IRM - VT PACE

Mission:

VT PACE addresses provide a secure and accountable method for workgroups to share departmental or workgroup e-mail. PACE stands for Personal Access for Collaborative E-mail.

---

A VT PACE address is useful for situations when:

• A department or workgroup needs a long-term, stable e-mail address; and
• Multiple members of the department or workgroup need to access the same electronic correspondence.

With a VT PACE address, a department or workgroup gets:

• A simple e-mail address (e.g., account_name@vt.edu)
• The ability to control who may access the e-mail
• Accountability of the individuals who view and respond to e-mail sent to the address

Forms:

• VT PACE Address Application Form (Group Email) (PDF)
• VT PACE Handout (PDF)

Cases:

Do any of these cases represent your needs?

General departmental inquiries

Jackie Doe is the department head of the Comparative Literature Department. Dr. Doe has assigned administrative assistant Jane Hill to respond to general inquiries that come to the department at the VT PACE address of Comparative-Lit@vt.edu. Jane receives this e-mail in her regular e-mail account. The associate department head, Gary Hale, also receives the e-mail but only responds when Jane is out of the office for the day. Dr. Doe does not receive the e-mails but can look at past inquiries in the archives.
The application for the VT PACE address included:
Requested address: Comparative-Lit@vt.edu
Primary administrator: Gary Hale
Additional administrators: Jackie Doe
Initial members of the recipient list: Jane Hill, Gary Hale

The department uses the initial set-up of the VT PACE address:

• Administrators Gary Hale and Jackie Doe can add and delete the e-mail addresses of other people to the recipient as needed, using the listserv tools.
• Replies go to the sender.
• The non-public archive includes the incoming inquiries to Comparative-Lit@vt.edu. All members of the recipient list and all administrators can view the archive.

Additional individual settings:

• Gary Hale filters the e-mail into an e-mail folder so that he doesn’t need to handle this mail when Jane is available. [See “Filtering Listserv Messages” ].

Journal staff

Casey Baltic is the editor of the journal Archival Resources that is hosted by Virginia Tech. Potential authors, reviewers, and other general inquiries correspond with the journal through its VT PACE address of ArchivalResources@vt.edu. The editorial assistants are typically drawn from the senior doctoral students in the Historical Documents Program, and so there is a relatively high turnover rate. A new editorial assistant, Jamie Davenport, has just joined the staff. The administrative assistant for the Historical Documents Program, Jordan Faylor, acts as emergency backup for the journal’s communications. Pat Tyler is a resource person at the journal’s sponsoring disciplinary association.
The application for the VT PACE address included:
Requested address: ArchivalResources@vt.edu
Primary administrator: Casey Baltic
Additional administrators: Jordan Faylor
Initial members of the recipient list: Jordan Faylor, Jamie Davenport, Pat Tyler

The initial set up of the VT PACE address provides for:

• Administrators Casey Baltic and Jordan Faylor can add and delete the e-mail addresses of other individuals to the recipient list as needed, using the listserv tools.
• The non-public archives can be viewed by all administrators and by all recipient list members.
• Note that Pat Tyler is on the list using a non-VT e-mail address (pat.tyler@assn.org.uk).

Changes made to the set-up:

• To include all replies as well as inquiries in the archives, Jordan changed the listserv to reply to BOTH the sender and to the list, permitting Casey to review all communications as Jamie begins work. Later, the archives will also serve to training a future new editorial assistant.

More…

VT PACE addresses are forward-only addresses that can be associated with other systems in particular circumstances.
An Exchange resource account can be the recipient e-mail for a unit that consists of Exchange users. Considerations include:

• Only individuals with Hokies accounts may access these accounts. Hokies accounts, in turn, are generally limited to university faculty and staff. Students and non-VT individuals cannot be included.
• Managing the group of individuals who may access this account is accomplished through an Exchange group. OU administrators have the ability to manage these groups. Units without OU administrators will have difficulty managing group membership.

Ticketing systems are an option for groups with complex staffing of single points of entry for high volume e-mail. A ticketing system (including help desk systems, request tracking systems, bug tracking systems) can be the recipient e-mail for a VT PACE address. Considerations include:

• Volume and complexity must be worth the effort to establish a ticketing system.
• Both proprietary and open source systems are available and used in several places on campus now.
• The method the ticketing system uses to check or receive e-mail must be maintained by the unit using the ticketing system.

Contact 4help (www.4help.vt.edu) for more information on these options.

 

• Virginia Tech Home
• Information Technology
• IT Security

Last updated February 9th, 2007