This work was done by members Peter Anderson, Ian Scott and Nick Cross reflecting the energy and desire of our members to help each other. AARNet generously hosted our new Joomla website and Moodle-based forum - evidence of the close relationship between MITIE and commercial partners.

2013 - 2015 Canvas

Thanks once again to Peter Anderson we moved our forum to an instance of Canvas providing a richer,  more robust and less management intensive platform for our forum. This site was generously hosted, at no charge by Instructure.

November 2015 - present: 

Between 2014 and 2015 MITIE moved through the process of formal incorporation. Following consultation with our members we selected Discourse as our forum platform which went live in November 2015.

The forum Archives 

Often, when communities move from one forum platform to another, much of the history of that group is lost. But in our case, thanks to the technical wizardry of Michael Smith and Nathan Mares we were able to import all the posts from Yahoo Groups, Moodle and Canvas into Discourse. 

So, if you’d like to find out what was on our minds in 1999, just go to our archives and search. Here is a sample from the archives from 1999 about, unsurprisingly, Y2K.