- Fairbanks North Star Borough School District
- Email (Outlook Information)
Business Information Systems
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Do I need to update the Staff group every time we get a new employee?
Each building/department has its own Staff group. This Distribution Group is for quickly sending email to everyone in your building/department. To make life easier for you, and to avoid the risk of the group becoming "stale" and unusable, our systems automate adding and removing users to this group as they come and go from your building/department. As a result, most of the time you don't need to do anything, and the group will keep itself up to date.
There are, however, times when you may need to manually update the group. Music teachers and ITTs, for instance, oftentimes work in multiple locations, however their employee record -- from which the email system pulls its data -- only indicates one "primary" work location; for the other places they work at, they can be manually added to the relevant Staff groups. Conversely, oftentimes when staff go on leave they remain active in the system, but have no need to receive building/department email while they are gone; for these users, you can manually remove them from the group.
Manual changes you make to the group will not generally be overridden: The automation specifically watches for reassignment events, and only makes the necessary changes at that point -- removing them from their former location and adding them to their new one. This can, however, cause problems in certain edge cases, such as a user being manually added to a building's Staff group, then briefly being assigned to the building in Munis before being reassigned elsewhere; the end result of this situation would be the user no longer belonging to the building's Staff group. A more common scenario involves staff who take a leave of absence: Since the email system does not watch for starting and stopping leave, if you remove a user who is on leave you must add them again yourself when they return.