The following tips are for current MessageNet users. If you aren’t a current user, feel free to keep reading to see the many ways MessageNet connections can work for you.

MessageNet Connections has different security classes of users, ranging from Manager level to basic. This allows one or more people to act as administrators of the system while preventing those with less experience or skill from accessing higher level features, with the lowest level users restricted to only sending and receiving messages. It’s the users in the middle that have the ability to accidentally put restrictions on messages,  lists, or anything else they create.

Most features of MessageNet Connections can be restricted to a certain class of user and above, and often the default is MGR, or manager. If someone with a security class lower than manager but high enough to create messages creates a group, list, or message, or adds a device and accidentally leaves the security restriction set to MGR, only those users would be able to even see, let alone access or edit the new message or list or device. Only a MGR-class user would be able to change the class restriction. This mistake is really easy to make, especially if the default restriction is generally set to manager. It’s one I’ve made myself when I was first learning how to use Connections. So, if you create a message or anything else and then cannot locate it, there’s a possibility it was accidentally restricted to a class of user higher than yours.

The best way to deal with this problem is by double-checking that none of the restrictions are for a higher class of user before saving as new.

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.

The following tips are for current MessageNet users. If you aren’t a current user, feel free to keep reading to see the many ways MessageNet connections can work for you.

A common mistake a lot of people make is confusing the ‘save’ and ‘save as new’ buttons. This can happen almost anywhere on the MessageNet system, but I’ll use message creation as an example, since that’s where it happens the most often.  Since the message editor uses an older message as a template, it makes the most sense to choose a message that has similar properties to the new one you want to create. This makes creating the message a lot faster and easier, but unfortunately opens the window for accidentally deleting the older message. A lot of users will accidentally click ‘save’ instead of ‘save as new’, which saves the new data over the old, then wonder what happened to the original message. Since this is a pretty easy mistake to make, the best way to avoid it is to click ‘save as new’ immediately after changing the message name, then clicking ‘save’ after any subsequent changes.