{"id":660,"date":"2015-01-15T15:23:54","date_gmt":"2015-01-15T15:23:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/eltt\/?p=660"},"modified":"2022-04-13T15:46:57","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T15:46:57","slug":"onemany-office365","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/onemany-office365\/","title":{"rendered":"One:many communication \u2013 Forwarding replies to Learning Central e-mails on to a generic account"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dewi Parry and Catherine Emmett<\/p>\n

Happy new year! We hope you all enjoyed your time off!<\/p>\n

For this week\u2019s blog post, we have a joint post with guest, Catherine Emmett, who works in the Learning Technology Systems team. We\u2019re going to focus in this post on a query we got from one of our\u00a0Schools this week.<\/p>\n

The School uses generic email accounts\u00a0to email students. All members of the School\u2019s admin team have access to read and respond to emails from students that come to this email box. The admin staff sometimes need to send out emails to whole modules or groups of students on modules, and the most efficient way for them to do this is to use the \u201cSend Email\u201d function in the Learning Central module. However, there\u2019s a challenge here; Learning Central doesn\u2019t have any login access for generic mailboxes, so you can\u2019t send an email from<\/em> those mailboxes in Learning Central. Which means that only individual staff accounts can email out to students, and therefore any time a student hits \u2018reply\u2019 to those messages, it sends the reply to that individual member of staff (instead of to the generic mailbox used by all the admin staff).<\/p>\n

We investigated logins for generic mailboxes and found that the reason Learning Central doesn\u2019t have this type of login access is that University regulations in relation to identity management and security prevent it. That means we need some other method to help deal with this. The team discussed this and came up with a workaround, which we thought might be useful for other Schools to know about. So, here is the method we came up with. In this case we\u2019re using the generic ELTT mailbox as an example.<\/p>\n

Example scenario<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dewi wants to send out a message to students on a module in Learning Central, but he wants any replies from students to go to the ELTT mailbox, not to him, where the others in the team can pick them up if he\u2019s away.<\/p>\n

Method process<\/strong><\/p>\n

1. Set up an Office365 rule first – using the on-line version of Office365.\u00a0All members of staff who use the ELTT@cardiff.ac.uk<\/a> mailbox each set up a rule in their own individual mailboxes. This rule states that anytime an email is received to an individual\u2019s mailbox and it contains (in this example) #cuemailtest\u00a0in the subject line, it is automatically forwarded to ELTT@cardiff.ac.uk<\/a>. This rule remains there permanently until the staff member deletes the rule.<\/p>\n

To set up up a rule in Office365, use this link to find instructions about Rules<\/em><\/a>. For this particular rule the settings we want will be as per this screenshot:<\/p>\n

\"LC<\/a><\/p>\n

2. Dewi can now go into the appropriate Learning Central module and clicks \u201cSend Email\u201d from \u201cModule Tools\u201d under the control panel. In the subject line of the email he types\u00a0whatever the subject title\u00a0is, then he adds #cuemailtest at the end.<\/p>\n

“Dates for the next Workshops\u00a0#cuemailtest”<\/p>\n

Then he types the text of his message as normal and sends.<\/p>\n

Now, if a student receiving this message just hits reply and sends back, the #cuemailtest will be in the subject line already, and this should trigger the rule in Dewi\u2019s Office365 email box to forward that student\u2019s message to the ELTT@cardiff.ac.uk<\/a> mailbox and delete from his own mailbox.<\/p>\n

A couple of suggestions and things to note<\/strong><\/p>\n