[Contents] [Newsletter Index]

Newsletter 12, June 1996 Improving the Staff Email System

• Rationalizing Users on Postoffices
• Online Help in Shared Folders

Rationalizing Users on Postoffices

We are restructuring our Email system so that all staff in the same faculty or department will be on the same Postoffice. As the majority of mail is sent within faculties/departments, this should substantially improve and expand the service. Benefits should include:

• Speedier messages, and much less network traffic: as most messages are sent within a faculty or unit, these will no longer need to leave the server.
• Less traffic passing between postoffices, will make the traffic that does go across faster and less prone to failure.
• Fewer problems maintaining groups, and the possibility of using shared folders as an alternative to mailing a whole group.
• Easier to share a single computer for accessing email.
• Far fewer problems working with Schedule+: most users will be on the same server as the others they wish to share diaries with, and cross-postoffice diary sharing should become possible (it is not at present).

As the first stages of the process, on the weekend of 27th/28th April all mailboxes belonging to HSC staff were moved from their current Postoffice to a new Postoffice, and on 18th/19th May all CES mailboxes were moved to a single Postoffice. Other moves will occur in stages at later dates: everybody should assume they will be moved at some point — we will let you know when your turn is coming up! All mail folders and Schedule+ information will be retained during a move, but, unfortunately, Personal Address Books will be lost.

As all personal groups and address lists that include references to anyone who has moved will no longer work — and this will affect everyone, whether they are part of the move or not, we recommend that you:

• confine personal address lists to external addresses, or be prepared to delete any addresses that cease to work and re-add them from the Global Address List.
• use message templates instead of groups: instructions on how to do this in Windows are posted in the shared folder “Email help and tips” as Best way of mailing to a group (see below), and are also in the Computing Services document Microsoft Mail for Windows: Basic Guide which is available from the Computing Help Desks.

Online Help in Shared Folders

We have started putting useful hints and tips in shared folders where they can be easily referred to. To view these, go to the “View” menu and choose “Shared Folders”. To return to viewing your private folders, select “View” and “Private Folders”.

Currently you will see the shared folders “Email help and tips” and “Email News”. These contain answers to some commonly-asked Email questions, and will be used for announcements. We hope to expand these to include group folders for the faculties/departments.