Communication technologies today are amazing. Yet, I hear more rumbling about The University of Montana’s inability to communicate effectively with students, employees and other constituents than ever before.  Nobody is happy.

I don’t know if people are any happier at North Carolina State University, but NC State offers a nice contrast to UM when it comes to campus communication strategies. UM has (sort of) adopted a tool called “Official Notices” for official campus communication. Official Notices can be read in OneStop and/or delivered to email addresses. NC State has adopted Twitter as an official channel of communication. They built a page that aggregates “official” Tweets from multiple departments.

The medium is not the message. Twitter doesn’t guarantee better communication than UM’s Official Notices. But NC State has adopted a strategy very different from UM. Without judging the quality or effectiveness of the communication, here is a numbers comparison between UM and NC State on official communication.

Number of messages in my UM Official Notices inbox:

8 over the last 26 days

Number of Tweets on the NC State Twitter page:

39 in the last 21 hours

Number of departments with ability to send UM Official Notices:

9

Number of departments at NC State with Twitter accounts:

62

Percentage of UM messages that link to a web page for more information:

37%

Percentage of NC State Tweets that link to a web page for more information:

67%

Average number of characters in UM Official Notices:

1,782

Average number of characters in NC State Tweets

108

Comments?

If you’re a student, sign up today.

If you have a reliable channel of communication to students, we would appreciate your help in getting the message to them to make the switch early.

Voluntary account sign-up will continue for several more weeks. All students who have not signed up for UMConnect accounts by the end of fall semester will have accounts created for them in early January.

What are the benefits?

UMConnect is powered by Microsoft’s Live@edu, which provides email, file storage and a collection of collaboration and networking tools. The email interface is similar to the Outlook Web Access used by GrizMail. The big difference is that students get 10 gigabytes of email storage instead of the 35 megabytes provided by GrizMail.

Live@edu also provides 25 gigabytes of file storage. Files can be saved for public or private use. Office Live provides additional storage space for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

Have questions? Go to our UMConnect FAQ page, or email us at italk@umontana.edu.

UMConnect provides access to Microsoft’s Live@edu, a suite of web-based services including Outlook live email, Skydrive virtual document storage, Office Live for storing and collaborating on MS Office documents, and other collaboration and networking tools.

UM students will have the opportunity throughout fall semester to sign up for UMConnect accounts. In early January, UMConnect accounts will be created for all remaining students.

Check out Ask Monte for UMConnect FAQs.

CAS-Central Authentication Service-is the front door to a growing number of secure UM web services, including OneStop, the Mansfield Library system, iTunes U and now Blackboard. Your NetID and password unlocks that front door and gives you access to all of the systems inside.

The single point of entry, or “single sign-on,” provided by CAS allows users to move among the web systems without having to re-authenticate. CAS also notifies users when their password is about to expire, and eliminates the problem of getting passwords out of sync (one NetID with more than one password).

Ask Monte now produces an RSS feed.

In case you’re wondering, Ask Monte is UM’s dynamic knowledgebase powered by RightNow Technologies out of Bozeman. Fourteen UM departments and schools currently have 346 answers to frequently asked questions on the system.

In Ask Monte, you can search for answers by keywords or filter them by topic. With today’s upgrade, even filtered search results and topic areas produce unique RSS feeds. Why is that significant?

As a user, you could subscribe to topic areas of interest in OneStop or any other RSS feed reader. Departments that use Ask Monte can now harness the content in the knowledgebase for use elsewhere.

For example, if Career Services wanted dynamic FAQ’s about student jobs on their website, they could simply filter the Ask Monte answers by selecting the Career Services topic and the Student Employment subtopic. That produces this granular RSS feed that could deliver dynamic content elsewhere.  

RSS in Ask Monte opens a lot of possibilities. If you have ideas about how the new feature could improve our customer service, please share.

The purpose of the blog is to announce the release of new channels, provide tutorials on more complex OneStop applications, and notify users of maintenance issues, bugs, etc.

OneStop News items are displayed in the left column of all OneStop pages below the Quick Links. You can also subscribe to the feed through your favorite RSS feed reader.

Gettysburg College, Iowa State, the University of Arizona and the Pennsylvania College of Technology all shared how they allow parents to access academic and financial records-FERPA-protected information-specific to their son or daughter.

These campuses handle parent (or guest) account creation in different ways. Some allow the parent to request an account and connect that account to a registered student. Others require the student to create and manage their own guest accounts.

While account creation mechanisms differ, all of these campuses deal with FERPA -protected information the same way. The student has control through a web interface to choose what data the parent account can access.

Gettysburg College built its web portal 10 years ago and has been a thought leader in portal develoment. You can visit their parent portal information page at http://public.gettysburg.edu/it/cnav/parents.htm.

In 2001, spam made up just five percent of the total volume of email messages worldwide.

By the end of 2007, spam accounted for more than 90 percent of all email received by large enterprises according to ProofPoint.

The onslaught of spam coming into University of Montana email systems is even more severe. One day last week—a typical weekday—1.8 million spam messages were blocked as they entered campus. Another 3,600 messages were delivered to recipients tagged as possible spam. These days, only about three percent of the messages that come to campus ever reach an end user.

“We’re tightening it up [spam blocking] as much as we can without blocking legitimate emails,” says Tom Travis, director of IT central systems. “We’re cutting it close to the boundary.”

Travis says campus email users may have experienced increased spam in their inboxes between late November and early February. Hardware problems compromised spam-blocking efforts during that period. By February, IT had restored spam and anti-virus services to full operational levels. Travis is confident that the spam blockers are now protecting email users from junk as best they can.

How does spam blocking work?

Spam blockers use a number of mechanisms to identify junk and virus-laden email. One method is rate control. Too many emails coming from one location raises a red flag. Emails with bad recipients also indicate a possible spam attack. The University also subscribes to a service that does pattern matching for spam, which includes recognition of sender addresses that have been blacklisted.

What can email users do?

Even with the best spam-blocking technology on the front line, the average email user can expect to receive hundreds of spam emails in their inbox every month.

“We educate our end users that if they get spam, right click on it and add it to your junk email list,” says Robert Logan, a systems administrator in the College of Forestry and Conservation who runs a Microsoft Exchange email service.

A right click on a message in Microsoft Outlook reveals a number of options for dealing with spam under the “Junk E-mail” menu item. If you click on “Junk E-mail Options”, you can set the level of junk email protection you want (left).

In GrizMail, which uses Outlook Web Access (OWA) as its email client, users can click on “Options” on the bottom-left of the screen and scroll down to the “Privacy and Junk E-mail Prevention” section.

Travis advises email users to be smart about what email messages they open as well.

“Email users need to develop the ability to detect suspect email,” he says. “You can look at email headers for some clues if you have suspicions.”

For more information about spam and tips for how to protect yourself, visit this Spam at The University of Montana page. You can also seek help from your desktop support person.

So far this semester Presentation and Technology Services is supporting twelve courses on iTunesU, plus a general section for University of Montana content. The general content includes lectures from the President’s Lecture Series, President Dennison’s State of the University Address, and other lectures of community-wide appeal. This area of iTunesU is open to any member of the UM community, and can be accessed through the iTunesU link on OneStop (onestop.umt.edu).

The courses can be accessed only by students enrolled in the respective course. If a student is not enrolled within a course they will not be able to download the course podcasts. So far this semester we are averaging 110 students logging into iTunesU per week, with all log-ins totaling 450 per week. Students have downloaded nearly 300 podcasts in the first two weeks of the semester. I expect these numbers will be on the rise as the time for exams and mid-terms nears closer.

If you would like more information on iTunesU please feel free to contact me at randy.gottfried@umontana.edu, or 406-243-2857.