UIC Announce is Here!

There's a link to UIC Announce Web page at the top of the UIC home page; go to http://www.uic.edu/ and click on Announcements. Or its direct URL is: http://tigger.uic.edu/announce/

Tired of receiving random email announcements? Meetings, seminars, want ads, various alerts - they never seem to stop. Sure, there's an interesting one every now and then. But why can't they only send you the ones that you're interested in, or at least make them all brief, so you could find the ones that you want and discard the rest?

Have we got good news for you! UIC Announce is here.

UIC Announce will send you one message per day (or fewer), containing one-line summaries of current announcements, specifically targeted to you as a student or as a faculty/staff member. This should make it quite easy for you to scan the list for interesting events and discard the rest.

No more scads of email or overflowing readers. No more reading half a note just to realize the announcement doesn't apply to you. And no more accidentally losing those announcements that you were interested in. Why? Because the details are on the Web! Even if you lose the original message, you can always jog your memory by going to the UIC home page and clicking on Announcements.

Want to jump on the bandwagon? Good, I thought so.

If you use an ADN POP server to read your mail, we've assumed that you'd prefer to learn about the announcements by email. And UIC Announce will send you no more than one piece of email per day, regardless of how many announcements it has for you! The URL for full information on each announcement is included in the mail, so if you're using a newer version of Eudora, you can just click on the URL and get the details from the Web, without leaving Eudora.

For the rest of you, we'll present you a message when you first log onto either tigger, icarus, or CMS each day. Again, you'll see just the one-line summaries, but you will have to start up your Web browser to see the details. If you don't log on today, don't worry - we'll save your summaries for tomorrow.

Did we guess wrong? Would you rather get your summaries in a logon message instead of an email note, or the other way around? No problem; you can change it! Simply log into tigger or icarus, enter the command: phupdate and answer either yes or no to the "receive announce summaries by email?" question. Then type d for done, confirm the change, and you're all set.

The UIC Announce Web page has the announcements sorted by event date and also sorted by event type: meetings, seminars, want ads, research funding, informational, and the like. You can check out all the announcements posted, even if you weren't in the targeted audience for their summaries.

Two hints on using UIC Announce:

First: Please pay attention to the one-line summaries. They are meant to be informative, in an active but unobtrusive way. The summaries you receive represent the subset of all announcements that you might be interested in, based on your college and your status as faculty, staff, or student. You probably won't be interested in each and every one, but we hope this will improve the odds. And if the people who post announcements to UIC Announce think you are disregarding their announcements, they may resort to mass email to get their announcements out, and that virtual headache we all just got rid of will come back. :-(

Second: If you receive email that was either addressed directly to you or to an email list like ACADEMY that would have been better sent to the UIC Announce system, let the sender know it in no uncertain terms! In the past, you were probably polite and just pressed the Delete key. But now there's a better way, so tell the offenders just where they should to send their notes!

Virtually Yours,
The Management

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Tired of trying to get people's attention? All that other email about meetings, seminars, and stuff for sale get in the way just when you, a responsible publicist, were trying to get attention for your legitimate activity? Those other people sure are making your job harder. Why can't the Computer Center make special dispensation for worthwhile organizations like yours?

Have we got good news for you! UIC Announce is here.

UIC Announce makes it easy to post a brief announcement on the Web, and to send a one-line summary of your announcement to the audience that will be most interested in it. (Now you can select your target audience based on college or on faculty, staff, or student status; additional criteria will be added in the future.)

UIC Announce gives you the best of both the Web and email. Your announcement is listed on the Web in a standard, easy-to-find place - under Announcements on the UIC World Wide Web home page. Everyone can see it, anytime they want, and you don't have to worry about people losing the announcements as you would if you sent them out by email. But you also get email's principal advantage - UIC Announce will actively notify your target audience about your announcement.

Even better, the notification about your announcement will be sent in a way that we hope the people who receive it will appreciate: a single email note or logon announcement, not more than one per day, which includes summaries only for announcements that should specifically interest that person. So people will probably find the time to scan the list and won't resent taking the time they need to do it. After all, their chances of finding something they're interested it will be higher - much higher than with mass email.

Want to jump on the bandwagon? Good, I thought so.

There's a link to the UIC Announce Web page at the top of the UIC Web home page (URL: http://www.uic.edu) under Announcements. The Announce Web page has a table of contents listing all the current announcements. It also has a link to use to submit your announcement; select "Submit a new announcement." You'll be asked to authenticate (using Bluestem, discussed in the March/April 1997 issue of the ADN Connection), and then will be presented with a Web form for your announcement.

Fill out the form, confirm your audience selections and announcement text, and you're done. The email summary will go out overnight, and the logon messages will start posting the next day. And, of course, your complete announcement goes up on the Web page immediately.

You can, if you want, prepare your Web page announcement in advance, as fancy as you'd like. Then just fill in its URL when you submit the announcement. Or if you like your announcements short and sweet, type in (or cut-and-paste) the text into the announcement submission form, and we'll post it on our own server. Either way, it's as easy as can be.

The form used to submit an announcement is mostly self-explanatory, but here are two hints:

First: Choose your title well. The title is a one-line summary of your announcement; it will be sent to your target audience and will also be listed on the UIC Announce Web page for everyone to see. Make it as catchy and informative as possible. But don't include the date or event type; we'll do that for you.

Second: Choose your audience well. If people find that they're actually interested in most of the announcements that they receive notification about, they'll be more likely to read the summaries and to visit the Announce Web page on a regular basis. And once a notification gets them to the UIC Announce Web page, your summary will be there, and your complete announcement will just be a mouse click away. So choose your audience well if you really want good return on your publicity efforts.

Don't worry about those other, greedy publicists who might abuse the new system by sending out inappropriate announcements. Remember, each post is authenticated. That means we know who did it (or at least what account they did it from) and can put a stop to such nonsense. Just post your legitimate announcements, and your audience will appreciate what you've done.

Of course, there may be some other publicists who haven't read this article, and continue posting announcements to ACADEMY or to zillions of individuals. They'll learn, I think, quickly. You're welcome to tell them about UIC Announce, unless of course, you don't want to let them in on a good thing. :-)

Virtually Yours,
The Management

Any questions or comments on UIC Announce? Please send them to John Andrews at jandrews@uic.edu.

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