Welcome to the December 2010 JISCMail Newsletter. This newsletter was created with our very own newsletter tool. Any subscriber to JISCMail can use our templates to produce professional newsletters. Find out more here: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/help/subscribers/newsletters.html.

In this issue of the JISCMail newsletter we'll be looking back at 2010 and reviewing the changes that the JISCMail team have made to the service.

The JISCMail team would like to wish all JISCMail group owners and subscribers a Happy and Peaceful Christmas and a successful New Year.

Spring 2010 saw JISCMail have a much needed facelift. A new website was launched, the JISCMail logo was re-designed and the list management software (LISTSERV) was upgraded.
The site, www.jiscmail.ac.uk, was designed to be easier to navigate which included enabling all links to be available on every page. The new design incorporated a 'My Groups box' which allows subscribers and owners to view and access which groups they belong to from the JISCMail homepage. If you are not logged in there is a link to do so.
We upgraded the list software that drives JISCMail to provide extra functionality such as the newsletters. Any subscriber to JISCMail can create professional looking newsletters using our templates as no coding is required. You can click the placeholders and fill out your content. This feature is open to both owners and subscribers. There are 5 easy steps to create a newsletter:

1. Set up a newsletter profile.
2. Choose a template.
3. Define your content.
4. Fine tune your newsletter.
5. Test and send.

For information on creating professional looking newsletters please see: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/help/subscribers/newsletters.html

In the summer of 2010, JISCMail released a calendaring tool to make announcing events on JISCMail groups more efficient. Make sure your JISCMail group doesn’t forget your event - send them a meeting notice and your event will go into their email client’s calendar.

Other benefits include:

• Keep track of your project and its milestones.
• Share events with people using many different mail clients.
• Schedule meetings with people not at your institution.
• A personal calendar you can access anywhere.
• Populate events from your own calendar.
• Display multiple calendars in one view.

READ MORE >

In the Autumn of 2010, we opened our public archives to search engines. All public information has been made available to search via search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. Previously searching across many public groups was difficult but this is now possible. Although previously your group names were searchable via search engines, the additional archive search has improved visibility of public groups and attracted more members to make valuable contributions to your discussions. The search can be accessed via any group homepage (https://www.JISCMail.ac.uk/yourgroupname) or simply search via your favourite search engine such as Google.

Points to note

• Search engines choose what to search and when so we cannot guarantee when the public archives will be available.
• Postings will not be available to search in real time outside of JISCmail. We will update our sitemap but the search engines will choose when to include this information.
• If your group goes from public to private following the release of search, any messages previously crawled maybe available cached for a period of time on search engines.
• If you are setting your group to become public from private, any previous private messages maybe crawled and become searchable. Please review the content of your groups before making the change and removing content that is not suitable for public consumption. You may want to inform your group subscribers of the change in settings.

Recently we added a new way to contact the support team. Along with our telephone and e-mail support we now accept queries through our new Web Helpline. The web helpline provides a user friendly web based interface for support queries.

The Web Helpline also shows your current and previous correspondence with our e-mail helpline. If you’ve e-mailed our helpline support in the past the web helpline will show all of your old queries and the solutions from the JISCMail team.

Access the web helpline here: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/webhelpline

If you are going away for an extended Christmas break, and want to temporarily halt email from a group, change your 'mail status' setting from MAIL to NOMAIL. To do this send the following command to [log in to unmask]

set * nomail
--

and when you return, send:

set * mail
--

or

Go to the homepage of your group. Choose 'Subscribe or Unsubscribe' and tick /untick the 'NOMAIL' checkbox within your subscription options.

Efficiency

EDIC2012 - The organising committee for Eating Disorders International Conference 2012.

ESAFETY - The purpose of this group is to act as a national conduit to support communications surrounding issues relating to eSafety within the post 16 education sector. Here list members can share best practice, ask for help and generally promote the safer use of technology within an educational and social context.

BLE-WEBDEV - This group is for marketing and web developers based in the Bloomsbury Colleges to provide support and help to each other.

NIRAN-MONITOR - This group is designed to enhance and facilitate communications between the various operational and management stakeholders of the Northern Ireland Regional Area Network NIRAN. NIRAN is an integral part of the UK JANET network for all higher and further education.

EMPLOYEE-LEARNING - This group is used by members of the Employee Learning Network, which is facilitated by the Higher Education Academy. It will be used for discussion, announcements and circulation of Academy news that is relevant to the community.

CAROLINEMISSION - A mailing group for the discussion of the proposed ESA Caroline spacecraft mission to a main belt comet.

SHARED-SERVICES - Shared services are the convergence and streamlining of the sectors or parts of the sectors functions to ensure that they deliver quality services as effectively and efficiently as possible, with potential for economies of scale and synergies through multi function working.

AUA-ASSESSORS - A discussion group for the team of assessors who work on the AUA Postgraduate Certificate in Professional Practice higher education administration and management OUVA

HUMANITIESMATTER - This is a group for members of the Humanities and Social Sciences Matter group to communicate. At present, all members are in UK education and research, but it may grow. Its focus is UK education and research.

LPHESYMPOSIUM - This is intended as a follow up to the successful neuro Linguisic Programming in Higher Education Symposium held at Bournemouth in September 2010

CSE-TPWG - The Trans-Pennine Working Group is an international, democratic membership organisation committed to developing a materialist critique of capitalism, unconstrained by conventional academic divisions between subjects.

VIEWS-OPENSIM - This sub-list is for members of the Scottish Virtual Worlds in Education (VIEWS) mail list. To support those interested in supporting, developing, promoting and using the OpenSimulator Virtual World Platform.

UEL-WOMEN-IN-SET - This is a mailing group for all women, both staff and students, working and studying in the Science, Engineering and Technology fields at the University of East London. The university has recently signed up to the Athena Swan charter in November 2010; and this mailing list will be used to circulate news about initiatives to implement the charter throughout UEL. It will also be used to notify members about events related to Women in SET and generally build a community of practice amongst the women staff and students in SET.

IAG-RSCEM - Information advice and guidance is on the cusp of significant change. Managers will have to grapple with new accountabilities and expectations in relation to all age guidance and financial resources will be squeezed. We will have to find new, innovative and more cost efficient ways of doing things.

OATS-SIG - This group is for general discussions surrounding open source assistive technology software and came about through the OATS project.

Learning and Teaching

NATIONAL-LAW-STUDENTS-FORUM - Group for members of the UKCLE-facilitated National Law Students Forum. The forum is for law student representatives to share ideas and best practice, with the aim of becoming more proactively involved in shaping their law learning experience.

Research

DERN - This group expects to grow rapidly over the following 12 months. It grew from 6 founding member to 95 since Easter 2010, and has a good amount of international interest too. The forum is about disabled people researching anything at all, and also anyone at all researching issues on disability and we are holding the first Disability Equality Research Network DERN conference at LSE during Summer 2011.

MASCULINITY-STUDIES - This group is for use by researchers in the field of masculinity studies accross academic disciplines to post announcements and generate discussions in this field.

SLUMTOURISM - This mailing group keeps its members informed on what is happening in research on slum tourism. We send out regular updates both of academic and more general nature.

FCNETWORK - The main aim of the email discussion group is to enable dialogue and debate between researchers, artists and curators whose interest is in museum and exhibition practice influenced by feminism.

Please note that the JISCMail office will be closed from 25th December to 3rd January inclusive.

We will be accepting emails into the helpline during this period and will answer them as soon as possible when we return.