Common Easily Avoidable Errors (part 2)- Messages That Never Expire

The following tips are for current MessageNet Connections users. If you aren’t one yet, you can feel free to skip ahead to the next article or keep reading to find out the many ways MessageNet Connections can help you.

Messages that don’t expire can cause all sorts of problems, from the mildly annoying at best to the potentially serious at worst. If a non-emergency message has no set expiration, it can be sent multiple times by users who don’t realise it’s already active or as part of a regular schedule, creating another copy of the message every time it’s sent, clogging up the archive so it’s next to impossible to tell where a problem occurred, who sent it, or when it was sent.  At the other end of the spectrum, an emergency message with no expiration can constantly warn students of a mugger on campus that was arrested hours ago, or a chemical spill that has long since been cleaned up.  The easiest way to avoid these problems is to make sure a message has an expiration time on it before it’s launched. This is ideal for non-emergency messages, which are more likely to be sent on a schedule. If it’s not possible to set the expiration for a message (sometimes it’s impossible to know how long a message, especially emergency messages, will be needed), knowing how to cancel messages is essential. There are two ways to do this. The first is to cancel the message from the inbox it was originally sent to. Most messages should be sent to ‘sender’ so it’s easier to access them once they’ve been launched. The second is to go to the ‘stop active messages’ screen, accessible from the ‘other screens’ tab, and cancel the messages from there. Any user can see their own messages here and a MGR level user can see all messages.