CNS › Dean's Office Staff Directory

The Staff Directory includes a database of all dean's office staff.  Using this tool, you can do three things:

• View information about dean's office staff, including office locations, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses.
• Send e-mail to individuals or groups of people based on where their office is located, what section of the dean's office they work for, who they report to, etc.
  
• Create an address book for the e-mail program on your computer, so you can start typing a person's name and their e-mail address will be filled in automatically.

To send group e-mails or to create an address book, you need a password, which can be provided by your supervisor.


Selecting Groups of People

The Selection Criteria allow you to choose groups of people having certain attributes before you click the "Show Selection", "Create E-Mail List", or "Generate Address Book" button.  When you first start using the tool, you will notice that the "All" entry is highlighted in every list.  By default, all dean's office staff are selected.  At any time, you can click the "Reset" button to reset the selection criteria to "All".

To narrow the group of people, click on entries in one or more of the lists.  For example, click on "PAI" and then "1" to select everyone whose office is on the first floor of Painter.  If you want to choose multiple entries in the same list, hold down the control (Ctrl) key on your keyboard while you click on entries.  For example, control-click "PAI" and "WCH" to select everyone with offices in Painter and W.C. Hogg.  Note that the lists have scroll bars and not all choices may be visible at the same time.


Viewing Directory Information

Click the "Show Selection" button to view information about all the dean's office staff you have selected.  If you have not used the Selection Criteria to narrow the selection, you will see what was once called the dean's office phone directory.  If you see nothing when you click the "Show Selection" button, your selection criteria are so narrow that no one meets the criteria.  (For example, we currently have no staff with offices on the second floor of ESB.)


Sending E-mail

To send e-mail to a single person, simply display the directory and then click on the person's e-mail address.

To send e-mail to a group of people, first use the Selection Criteria to specify the group, then click the "Show Selection" button to make sure you've selected the right people, and then click the "Create E-Mail List" button.  You will see a list of the e-mail addresses of the people you have selected.  If the list is fairly short, you can click on the "Compose Group E-mail" button to bring up an e-mail composition window.  Note that all the addresses appear in BCC (blind carbon copy) fields.  This is to protect the confidentiality of people's e-mail addresses and to prevent the recipients of your e-mail from unintentionally replying to everyone.

If you attempt to send e-mail to a large group of people (for example, everyone in the dean's office), you will be instructed to click on the list of e-mail addresses, select Copy from your browser's Edit menu., go into your email program, and insert the addresses into the BCC field of an email message.  This copy/paste operation is necessary because of a limitation in the web language.

In the e-mail composition window, you can manually add or delete individual e-mail addresses.  For example, if you want to invite everyone in your section to Bob's surprise party, you can delete Bob's address from the e-mail at this time.


Creating an Address Book for Thunderbird on a PC

1. Once you are in the Directory Query Tool, use the Selection Criteria lists to choose the group of people you would like in your address book.
2. Click the "Show Selection" button to view the list of people.  If you've made a mistake, click the "Reset" button and start over.
3. Click the "Generate Address Book" button.  In the window that appears, click the "Save to Disk" button and then click the "OK" button.
4. Exit or minimize your web browser.  You should see a new file on your desktop having the name DNS_Staff_Directory.csv.
5. Launch Thunderbird.  From the menu bar, choose Tools -> Import...
6. In the window that appears, choose "Address Books" and then click the "Next" button.  Click on "Text file (LDIF, .tab, .csv, .txt)" and then click the "Next" button.
7. In the "Select address book file" window that appears, click on the "Files of type:" drop-down list and choose "Comma Separated (*.csv)".  Then, click on the file name DNS_Staff_Directory.csv and click the "Open" button.
8. In the "Import Address Book" window, make sure that "First record contains field names" is unchecked.  Then click the "OK" button.  You should see the message "Addresses successfully imported from text file".  Click the "Finish" button.
9. In Thunderbird, when you click the "Address Book" button in the toolbar, you should see an address book named DNS_Staff_Directory in addition to your Personal Address Book.  Names in these address books will auto-complete when you are sending e-mails.