[Em-announcements] New Campus Instant Messaging Service

[Veronica Ruiz]

  To all Enrollment Management  Staff:

C&C has recently delivered a campus-wide IM solution for all UCR 
staff and faculty called IM at UCR 
(<http://cnc.ucr.edu/im>http://cnc.ucr.edu/im). Since 2005, most VCSA 
staff have been using an instant messaging service provided by VCSA 
Technology Services called Microsoft Office Communicator. While this 
divisional solution has served us well, IM at UCR offers a number of key 
benefits:
    *  Ability to chat with any UCR staff /faculty
    *  Chatroom capabilities for regular group chat needs
    *  Pre-configured buddy lists for your department and division
    *  User lookup makes it easy to discover any UCR employee and 
initiate chat sessions
    *  Works with many common PC/Mac chat clients; there is also a 
web-based interface integrated with R'Space forthcoming
    *  Eliminates the cost of running redundant IT systems across campus
Over the course of the next 2 weeks, Technology Services will be 
piloting this service with a limited number of users and gathering 
feedback. Based on the outcome of the pilot, we will begin the 
process of migrating Student Affairs to use the campus IM, and will 
eventually discontinue the VCSA IM service.

Please stay tuned in the coming weeks as we send out additional 
announcements regarding how and when users will be able to convert to 
the campus IM service. We will also send out advance notice as we 
schedule deactivation of the VCSA IM service. Our goal is to complete 
this conversion by the end of February.

Changes to Staff Experience/Training Resources

IM at UCR has all the features of a modern instant messaging service, 
and functions very much like the current VCSA IM service as well as 
popular consumer chat programs from MSN, Yahoo and Google. We expect 
staff that have used VCSA or other IM services should be able to 
begin using IM at UCR with little or no training. C&C also has a robust 
support site that provides training materials and outlines the 
capabilities of the IM at UCR service: 
<http://cnc.ucr.edu/im>http://cnc.ucr.edu/im.

Please feel free to contact me if you or any of your staff have 
questions or concerns.

Regards,

-Sean 
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