SEPTEMBER, 2005

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Wireless Networking Comes to Residence Halls

Telecommunications technicians have installed wireless access points in the first floor lounges of every residence hall.  Two exceptions are Higgins Hall, which has wireless access throughout the building, and Hulbert Hall, which has wireless access in the dining hall wing.

Installation of building-wide wireless access was investigated in the other residence halls - but the massive construction techniques common in the 1950s and 60s makes it very difficult for  wireless signals to propagate effectively.  Telecommunications will continue to investigate alternative approaches to bringing additional wireless access to students where they live.

Fall 2005 Semester Start Smoothest Ever

The beginning of the fall semester saw thousands of students arrive on campus within a few days, most of whom were toting personal computers and other kinds of hardware.  In the first five days 3100 residential students successfully connected their machines to the network and were up and running, representing 94% of all on-campus students.  This excellent start to the year is a direct result of the Get Connected campaign carried out by the Help Desk and lots of work behind the scenes by network security and systems managers.  The relatively few problems encountered were quickly fielded and solved by technical support personnel.

Outlook Mail Tips - Archiving your mail

We get a lot of email, no question about it.  Besides the spam and junk mail, we send a receive hundreds of email messages every month. 

Both received and sent messages remain in your mail account unless you do something with them, and eventually you reach the quota for how much mail can be stored in your account. This quota is 45 megabytes, and how quickly you reach this limit depends largely on the size of individual messages. Naturally, if someone sent you a message with a 50 megabyte attachment, it would immediately overflow your account.

One way to handle old mail is to AutoArchive it. AutoArchive is a mechanism where you tell Outlook; “Please take any messages that are older than a certain number of days, weeks or months and transfer them to a folder on my computer.” Every time you open Outlook it will go through your mail and do exactly that. Mail that is moved from your mail account on the Exchange Mail Server to your personal computer no longer counts against your account quota, but it can still be accessed.
Setting up AutoArchive is easy. In Outlook, go to Tools- Options- and click on the “Other” Tab. Click on the AutoArchive button. Make sure the box is checked next to “Run AutoArchive every (you decide) days”. Then check the boxes next to “Archive or delete old items” and “Show archive folder in folder list”. Next, decide how long you want to keep items on the mail server before they get archived – typically users will decide to archive items older than three months, but the best length of time will depend on the volume of mail you get and your personal preferences. The idea here is just to keep your mail account from overflowing. Finally, make sure that you have clicked on the radio button next to “Move old items to:” – the other choice is to permanently delete old items, and you probably don’t want to do that.  Mail will start AutoArchiving the next day. A new folder item will appear in your folder list called Archived Items. It will contain all the mail that is archived on a daily basis. This folder is located on your computer, so it cannot be accessed unless you are working at your computer here on campus.  Otherwise, it can be accessed, searched and used just like any other mail folder. 
 

Or, you can do all of this manually:

If you don't already have one, you can create a Personal Folder by selecting File- New- Outlook Data File.  Choose to create a Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst) and let the computer call the file name Personal Folders.pst.  There's really no need to encrypt the file, so click OK on the next step.

Once created, you can treat the Personal Folders just like any other folder in the list.   You can right-click on it and create a new folder - call it Saved Mail or something.  Inside this folder make a new folder - call it 2005.  Inside that one create yet another named 200509, for September.  Make a bunch more for the previous months - 200508, 200507 and so on.

Okay, now go back to the Inbox where you have 85,459 messages saved up since the first Clinton administration.   Presumably they are sorted in the order in which they were received.  Select the first one (which is the most recent message) and then scroll down until you find the first message sent in September.  Hold down the shift key and select it.  This will select all the messages in between and so you have all the messages for September selected.

Now left-click and hold on any of the selected messages, and drag it to the new folder you created for 200509.  Let go.  All of the September messages will get moved to that folder.  Now do the same for all the previous months for which you have messages laying around.

Meanwhile you probably have lots of messages sitting in your Sent Items folder.  A copy of every message you send winds up in there, unless you have explicitly chosen not to do that.  You should move everything in there to the month folders, too.

Once that's all done, you should now have more or less empty Inbox and Sent Items folders, and everything filed away in your Personal Folder. 

When October gets here, right-click on the top of your folder list (where your name is) and make a new folder - called 200510.  As October passes, drag email to this folder after you have read and dealt with it.  In November make another one.  And so on.  Now, these folders still count toward your mail quota limit, so eventually you will have to drag the October folder to the Personal Folder- 2005- folder.  This will take it off the mail server and relocate it to your personal computer.

You will rapidly accumulate email in these archive folders.  The author has over 30,000 emails stored this way, but it is possible to search for messages pretty quickly.  At the top of the Outlook window you will see a Find button. 

Click on the Find button and then the Options Button - and choose Advanced Find.  Here you can choose which folder(s) you want to search by clicking on the Browse button, and then you can enter words to search for in all your messages.  In this example we recall that somebody sent a great recipe for chicken salad last Christmas.  Make sure you select to search in the subject field and message body.  If it's there, Outlook will find it fast, checking around a thousand messages a second.

If you have any trouble using this technique to manage your mail, contact Phil Bidwell at 2710.

Meridian Mail Shortcuts

When you are listening to your messages, there are a couple of handy keystrokes that can save you time -

• Instant Call Back:  While the message is playing, hit 9 at any time to make the phone immediately call the number that the message came from.
• Rewind and fast-forward:  While the message is playing press 1 to "rewind" the message in five-second increments.  Skip forward by pressing 3.

See more of these tips at http://www.oneonta.edu/admin/telecomm/vmi.asp. 

If you have a question for Computer and Telecommunication Services about:

Computer Problems or Related Issues - Call the Information Technology Help Desk at 436-4567

Telephone Service or Problems - Call the Office of Telecommunications at 436-2577

Directory Assistance - call 436-3500

Learn more about our automated NameConnector Service