NOVEMBER, 2005

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Campus Upgrades Connection to the Internet

Recently the Office of Telecommunications made arrangements with the College's Internet Service Provider to increase the amount of bandwidth connecting the campus to the Internet.  Our connection is now rated at 100 Megabits per second, more than doubling our previous connection size.  Our network administration staff continues to manage this bandwidth by assigning different portions of it to different applications.  This means that part of the "highway" is dedicated to webpages, part to email, part to instant messaging, and so on.  Overall, though, users should see a notable improvement in overall speed of connection as we fine-tune our Internet service.

What Our Staff Is Up To

Deb Landry

Deb first began working for Computer Services in the Fall of 1999 as a work study student in Desktop Support.  She did an internship with the programming group in January of 2001 and joined them as a programmer / analyst after graduating in May of that year. 

Her responsibilities are to support the departments of Admissions, Alumni Affairs, College Advancement, Academic Advisement and the College Health Center.  Recently she has created processes to allow online Admissions deposits as well as supplemental applications for prospective students.  She also collaborated with programmer Rob Brown to set up a Health Center appointment scheduler.  Her current projects include processes for student advisors to obtain advisement documents online. 

Deb was married in July of this year - her husband Jeff supports computer technology in local school districts and plays in a local band.  They are currently building a new home in the town of Oneonta.

Outlook Mail Tips

Email Options Settings

There are lots of different attributes of your Outlook Mail that can be managed and customized.  Most of these settings are located within Outlook by clicking Tools- Options- at the top menu.  Under the Preferences tab, you will see a button labeled "Email Options".  Clicking it reveals the following menu:

This part is fairly self-explanatory, allowing you to set how messages are handled and how replies and forwards are formatted.  Try different settings to see how they affect the appearance of your mail - you may find some styles that work better for you.

Clicking on Advanced Email Options reveals yet another menu of choices:

This menu allows you to set what some people consider to be the more annoying aspects of email operations, like the playing of a sound when a new message arrives, the Desktop Alert Settings (you know, the box that pops up on your screen when a new message arrives - looks like the example to the left and can be very distracting), the suggesting of possible names in the To: field and so on.

Mail Merging in Microsoft Word

Merging data from other sources into Word documents is a very powerful tool, but can easily get confusing.  We have created a nice little set of documentation to help you pick your way through the process.  It is in the form of a Word document (what else?) and can be downloaded from this link.

Voicemail Tips

Creating an Operator Assistance Number

If you wish to assign a number that callers can refer to for more help, you can set the Operator Assistance Number.

At the end of your Recorded Greeting, you would say something like "for immediate assistance, please press 0 to speak to the department secretary".

After you have recorded your greeting but while you are still logged into Meridian Mail, press 80

Press 1

Enter the extension you want to assign to the "please press 0" function, followed by a # sign.

That's all there is to it!

If you have trouble working with this function, don't hesitate to call the Telecommunications Office at 2577.

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

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