President Mary Sue Coleman

If you’re a University of Iowa faculty member, staff member, or student, you now have an e-mail target address—and you’ll need to use it. Increasingly, important communications on campus will be made only on e-mail, not in memo form, under a new policy.

The announcement from the office of President Mary Sue Coleman says that she will no longer send policy or emergency messages on paper to all people on campus. Such notifications will be made exclusively on e-mail, supplemented by messages on the University’s web site. Near the end of the current academic year, the first all-e-mail communication is expected from the President’s Office.

While there will be cost savings from eliminating the individual paper messages that were sent out each time the president communicated to campus, that was not the ultimate goal of the project, says David Dobbins, assistant vice president and chief information officer.

“The president’s primary purpose was to assure that all members of the campus community had reasonable e-mail access and to assure the timeliness of important messages,” he says. “Cost savings will grow over time, as others increase e-mail and reduce paper mailings.”

While e-mail is old hat to most faculty, staff, and students, a number of University employees have had no good way of accessing electronic communication until recently. They may have been assigned target addresses (the first name-last name@uiowa.edu addresses) and accounts, but often they went unused.

Some employees work in positions that don’t have individual desks and workstations. A part of the development of the new policy has been to make sure that these employees would have nearby workstations that they can use and private e-mail accounts that they can access, Dobbins says.

David Dobbins

For example, if an employee works near an Instructional Technology Center (ITC) that has a public access terminal, a supervisor may arrange to have the employee check e-mail at that location, he says.

With the new policy in place, all employees will be able to use self-service transactions for human resource systems, purchasing systems, on-line library information, course management systems, and other information on the University’s web site.

To accomplish this project, a group of 30 people from Information Technology Services, colleges, and large administrative units have worked since November in what is called the Electronic Communication Project.

On a technical level, group members assured that every faculty and staff member had reasonable access to e-mail and electronic communication. When requested to do so, they installed new computer workstations in strategic locations, and they updated directories from colleges and departments to fix bad e-mail addresses and add new ones.

Dobbins says, “In November 2001, there were 2,058 faculty and staff members without e-mail target addresses. As of May 1, 2002, there are 46 without target addresses.”

Health Care Information Systems is making access available to all the people in the UI Health Care complex.

The group also completed a new e-mail address policy that covers students as well as faculty, staff, and affiliates. Affiliates include adjunct faculty or satellite location staff members, Dobbins says.

A provision has been made for supervisors of employees who do not have convenient access, such as food service and temporary employees, to ask for an exemption. In that case, University e-mail would be posted on a shared bulletin board or distributed to employees by the supervisor.

Students now may maintain their e-mail addresses through the Iowa Student Information System (ISIS). Faculty and staff may submit a web form electronically to Campus Services (www.its.uiowa.edu/cs/cid). However, new tools are under development to make that process easier.

“We also are making a significant upgrade to the Univer-sity’s electronic mail distribution software, so people can check and update lists they want to join and better control the messages they want to receive,” Dobbins says.

Article by Anne Tanner