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News-Mail-Relation

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1 Description

A new suggested feature "Send news automatically to group/course members per e-mail" evinced the needs of a general discussion on the relation between mail and news, e.g. should news be generated, when group/course mails are written / should mails be sent, when news are created / should users get a daily summary of group and course news per e-mail / ...).

2 Status

3 Additional Information

  • If you want to know more about this feature, its implementation or funding, please contact: Florian Suittenpointner / suittenpointner@qualitus.de

Attempt to clarify the differences between the two concepts:

Mail

News

Exclusive properties (sender)

  • File attachments
  • Personalization
  • Range of receivers can be controlled individually"

  • Integrated editor
  • Integrated link to source object

Exclusive properties (receiver)

  • Response and forwarding
  • Display on Personal Desktop can be controlled message by message

  • Reception can be skipped
  • Automatically executed range of display on the Personal Desktop

Exclusive properties (administration)

  • Permission to send can be controlled object by object

Interaction type and situation

Information and communication (1:1, 1:n)

Information (1:n)

Advisable usage if ...

  • feedback is expected or even desirable
  • need for coordination is urgent
  • receivers are supposed to be "activated" (assigning tasks, demand activities)

  • information is to be distributed unobtrusively
  • receivers are supposed to only be kept up-to-date
  • source objects are to be pointed out directly

Possible problems

"Flood of mails"

Technology is not that familiar to users by comparison

4 Discussion

We assume:

- (Group/Course) Mails are sent, if the sender wants to ensure that the members get the information.
- News are written, if information should be available for new members (that are registered after a news is written) as well and it is less important that everyone reads the messages.

The general requirement is: Send a news and a group/course mail with the same content without the need to write a news and a mail separately.

Options for Implementation:

(1) News form includes an option to send a news also per e-mail.
(2) Mail form includes an option to create a news item with the same content.
(3) Course/Group includes an option "Send news per mail automatically". This would also include automatic generated news (e.g. new file has been added) and send them per mail (one mail for each news).
(4) User option "News Notification per E-Mail", sends all news also per mail to the user, if activated.

If automatic news are sent per mail, we can run into a "spamming" problem, e.g. if a lot of new files are uploaded. We could avoid this if we prevent sending e-mails for each news and only send one "daily ILIAS news mail" e.g. triggered by a cron job.

Current Preferred Solution: We implement a user preference "Send Daily News Mail", that sends all news of the day to the user, triggered by cron job. A default (On/Off) for new users can be set in the administration (similar to other options, e.g. "show users online" setting).

-- Jour Fixe 12 Jan 2009

JF 29 June 2009: Option 2 would also be acceptable. If a user enters the mail form via "mail to course/group members" an additional checkbox "Generate Group/Course News" including a info text ("This news will be visible for all users that can access the group/course") can be provided.

Zenzen, Enrico [ezenzen], 05 SEP 2022: This request no longer fulfills the requirements of the Feature Wiki. In consultation with the maintainer I change the status of the feature request to "Redundant / outdated". If the request is still relevant, please update template and mockups.

5 Follow up

Last edited: 5. Sep 2022, 07:51, Zenzen, Enrico [ezenzen]