Description
The campus currently has several 'announcement' distribution lists that have been in use for years, including All Announce, All Faculty, and All Staff. In addition, various other areas of campus have created their own distribution lists for their internal stakeholders (e.g. All College of Business, All Continuing Ed Users, etc.). Historically, members of these lists were managed manually and they were often very out of date.
With the implementation of Account Center, new AD groups were created based on affiliations, organizations, and roles. Memberships in these groups is managed automatically by Account Center based on data in Peoplesoft (as a source of authority). Some of those groups have been mail-enabled and used as sources for the larger 'announce' lists:
- All Announce: aff-Faculty, aff-Employee, aff-FacultyEmployee, aff-FacultyEmeritus, aff-EmployeeRetired, aff-Auxiliary, AnnounceContacts (this one is manually maintained for exceptions)
- All Faculty: aff-Faculty, aff-Instructor, role-AssociateDean, aasnetwork (manually maintained), cad (manually maintained), AllFacultyManualAdds (manually maintained for exceptions)
- All Staff: aff-Staff, aff-Auxiliary
- Other managed announce lists that have been created includes All Admin Analysts, All Admin Assistants, All Admin Coordinators, All Deans, All Associate Deans, All Department Chairs, All Emeritus Faculty, All Lecturers, All MPP, All Retired Employees, All Tenured and Tenure Track Faculty, All Coaches, All Librarians, All Counselors, All FERP Faculty
Now that students have O365 mailboxes, we should modify some distribution lists or create new lists that include them. We should also investigate creating additional 'announce' lists based on Account Center managed groups and consider retiring some of the existing manually maintained groups. There are many aff-*, dept-*, div-*, role-*, and unit-* groups that can be used for this purpose.
Also note that the Account Center team is going to update some of the organizational groups (div-* for sure... not sure about unit-* and dept-*) to separate out regular employees from student employees. For example, div-OCIO is just DoIT regular employees and div-OCIO-students is all the student employees. This allows for more fine-tuning of the announce groups as desired.
Some proposed milestones:
- Meet with stakeholders (UCOMM, DoIT Leadership, SA Leadership, HR, OAPL, others?) to determine the appropriate groups to create and the appropriate permission structures for who is allowed to send to these groups.
- - Ideally there's a simplified hierarchical structure to the lists that allows for permissions to be streamlined. For example, anyone with permission to send to All Faculty should also have permission to send to any Faculty sub-group (like All Lecturers).
- - For some groups, it may be appropriate for any member of the group to send to the group. For example, any Dean could be allowed to send to the All Deans list. The larger the group, the less likely this would be a good idea, but for smaller groups this functionality might enable efficient communication.
- Create any new groups and modify any existing groups per the recommendations from the stakeholders.
- Communicate the changes to campus, including KB articles that document the lists and their associated populations.