Skills day: Penny Windebank, JISCMail: Mailing lists
Penny Windebank is the JISCmail’s Director working in the e-Science Centre of the Science and Technology Facilities Council based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.
JISCMail community is worldwide. Why do they use it? One example from the Falkland Islands: an academic there can communicate around the world, and receive regular and vital email alerts about in-depth research within 48 hours of publication via the University of York. It improves access to information that benefits the whole of the island in a place with limited bandwidth and where satellites are expensive. Email provides timely, rich and enticing information.
Dissemination and discussion: JISC Announce is a tool for dissemination and JISCMail also used to distribute course information, funding opportunities, lectures, jobs etc
Versatility: messages are delivered within minutes, can be delivered once a day in a digest form to minimise intrusiveness, delivery can be switched off, and delivery can also be via RSS.
Functionality: email, text chat, survey, web, documents area, reporting tools, online archives, bookmarks, statistics (can look at trends)
Newsletter: produce it in html and pdf form and an article index
Surveys: easy to generate one or more surveys - match question to the type of response you want, tell the system when you want it activated and due to conclude and it automatically does the rest - helpful to find out trends about your community
Document store: helps to manage projects
Future: still growing - continues to meet community needs - got a development programme and actively exploring technologies - can we mix the established and the new? I think it’s possible to do that - check out our JISCMail presence on Second Life!
Comment: from a marketing point of view, JISCMail has such a presence that it would be silly to dump it in favour of something new rather than progressing with what we’ve got
Question: the way you deal with spam is excellent - how do you do it?
Penny: very good set of people on site who deal with it as well as an automated system but we always need to keep improving
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