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Need a Summer Break from UM Today Daily Emails?

May 18, 2012 by

Summer is almost here and, if you are not teaching or enrolled in classes or if you are traveling, you may want to disable the daily UM Today email summaries.

To do this, sign in to myOleMiss and choose “Preferences” from the upper right of the UM Today listing. Once here, you should see an option to set your UM Today email format. You can set it to text-only, mobile-friendly, or you can disable the messages altogether. The default, HTML format, includes all of the graphics and menus that display best from a computer with a Web browser. Note that this menu also lets you prioritize your messages within the UM Today listing and even suppress messages by type.

You can view UM Today messages anytime from myOleMiss. Although disabling the daily messages may give you some email relief, keep in mind that you may miss important announcements by doing this.

Filed Under: Email, myOleMiss, UM Today Tagged With: ,

New Event Calendar

February 25, 2012 by

event calendar screen shot

Last week a new Event Calendar was rolled out for the university community. It may look similar to the old one on the outside, but underneath it is fundamentally different.

There are so many online calendars on the market that it is worth explaining why we chose to build a new one. There are two aspects to advertising an event on the Web. One is to have it listed in a calendar where everyone can find it. The other is to let people know there’s something on the calendar to see. We had applications for both of those, but there was nothing linking them. A person would have to submit all the necessary information for an event to be put on the calendar, and then submit it all again through a different process in order to tell people about it. The errors and delays caused by this necessary redundancy compounded the difficulty. And, frankly, our campus calendar lacked many events that people would expect to find on it, due mainly to these difficulties.

To avoid additional time entering duplicate information, we chose to combine the two processes. An event would be its own announcement. The new calendar is run by UM Today, our one-stop announcement delivery system. When an UM Today administrator enters an event announcement, she is presented with new fields for date, time, location, and sponsors so that all the pertinent information is gathered at one time. Once submitted, the event immediately appears on the Event Calendar, and the announcement for it will appear in UM Today for the specified period prior to the event date. So today you can submit an announcement for an event in the fall, and by setting the “validity dates” correctly, it will start being announced in UM Today up to 21 days prior to the event. And since announcements can be pushed to the Bulletin Board, it will also appear on the UM home page at the same time.

Additional features are already planned, including a method of displaying sponsored events directly in the sponsors’ websites. Expect to see further improvements over the next several weeks. Please let us know if you have ideas to make it better. And, by all means, be sure to add events to the Event Calendar–It’s where people are looking.

 

 

Filed Under: UM Today, Web Applications, Web Site

UM Today and the Ole Miss Event Calendar

January 2, 2012 by

The Office of Information Technology and University Brand Services have been working to develop a new and improved event calendar that is integrated with UM Today. Up until now, there has been no connection between events posted in UM Today and those added to the Ole Miss Event Calendar. In several weeks, the new calendar will be enabled, and events added to UM Today will automatically flow to the Ole Miss Event Calendar.

In the meantime, when you enter events in UM Today, you can now enter new fields to give more details about the event. The daily UM Today email and myOleMiss portal displays have already been adjusted to distinguish between announcements and events and to show the new event fields. Specifically, you can now select campus, building, and room from a drop-down list that is maintained in SAP.   Alternatively, you can provide the full address for events that take place off campus. When you select building, the detailed location information, including latitude and longitude, will be available when the event is viewed for placement on maps.

There are four new flags to give more information about events:

  • Registration Required
  • Ticket Required
  • Open to the Public
  • Ongoing Exhibit

Also, you can enter up to five sponsors per event.  Sponsors can be departments or schools, committees, or other entities such as fraternities and sororities.  Lastly, additional event types have been added such as Lecture, Brown Bag, and Conference to further describe the event.

More information will be posted on the new and improved event calendar soon.  Please feel free to begin using these new fields to give more details about your events and send any questions or comments to it@olemiss.edu.

Filed Under: UM Today Tagged With:

Need Ideas for Next Round of Ole Miss Today Changes

May 4, 2011 by

The Office of Information Technology (IT) is planning for the next round of enhancements to Ole Miss Today (OMT) and needs your ideas. The following suggestions were generated from a focus group with student leaders. Please feel free to comment on these ideas and offer any additional ideas that you have by sending email to it@olemiss.edu. Deadline is Sunday, 5/8.

1. Find out if Webmail can be configured to display OMT graphics by default. To receive a message with the x’s for missing images is unappealing, and some students will not take the time to set options to show images.

2. Add information to the header that shows the OMT message is customized for each person.

3. Allow students and employees to prioritize message types so they can control the order that messages appear. Always keep certain message types at the top such as “Emergency” and “My Alerts.”

4. Allow students and employees to opt out of certain message types. Any concerns about this?

5. Allow students and employees to opt out of the daily email and re-enable it as needed. Examples where this might be useful are pharmacy students located at UMMC and students who are on a study abroad.

6. Allow students and employees to choose how they will receive the daily email – as rich text or HTML. The motivation is to provide a method that is readable on all mobile devices and to give those who prefer a text-oriented layout that option.

7. Continue to stress with those who enter messages that the messages need to be succinct and meaningful.

8. Add OMT messages to Blackboard. Would this be a good or bad thing?

Filed Under: UM Today Tagged With:

Sending SMS Text Messages to Students from a Computer

February 23, 2011 by

Figure 1. The Site Index in myOleMiss

Instructors, advisors, and academic administrators – Are you having trouble getting the attention of your students? If yes, then here is a new communication method to try. Last fall, a new service was deployed in myOleMiss that allows you to send email and / or SMS text messages to students. That is, you can send your students a text message from your computer.

The easiest way to get to this service is to select “Ole Miss Today Administration” from the myOleMiss Site Index in the left-hand navigation panel (Figure 1). Once there, select “Send an Immediate Email or SMS Message” (Figure 2). You will be presented with a screen that includes target groups to send to at the top (Figure 3) and a place for you to enter your message at the bottom (Figure 4).

Figure 2. Send an Immediate Email or SMS Message

The target groups available to you are determined by your roles. If you are an advisor then you will see an option to send messages to all of your advisees. If you are an instructor then a list of your currently active sections will be presented. If you are a department chair or dean then you will see an option to send email to students enrolled in programs offered by your department or school.

 

Figure 3. Send an Immediate Email or SMS Message ~ Target Groups

To send a message, select the target groups, enter your email and text messages, and press “Send Message Now.”

 

Keep in mind that text messages only go to students who have provided their cell phone numbers and have “opted in” to receive non-emergency text messages in myOleMiss. Also, this method does not support any special text formatting or attachments. If you require those kinds of features or more control in targeting recipients then you should send your message using the standard Ole Miss Today Administration interface where you have a rich set of options but more “clicks.”

Figure 4. Send an Immediate Email or SMS Message ~ Enter Message

Email messages are delivered using UM’s in-house, centralized email platform, and text messages are delivered by means of a Web Service that connects UM’s SAP system with the text messaging vendor, 2SMS.com. Since November 2011, about 19,000 SMS text messages have been sent to students from about 200 different advisors and instructors.

Filed Under: Email, myOleMiss, UM Today Tagged With:

Ole Miss Today, Version 2

October 25, 2010 by

Ole Miss Today was enabled five weeks ago, and last week we asked for feedback on how to make it more useful.  About thirty-five people responded with many good ideas.   These ideas are summarized below and are shown with time frame for implementation where appropriate.

Ideas to Be Implemented

  1. Use a generic subject line in daily e-mail messages.  (10/26/2010)
  2. Eliminate OMT afternoon update.  (10/26/2010)
  3. Include more on-screen help and error checking to help message submitters choose the correct target audience. (11/1/2010)
  4. Limit the number of consecutive days a message can be displayed.  Will add a 21 day limit for now and may reduce further in the future. (11/1/2010)
  5. Move “Select All” box on the e-mail to advisee page to the top of the advisee list.  (11/1/2010)
  6. Provide a better explanation of how test mode works.  (11/1/2010)
  7. Add more on-screen instructions to message submitters to enter descriptive subjects and summaries. (11/1/2010)
  8. Provide a “Don’t show again” option for individual messages within the consolidated message. (11/23/2010)
  9. Provide a one-step  text-only method for instructors and advisors to quickly send e-mail and SMS messages without the extra OMT steps. Integrate this into existing myOleMiss interfaces such as class rolls, e.g., quickly text a single student from the class roll display.  This will form the basis for a mobile version with equivalent functionality.  (11/23/2010)
  10. Include a table of contents in consolidated messages for easier navigation between sections; highlight new messages in TOC.  (11/23/2010)
  11. Mark new items as new; Include date submitted in message display.  (11/23/2010)
  12. Allow for OMT messages in the current Guest and future Parents roles. (11/23/2010)
  13. Show campus events in chronological order.  (11/23/2010)
  14. Add a Cc option w/ WebIDs for OMT messages.  (11/23/2010)
  15. Add a “don’t e-mail” option to prevent a message from being included in the daily message. (11/23/2010)
  16. Add an option to send to “my organization” when selecting recipients.  (11/23/2010)
  17. Condense Blog and URL message type options into one type. (11/23/2010)
  18. Provide a way to view/search through historical messages. (11/23/2010 or later)
  19. Provide a way to “share” a single message that is listed in the consolidated message. (11/23/2010 or later)
  20. Allow for a PDF upload with an HTML message.  (11/23/2010 or later)

Ideas to Be Deferred

  1. Allow users to opt out of certain message types.  This is difficult to implement and will increased the run time for dynamically generated message.  May add in future versions.
  2. Integrate OMT events with the campus calendar.  This absolutely needs to be done and will be addressed in future versions.  Requires developing long term plan and coordinating with OrgSync and the Campus Calendar.
  3. Store fixed lists of users and commonly-used selection values for future retrieval.  This is a good idea, but is hard to implement due to the rich set of selection options.  May add in future versions.
  4. Provide a way to preview how the message will look in final form.  This is a good idea but is hard to implement due to the fact that messgaes and uploaded files are not stored parmanently until the message is actually submitted.  May add in future versions.

Ideas That Are Not Technically Feasible

  1. Integrate OMT with Blackboard.  Blackboard is an out of the box product, and we can’t make modifications.
  2. Make the student and employee selection options mutually exclusive.
  3. Support cut and paste from WordPerfect.

Important: The implementation of OMT Version 2 will require taking OMT down on Tuesday, 11/23. 

Thanks to everyone who submitted suggestions!  We want OMT to work well for UM students, faculty and staff and appreciate your feedback.

Filed Under: UM Today Tagged With: