Electronic Pigeon Holes

[mcnallyfc]

Morning all,

 

Im looking at getting rid of paper memo's and other wastes of paper by introducing an electonic alternative.

 

Ideally in staff room id like to have an electronic pigeon hole - where on a large display its split into honeycomb sections with staff members name and in there is maybe a display of how many emails or voicemails they have?

 

Has anyone done anything like this and if so, how?

 

Any alternatives to this if its not possible?

[plexer]

Nice idea how practical to implement I don't know.

 

Do you have a vle?

 

Ben

[FN-GM]

I assume you will still need Pigeon Holes for the post?

[plexer]

Nah you open it all scan it in then email it to people and shred the originals.

 

Ben

[p858snake]

I wouldn't bother with something like that, I would just get them into habbit of reading their emails without needing to view a reminder about it.

[mcnallyfc]

Yeah we do have moodle

 

Plexer - bingo my way of thinking

 

Cant see me winning that battle though and in all likelihood yes there will need to be the pigeon holes for the post aspect but i hope that all other forms of communication will be electronic rather than paper based by offering something similar to what i want. Plus when if the system works as desired then it will push staff to use email more and maybe get external companies to contact via email and not post.

 

Ive heard of a system working as we want it but just for voicemails, its getting it for emails too.

[dhicks]

Im looking at getting rid of paper memo's and other wastes of paper by introducing an electonic alternative.

 

Good plan. A print-to-PDF server is always good - a combination of Samba and Ghostscript can do this for free, and you can have staff print straight to a "Memo" printer to print memos (as PDF documents) and send them off to other members of staff.

 

Has anyone done anything like this and if so, how?

 

A large-screen display attached to a PC is easy enough, and I'm guessing the easiest way to do a custom display is simply to have a script write out the appropriate information to an HTML page, refreshed every minute or so from a kiosk-mode browser. How, exactly, you extract that information from your email / phone system depends on what systems you have and what APIs they have available.

[ReverentCreature]

Nah you open it all scan it in then email it to people and shred the originals.

 

Ben

 

 

 

Opening other peoples mail? Thats against the law!

[nadeem]

Opening other peoples mail? Thats against the law!

 

It's not actually.

[Edu-IT]

Nah you open it all scan it in then email it to people and shred the originals.

 

Ben

Do you have a lot of spare time at your place Ben? ;-)

[plexer]

It's not actually.

 

Opening someone elses mail to their private residence is illegal under ripa not sure about work mail though.

 

Ben

[plexer]

Do you have a lot of spare time at your place Ben? ;-)

 

Nope but I was just making a suggestion how it could be acheived should have added a tongue in cheek smiley

 

Ben

[Little-Miss]

what about confidential letters?

[pete]

Scrape new messages for the day / week using exchange powershell tools for the mailboxes you want, dump to status screen / webpage. Could probably pull this via nagios wmi.

 

Not lit = no email, green = new email today, orange = new unread email for week, red = "hasn't read emails since dawn of time".

[Edu-IT]

Really, I do have to ask. What is the point?

 

Why not work with SLT to implement a policy whereby anything internally that can be sent by email, is sent by email. There will always be post coming from outside of school and letters from parents etc now unless you have the staff to sit there and scan all this into the system then deliver it electronically, it really just over complicates a system that is meant to be simple.

 

Here we use pigeon holes to return found items, for example a CD belonging to a child in a tutor group 10ABC could be put in the tutors pigoen hole to return. If you remove the pigeon holes you're making more work there too.

[mcnallyfc]

This seems to have gone off topic - i dont want to get rid of the existing pidgeon hole just to add an electronic one.

 

So the point is as described - to stop things like paper memo's, word of the day booklets etc. Getting staff to send emails rather than paper notes. Basically internal communications done by email rather than paper.

 

Pete - finally a suggestion for how to achieve it! thanks for that - its something im looking into and if i do find something ill post it up.

[dhicks]

i dont want to get rid of the existing pidgeon hole just to add an electronic one.

 

You could combine the two: have a cabinet on the wall for pigeon holes, with a small hinged flap over each slot, flush with the sides. Paint the whole lot matt white and you've got a surface to project on from a short-throw projector - no need to mess around with sticky lables when re-labling slots, just re-arrange the display.

[localzuk]

It can be done, but it depends on your phone system and email system.

 

What are you using for each of these?

[Edu-IT]

You could combine the two: have a cabinet on the wall for pigeon holes, with a small hinged flap over each slot, flush with the sides. Paint the whole lot matt white and you've got a surface to project on from a short-throw projector - no need to mess around with sticky lables when re-labling slots, just re-arrange the display.

Power a projector for 8 hours each day to project onto pigeon holes? Seems a waste of money and electricity!

[LosOjos]

I've not seen a system like this, but I'm really liking the idea of a large touch screen display with a honeycomb view of staffs electronic pigeon holes... I'm really interested to see how/if you implement this one

[User3204]

We only send memos out via emaail now.

 

We also have a VOIP system that gives all staff a voicemailbox, and the PBX sends the recorded message to the email address of the owner (as a WAV).

 

 

If Microsoft had managed to bring out their Lync server out earlier I would have looked at this instead, but they got to market too late for us.