To communicate with a specifically defined set of K-State faculty, staff, students or a mix, you can create a Microsoft Group and that allows a way to make a very visual set of pages with media, files, text, etc and you can directly email all the people in the Group called a Sharepoint site. You can maintain these pages, send notifications of changes, and easily keep the group updated with changing membership using eID/email address.
To create a Group and site, follow these steps:
- Go to O365 in your web browser by signing into Webmail at https://webmail.ksu.edu
- Click on the People icon (2 blue people heads) or the little 4 square More Apps icon at the bottom of the stack of icons down the left side of the window.
- In that Search, type Groups
- You can then right-click or 2 finger click (mac) and Pin that Groups tool for convenience going forward.
- Click the New Group button in the upper left to start your new Group!
- Give it an appropriate name and click Create and it will take a bit.
- You can add people at this point, maybe add a set of test people or helpers to start or you can say Not Now
- You should keep the Privacy to Private so it is just the people you add, not all of KSU.
- Once it is created, you will see Mail, Files, Events, and Members right at the top left and you can use those to set everything up.
- The Sharepoint site is managed by clickin on the Site button in the upper right hand corner. See the image below. It is a small blue button on the far upper right or in the middle of the page you should see a blue S that says "Add to the team site-Start sharing and collaborating on content in SharePoint." Click that and you can start setting up a site.
- When you are ready, you can add your members (staff or students) via the Members menu and keep the site, events, files and users updated.
Note: The default notification option is Following in Inbox but users can control that via a button in the top right of the Group.