Groupwise Tips
Making Groupwise Work for You
Copyright © 2004 Stan Brown and Eric Howd, Tompkins Cortland Community College
Copyright © 2004 Stan Brown and Eric Howd, Tompkins Cortland Community College
Contents:
A note on terminology:
When using the Groupwise Web interface from any public computer, make sure it doesn’t save your password. (On Microsoft Internet Explorer, Click Tools then Options then the Content tab, then the AutoComplete button, and make sure that “Save passwords” is not checked. Click OK as many times as you have to. On other browsers, find similar options.)
It may not be obvious, but you need to close all windows of the browser before you walk away; otherwise the next person can access the sites you did without entering any password.
After 10 minutes of inactivity, the Web interface assumes that you’ve probably walked away from the computer. If you’re actually just composing a long message, when you click “Send” Groupwise will tell you that you must log in again. Usually you don’t lose the message you were composing, but it’s a risk.
When composing a very long message, it may be safer to write it off line and then paste it into the Groupwise window.
In the Web interface, but not the client, you can click the “unopened items” pseudo-folder. That will display unopened messages from all folders, to help you focus on the messages you haven’t dealt with yet. This can be a huge time saver.
The address book in the Web interface is powerful and flexible, but it sometimes seems to take an awful lot of clicks to get one name into the “To:” window.
If you know the recipient’s three-letter ID, you can simply type it in the “To:”, “CC:”, or “BC:” window. If you want to send to multiple recipients, separate the IDs with commas.
Three-letter IDs are shown on the Staff Directory and Adjunct Directory that are issued periodically by Communications.
Often you can look at a subject line without opening the mail, and know that you don’t really want to read it.
In the Web interface, click in the box to the left of each uninteresting subject, then go up to the top and click Delete. In the client interface, click once on the subject line and tap the Delete key.
Either way, if you make a mistake, you can go to the Trash folder and undelete any message.
When sending mail to EVERYONE, be sure to put DINI (“Delete If Not Interested”) in the subject line if your mail doesn’t directly relate to College business — selling fruit for your kid’s band trip, for instance.
If you chose not even to see DINI mails, you can easily tell Groupwise to delete them automatically, without ever showing them in your mailbox.
(Instructions for the client interface will be added.)
To set up a rule in the Web interface, click the Options button
then when the Options screen appears click the Rules tab.
(Don’t enter your password.) Click the drop-down
and select “Delete”, then click Create.
Give the rule any name to help you remember it. Then click the drop-down boxes and fill in text as shown in the illustration. Click Save.
The EVERYONE list isn’t actually everyone at the College. Some adjunct faculty have opted out, and some were never included. If you have an important announcement of College business that should reach all faculty and staff, type EVERYONE,ADJUNCT in the “To:” window.
If you want to take yourself out of EVERYONE or get yourself in, send mail to Olivia Hersey.
But before you decide to opt out (or decline to opt in), ask what problem you’re trying to solve. If you’re just concerned about being overwhelmed with irrelevant mail, you can create a rule that deletes DINI mails, or one that shunts EVERYONE mails to a folder, or both.
First create your folder. You could give it any name, but
we’ll use EVERYONE.
In the Web interface, click Add
Folder. Then before you do anything else, click the first
button in the “Right” column. Then click in the box and replace “New
Folder” with the name of your folder, and click OK.
(Instructions for the client interface will be added.)
To set up a rule in the Web interface, click the Options button
then when the Options screen appears click the Rules tab.
(Don’t enter your password.) Click the drop-down
and select “Move to Folder”, then click Create.
Give the rule any name to help you remember it. Then click the drop-down boxes and fill in text as shown in the illustration. Click Save.
Both the client and the Web interfaces do a decent job of presenting most attachments. But for printing, or to save an attachment for later viewing, you don’t want to use the View window.
Instead, in the Web interface, you need to click on Save As. Select a file name (if you don’t like the default file name that’s presented to you) and then click OK. This procedure saves the attachment in the same format that it had when the sender attached it.
In the client interface, things are easier: just click the attachment and drag it to your desktop.
Groupwise lets you set up automatic forwarding of all mail to another location, but it’s a bad idea to do that. You can’t respond to group mails from another mail server, only from the Groupwise server. And most people who have tried it find that merging College mail with other mail makes the whole lot harder to manage, not easier.
IQ Web can send mails to your class. Select View Class Lists and use the Online version. Make sure there’s an alternative way to get information to your students, because a significant number of students have no email address or a wrong address in IQ Web.
Don’t put addresses in the CC field, because then every addressee can read all the addresses, and people may not appreciate having their addresses exposed in that way. Instead, put addresses in the BCC field.
(This isn’t a problem with mails that only go to Groupwise addresses, since everybody in the College already has access to all of them.)
If you send mass emails, they may be blocked as spam even if you’re sending them to people who requested them. If this happens, you may never know, because Hotmail and Yahoo don’t send bounce messages in this situation. You may be able to get around this problem by sending mails to one addressee at a time, but be sure to test your mailing procedure before you send out anything that’s time critical.
Periodically, the Groupwise administrator announces a purge of old messages from the server.
If you have a message that you need to save, the client interface lets you archive it on your computer.
But the Web interface doesn’t have that option. A tip shared by a Roundtable participant is to forward important messages to yourself before a purge, thus giving them a new and current date. The original copy gets purged but the forwarded copy remains. (I haven’t verified this personally.)
Dec 21, 2004: added View and Save Attachments, Bypass the Address Book, “EVERYONE” Isn’t Everyone, Save Messages from a Purge, and The 10-Minute Rule
Sep 20, 2004: original document prepared as a handout for the CTC Roundtable
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