Martin's BCIM Website Blog

I've been thinking for a while now that the StaffWeb home page announcements area isn't really working, in the sense that I doubt whether anybody bothers to check it regularly. I've also become rather lazy when it comes to updating it. Staff announcements are invariably made via the University's mailing list system, which is really much better suited to the purpose.

It occurred to me that it would be good to archive these emailed announcements to help staff who have lost or deleted important announcements that have been sent to them via the mailing list system. I don't think this would be very hard (for Mike!) to implement, although it would need quite a bit of work I'm sure. I would suggest that the most recent message headings should be listed within the StaffWeb home page announcements area, to be followed by a link to older message headings. Clicking on a message heading would bring up the full message; the messages themselves could be archived either in the form of an SQL database or as individual XML files.

We've discussed the idea of resurrecting the ex-SCISM StaffWeb Emailer before; I now think that we should go ahead with this, and add in a message archival facility for all messages - perhaps for each of the Depts too.