Training and Employee Development

MEMO Best Practices

As we get more experienced using our new MEMO system, some "Best Practices" have been suggested. These suggestions have come about while learning the new system and working with ITS, MEMO administrators and programmers, trainers, college trainers, college contacts, and college HelpDesks. The Best Practices were developed with the goal of improving everyone's awareness of how we may be better able to improve our new MEMO system's effectiveness.

Special Effects:

Please use some discretion when creating a message containing special formatting or special effects such as very different fonts, really wild colors, blinking text, or animated objects. You don't want your audience getting so caught up in the special effects that it's lost sight of your message!

In addition, sometimes special effects backfire. Although some of these special effects are fun and cool, they can become quite irritating for someone who just wants to read the message!

Also, please keep in mind that special effects and graphics take a long time to download when accessing the MEMO system from home. This causes frustration for remote users of the system. You may want to measure how much time and effort is required to create such a message versus the outcome expected.

Attachments:

Please try to use attachments, such as Word and Excel documents and graphic images, for specific business purposes only.

For example, routine e-mail communications should be created within your Netscape Messenger Composition window, not in a word processing application that is then sent as an attachment. Special formatting such as bold, underline, italics, font size, font color, and others can be applied in your MEMO messages using the formatting toolbar located across the top of the Composition window. Other features such as inserting tables and inserting images can also be done in a MEMO message by using the Insert menu.

Attachments should be used when a specific business purpose arises for that particular Word, Excel, or graphic document. The reason for using attachments more judiciously is due to their large size. Attachments come across as very large documents when using the MEMO system. A lot of a person's MEMO disk space is used when attachments are received. There are also some server-saving issues related to attachments that are currently being addressed. Yes, there are situations in which an attachment is necessary. Those situations are recognized and respected.

Some good questions to ask yourself before using an attachment are, "Does this information have to be an attachment?" "Can the information be entered directly into a MEMO message?" "Can the information be accessed via a web link?"

Graphics:

Graphics, scanned images, and photos take up a lot of MEMO disk space. They also take an extremely long time to download when using the system from home.

When graphics, photographs, or the like, are deemed necessary for a message, try to make it possible to link to the image rather than to have the image included in the message or included as an attachment. If that's not possible, and the image is needed in your message, please make sure the graphic is in GIF format. The GIF format takes up a lot less space than the JPEG format.

A good question to ask yourself before using graphics, scanned images, or photos is, "Can the same information be entered directly into a MEMO message as text?"

Please keep in mind that it is the message that is important.

Maintenance:

Please perform weekly maintenance on your MEMO account. The most important thing to remember is to delete messages from your Sent folder, and then empty your Trash folder to completely remove these messages from your account. One of the main reasons for running out of MEMO disk space is due to the multitude of messages in the Sent folder.

Local Mail Server:

Try to get in the habit of saving messages that you don't access very often to your Local Mail server. Your local mail server is listed at the bottom of your MEMO folders. (Your local mail server is actually your computer hard drive.) Folders can be created on your Local Mail server in the same way they are created on your regular MEMO mail server.

You always have access to the messages on your local mail server while you are using your computer here at work. However, you don't have access to these local mail server messages from home or from other remote access locations. That's not necessarily a bad thing! For instance, some good examples of messages that you may want to save to your local mail server may include minutes of meetings, FYI types of messages that you want to keep, but you don't necessarily have to review all the time, and messages from family and friends that include photos. You want to save these messages, but you don't need access to them all the time. They're perfect for saving to your Local Mail server!

In summary, these suggestions were developed with the goal of improving everyone's awareness of how we may be better able to improve the effectiveness of our new communication system.

For more information on Maricopa's Electronic Communication Policy, please visit http://memo.maricopa.edu/policies/bestpract.html