Making changes to your platform
First Six is built so that you run it. Once it's live, the large majority of the changes you'll ever want are yours to make directly in the console. They go live the moment you save, and nothing waits on us. A small, well-bounded set of things genuinely need First Six, and there's a clear way to ask for each.
This page draws the line: what you change yourself, what to request, and how.
What you change yourself
All of this is self-service in your admin console. You don't need First Six, and there's no deployment or downtime: the change is live immediately, and it's recorded in your own audit log.
| You want to… | Do it in |
|---|---|
| Add, edit or remove content: weekly briefings, events, library and resources, Ask Anything answers, announcements, campus maps | Authoring, Library, Events. Everything has draft → publish → archive/delete, so "take that down" is one action. |
| Change your institution name or short name | Settings → Institution |
| Run your cohorts: create, clone from a previous intake, archive; import students | Cohorts, Term setup |
| Target content: audience tags and student groups | Audiences |
| Manage your team: invite staff (one at a time or a CSV for a whole team), set roles and scope | Team, Roles |
| Turn student features on or off: Wellbeing, Workspace, Timetable, Events, Maps, Resources, Saved, Help | Settings → Student features |
| Connect your systems: crisis routing, help-desk mirror, webhooks, the events feed | Settings → Integrations |
The rule of thumb: anything you can open and edit in the console, you own. No request needed. Requests are only for the things the console deliberately doesn't let you edit, below.
What to ask First Six for
These are the things a tenant can't self-serve today. They're intentionally kept in our hands, either because they touch the platform itself, or because they're sensitive enough to want a paper trail.
- Brand visuals: your logo, accent colours and typography. (Your name and short name you change yourself; the visual identity, for now, you request.)
- Delete a student's data (right to be forgotten): you authorise it as the data controller, and First Six carries out the hard delete. There's deliberately no delete button in the console; an erasure this final gets a paper trail.
- Sign-in / SSO: connecting or changing your identity provider.
- Bug fixes: anything broken in the platform.
- A new feature or idea: anything beyond what the console configures.
- Looking into a specific student's records: First Six can only ever see a real student's data if you open a time-boxed, redacted break-glass grant from your own console. That's self-initiated, not a request to us.
How to ask
Two channels, both inside the console, both reaching the First Six team:
- Request a change
For brand, sign-in, a new feature, or help with setup. Go to Your account → Request a change (or, for brand specifically, the Request a brand change button on Settings → Institution). Pick what it's about, describe it, and send. Every staff member can reach this; brand and SSO changes are usually an admin's call.
- Report a bug
For something broken. Your account → Report a bug. The page you were on and your device come along automatically, so we can reproduce it without a back-and-forth.
How First Six makes the change
Two very different paths, depending on what's changing:
- Configuration changes are live, with no downtime. Your brand and your feature flags are data, not code, so a brand refresh or a feature change is applied to your tenant and re-themes the student and staff apps without a redeploy. There's no maintenance window for a logo or colour change.
- Code changes go through change management. Bug fixes and new features are built, verified, and then released under our change-management standard: every change runs a fixed checklist before it ships, a separate non-production project now stands for pre-production testing, and completing that split is an open item we track in our risk register rather than claim early.
And the guardrail underneath all of it: your content stays yours (First Six can't silently edit it; the only cross-tenant view we ever have is the read-only, redacted break-glass path), and every privileged action we take is logged, with break-glass reads written into your audit trail as well as ours.
Common questions
Can we edit our own logo and colours?
Not yet. The brand panel in Settings is read-only for now, so a brand change is a request. When you send one we update it directly; because the brand is data-driven, it takes effect live with no downtime and no redeploy. A self-serve brand editor is on the roadmap.
Who on our side can request a change?
Any staff member can, from Your account. In practice brand and SSO requests come from an admin, since they're institution-wide, but the channel isn't gated, so a content editor or responder can flag something too.
Will a brand change cause downtime?
No. Brand is resolved from configuration at request time, so updating your logo, colours or fonts re-themes both apps without a deployment or a maintenance window.
What's the difference between 'Report a bug' and 'Request a change'?
Report a bug is for something broken: it attaches the page and device so we can reproduce it. Request a change is for something you'd like different that isn't broken: brand, sign-in, a new feature, or help with setup.
Related
The fastest answer is usually one question away.