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Contact Students in an Instant with EagleConnect!By Dr. Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, Assistant Director - Academic Computing and User ServicesOne of the reasons the new student digital communications system, EagleConnect, is powered by Microsoft is because of the variety of 'digital bridges' that could be easily built between the students, faculty, and staff at UNT due to our use of Exchange and Outlook. Plans to make digital communication easy and ubiquitous throughout the UNT community have taken a big leap forward with the addition of the students' directory to Outlook and related applications and services. Finding students now is a piece of cake!EagleConnect addresses for current students (and alumni and retirees) follow the format FirstnameLastname@my.unt.edu. These EagleConnect users and addresses are included in a separate Students addressbook that can be accessed in a variety of ways in the Outlook client, on Outlook web access, and in Entourage (if you are a Mac user). To find the Student Address Book in Outlook, simply go to Tools-->Addressbook and select Students from the pull down menu of your available address books:  You can easily find the students when making an appointment as well:  This is especially handy for calling meetings of groups of students in one's classes, setting up training sessions for your student employees and a variety of other options where you need to publish items to a student's calendar and also have them accept or decline such calls. Unfortunately, faculty and staff cannot see a student's availability in the Scheduling Assistant but students CAN give rights to view their calendars. Remember that students can forward their EagleConnect items (appointments and emails) to another account (such as a Gmail account) so they should get these requests forwarded to their preferred system. It is easy to find and use the Student Address Book in Outlook Web Access as well whether you are using Internet Explorer (I searched for my husband and his alumni account showed up easily!):  or other browsers like Firefox and Safari:  One small 'gotcha' at this timeOne thing to watch out for: multiple students with the same name. As of right now, there is no way of distinguishing between the many 'John Smiths' we have at UNT but the CITC Messaging Team is working on a solution for this. For right now, in order to find out WHICH John Smith of the many in the address book you want, you will need to click on the name to get its properties and look for the specific email address to find your student (you will have to know their email address - whether YOUR John Smith is JohnSmith09 or JohnSmith14). So, it is not perfect but the information on your particular individual is certainly attainable with a little pre-planning:  For you Macintosh folks, the Student Address Book can be easily accessed in Entourage:  All this and you can chat with the students too!You can easily chat with the students as well. UNT faculty and staff use Windows (or Mac) Office Communicator and the students' EagleConnect accounts (which are named the same as their email addresses) can be added to your chat contacts as well and students can indicate their 'presence' too so you know if they are online and logged in, busy, in a meeting or currently offline. This should be especially helpful for quick communications with student workers. Mobile Options - Communicate anytime and anywhereOne of the most popular features so far with EagleConnect and the students is the fact that they have been easily able to sync all EagleConnect features with their cell phones. This means that no matter how YOU prefer to communicate digitally (via email for most of us UNT faculty and staff), your students can get and respond to your communications via their mobile, wireless device of choice. But can they easily find me?Though some faculty and staff may welcome the idea that their digital contact information might be only a click away for the students, this was determined to not be optimal. The faculty and staff address book is NOT accessible to the students in EagleConnect! You would need to share that information with appropriate students as needed. EagleConnect does have a pre-loaded address book of general contacts on campus which includes accounts from areas like the Registrar, the Helpdesk, Housing and many academic departments. These 'general accounts' for this address book were developed when EagleConnect was first provisioned and were done in cooperation with these offices. So, no one should have to worry about their student texting them at 3:00 AM asking a question about an assignment! That being said, if you want that level of communication with your students, you are certainly welcome to give them your account info! For more informationStudents who have questions about using all of the EagleConnect and digital communications features listed above can contact the UNT CITC Helpdesk and/or check out the extensive EagleConnect tutorials at eagleconnect.unt.edu. Faculty and staff who want to learn more about integrating their Outlook email etc. with the student EagleConnect system can contact the Helpdesk as well. More general questions can be issued to me at ehinkle@unt.edu. Additionally, the CITC Messaging Team has a variety of tutorials and features about all these email and chat resources at messaging.unt.edu. There are several other integration initiatives on the horizon including collaborating and viewing documents using the Office Live component of EagleConnect and publishing calendars. Future Benchmarks articles will appear as this functionality is added to what is proving to be a very flexible and powerful system for faculty, staff, and student communication at UNT!
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