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E-mail
Broadcasting in the University
By Henry Wong, Annie
Yu
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Long before the emergence of e-mail,
the telephone and campus mail have been the major form of internal
communication on campus. When accessing e-mail has proved to be
just as easy, it quickly became a popular method of communication
between individual computer users and is now used frequently by
most faculty and staff.
Whenever there is an official announcement
to be made within the CityU, it is general practice that the messages
should be posted on the University Message Board where everyone
is expected to read. In cases where the concerned topic is really
important and a personal e-mail is required, broadcast tools have
been developed to help disseminate the official news, thus minimising
the amount of effort involved in maintaining e-mail lists (a laborious
and error-prone process).
In the early days when the old text-based PolyLink system was used
extensively as an electronic tool of internal communication, authorised
users were advised to make use of the "all staff" broadcast
feature for sending messages to staff and special notations were
also available in PolyLink for sending e-mail to all or groups of
students according to the course year, course module etc. In order
to use the broadcast facility in PolyLink, one must login with the
departmental PolyLink account. Initially, only PolyLink users were
able to receive broadcast mail. Soon the broadcast facility was
modified to accommodate staff VAX accounts as well.
When the e-mail system was upgraded
to Eudora about three years ago, the CSC had re-organised the broadcasting
facility in line with the recommendation made by the Strategy Group
for IT development in the CityU. Under the new setting, a departmental
account of the form "dd_msg" was opened for each department
for sending broadcast e-mail where "dd" is the department/office
e-mail code. Sending out e-mail broadcasts is like sending out e-mail
using a personal e-mail account, except that the recipients address
field should be filled according to the following notation:
- staff-all - for all staff of CityU
- staff-dept - for all staff in a
department (where dept is a department code, e.g. staff-csc, staff-meem)
Under the new e-mail system of Eudora,
e-mail broadcast has been made easier in terms of speed and user-friendliness,
and Eudora also offers better formatting, improved management of
file attachments and so forth. Although sending e-mail broadcast
to students is still accomplished under the PolyLink system, e-mail
broadcast to staff has been switched from text-based PolyLink to
windows-based Eudora for increased convenience.
Improvement to the e-mail broadcast
facility is nowhere near the end. Recently, the E-mail Broadcast
System (EBS), a centralised broadcast system, has been developed
to replace and enhance the e-mail broadcasting function previously
provided in the old PolyLink system (for e-mail broadcast to students)
as well as the departmental e-mail broadcast accounts used with
Eudora (for e-mail broadcast to staff). With EBS, it is possible
to dispatch information to both staff and students in one system
and its Web-based interface enables authorised users to perform
e-mail broadcast in a more convenient and secure way. As long as
you have access to the Internet using a Web browser, sending broadcast
e-mail can be accomplished anytime and anywhere.
Furthermore, the new system provides
pull-down lists for authorised users to select specific recipient
groups. Up to five selection lists (Student Mode, Level, Department,
Programme and Cohort) can be chosen with complicated combination
for sending broadcast e-mail to various groups of students. Integrated
with the AIMS Banner System, the EBS can unquestionably supply the
most updated recipients list of the selected group(s) of students.
Instead of using the current logged-in
user address by default (usually dd_msg@cityu.edu.hk), users can
specify a different reply e-mail address for the broadcast e-mail
if desired so that replies of the concerned broadcast e-mail can
be delivered directly to the staff who looks after the announced
event.
Another great feature of the EBS is
that it saves all attachments on the EBS server and sends out corresponding
URLs automatically for recipients to access the files on the server
on demand, thus avoiding the replication of the same file attachment
to each recipient's mailbox thereby, and saving many storage resource
on e-mail server as well as individual mailboxes. As a result, it
greatly reduces the network traffic and mail server loading when
delivering the broadcasting e-mail.
The rollout of the EBS has indeed enhanced
broadcast messaging to a great extent. It has definitely brought
efficiency and convenience to many users who need to conduct official
campus business on a daily basis. For enquiries, please contact
the CSC Help Desk at ext. 7658.
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