email cal - neu-spiral/SPIRAL-Handbook GitHub Wiki
Email, Slack, and Calendars
- Setting Your ECE Email Address as an Alternate to Your Google Account
- Email Forwarding
- Email Lists
- Slack
- Calendars
- Sponsored Emails
- Reserving a Meeting Room
This section is for procedures involving email, email lists, and calendars.
Please designate a Google account for SPIRAL business and use it for all Google services mentioned in this handbook.
- Several former members attempted to maintain two separate gmail addresses for work and personal communications; this is a futile attempt and will cause a lot of headache for you; just use your existing/single Google account for SPIRAL. Use alternate emails (see below).
- If you do not already have a Google account, please create one for this purpose; SPIRAL relies on many coordinated Google services.
- Do NOT use the @husky.neu.edu email address and the associated Google account for any SPIRAL business. These are restricted Google accounts that cause too much trouble for everyone; just forward emails from @husky to your preferred email address and never introduce the @husky email address to circulation.
Setting Your ECE Email Address as an Alternate to Your Google Account
Make sure your ECE email is defined as an alternate for your work Google account (not @husky!). To do so, go to Google Account > Personal Info using this link. Scroll down to Contact Info and click on arrow on the right in Email box in table. Add your ece email address as an alternate email.
Actually, while you are at it, list ALL of your email addresses in existence as alternates to your google account; there is no downside to it.
Setting up an alternate email is not the same as forwarding, which you need to set up separately. What this does is, it allows your work email to work as an alternate to your personal email. For example, if someone sends a google calendar invite to your ece account, it will show up in your google calendar. If someone shares a google drive folder with your ece account, or with a google group your ece account belongs to, it becomes shared with your personal account, etc. This allows you to get access to all these google services (calendar, drives, etc.) without sharing your personal google email with anyone.
Note: If you still have trouble seeing and responding to calendar invitations across calendars, first make sure to set your ece email as alternate email. Afterwards, make sure to visit the Calendar Settings of your work Google account and activate "Allow responding to invitations forwarded through alternative email addresses" option. This option can be found under "Other Notifications" section after you click 3 dots next to your personal calendar (the one with your name) and go into the "Settings and Sharing". From now on, the invitations to alternate email addresses will allow event invitations sent to your ece address to show up in your personal calendar.
Email Forwarding
You can also set up email forwarding, to forward your email to your personal google account.
- For setting up email forwarding of your ece.neu.edu email, open the ECE webmail through here. After logging into the ECE webmail, open "Forwarding" under the "My Account" panel at the top of the page.
- Instructions on how to set up email forwarding of your northeastern.edu email are here.
If you have set up any of these email accounts as alternate accounts to your email address, you can also respond/write emails as "@ece.neu.edu" or as "@northeastern.edu" by following instructions here. The Northeastern COE SMTP server information and ports required for sending emails via your gmail account using your Northeastern COE address may be found on the COE email questions wiki. This will also allow you to correspond with people via gmail, without however sharing your personal email account with them.
Email Lists
Please use your ECE email address to subscribe to appropriate google-groups below. Check your lab specific page for additional groups. You can join each of these member lists by clicking on the respective link and then clicking on "Apply for membership".
In your request to join a mailing list, please include some information on who you are, what is your relationship with SPIRAL (e.g., are you a Ph.D., M.Sc., student?), who is your advisor, etc.
There are lists who are not for SPIRAL members but still related to SPIRAL community. They are listed below for completeness:
| Membership | Group Name | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Not in SPIRAL but attending to ML reading groups | ml-readinggroup-neu | https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ml-readinggroup-neu |
Setting Your Display Name
Please make sure to use your display name as your full name for groups.
- After subscribing to groups, go to My Groups page.
- On the right side, for each group, you will see that you can edit your display name.
- Set your display name as your user name.
- (Optional) Select link my google plus profile, so it also displays your g+ picture next to your name.
Slack
We have a slack group for SPIRAL, you can sign up with your @ece.neu.edu, @neu.edu, or @northeastern.edu email address here
Calendars
SPIRAL uses two shared calendars to coordinate events across the group.
| Calendar | Calendar Adress |
|---|---|
| SEC: Spiral Events Calendar | [email protected] |
| SUC: Spiral Unavailability Calendar | [email protected] |
| SSC: Spiral Seminar Calendar | [email protected] |
To add a calendar:
- Open Google Calendar.
- On the left side, click Other calendars.
- Select Add a friend's calendar
- Enter the address of the calendar.
The purpose and suggested usage of each of these calendars is described in detail below.
Spiral Events Calendar
This calendar is a repository of events across all labs participating in SPIRAL. It is used to host (own) almost all events of relevance to SPIRAL to which guests will be invited as appropriate. It will appear cluttered, but will be useful to see and recover events not hosted in or lost from individual calendars.
- Add event to SEC, invite all guests from Spiral and outside (use google groups maximally in guest lists).
- Keep OFF in your personal gcalendar view, access to create/recover an event.
Spiral Unavailability Calendar
SUC is very useful to quickly determine if a SPIRAL member is out due to recurring or one-time business (e.g. classes, vacation, sickness, errands). Please use SUC to indicate planned time-off, recurring or otherwise.
- Create classes you take in SUC, then invite yourself as a guest so it appears in your personal calendar. If you are taking a class that already exists in SUC, simply add yourself to the guest list.
- For planned time off (e.g. vacation, conference travel), enter an all-day event that spans the dates you will be out.
- For recurring absence, enter weekly recurring events indicating the times you will be out.
- A short reason indicator in the title next to your name is optional but very useful (e.g. Deniz-vacation)
- If attending an event that already exists (e.g. a recurring class), add your name in the title; do not duplicate.
Spiral Seminar Calendar
Events such as seminar series, proposal/defense presentations, and other events that are needed to be publicized on the SPIRAL page should be created on SSC calendar. The SPIRAL website is set to automatically display the events from SSC. Therefore, for an event to appear automatically on the SPIRAL webpage, it needs to be created in SSC.
The procedure to add an event in SSC is as follows:
- Create the event in SSC (event appears on the SPIRAL webpage)
- Add the following guests:
[email protected] (event appears in SEC)
[email protected] (event appears in personal calendars of SPIRAL members)
Automatically Add Invitations from Gmail
In your Google Calendar (gCal) settings, allow incoming invitations to appear automatically in the calendar view.
- Click on the gear/settings symbol (top-right)
- Select SETTINGS
- Select “Yes” for “Show events automatically created by Gmail in my calendar”
Creating New Events in SEC
- Create the event in an appropriate (lab) calendar.
- Give a short title descriptive for all participants.
- Invite relevant individuals/googlegroups as guests.
- Always enable “Guests can modify event”.
- Always include video and reminder emails.
- SPIRAL always uses the video link in the gCal event entry; do not initiate other/parallel hangouts!
- Include and maintain further details, such as location, file attachments, and event details as accurately.
- To reduce email traffic, do not send emails to participants if you make minor modifications to an event entry.
Sponsored Emails
- Some activities require an @northeastern.edu email, such as accessing Asset Disposition forms for recycling university materials or reserving classrooms via myneu. Faculty and staff are given this email, but graduate students and temporary employees need to apply for one. You can make this request by following the instructions here.
Reserving a Meeting Room
Graduate students and faculty members can reserve classrooms via myneu-registrar's classroom reservation system. Make sure that you use a sponsored email to use this service and follow the instructions at Sponsored Emails.
Alternatively, you can use ISEC 550 for small SPIRAL meetings. ISEC-550 is a small experiment room for CSL and it has two doors - from inside 555 and from the corridor across from the freight elevator. The room has a working AV/setup using a desktop. We leave the door to 550 from inside 555 open using a doorstop, so please do not unlock that door if you use the room for a meeting. To reserve this room for your meeting, here is the first attempt at making an easy procedure:
Create your event in SEC or SUC or your personal google calendar (whichever is appropriate). Invite the following CSL lab email as a guest: '[email protected]' to your event. This is the calendar ID email and you should be also able to add it to your calendars and view existing reservations.
The rules for using this room for your events/meetings are simple:
- CSL experiments always override any other type of event.
- Events with reservation on the calendar always override spontaneous gatherings in the room.
- You must leave the room in sparkling clean and super neat condition up to my standards (not yours - so imagine the most severe level of OCD and make that person happy before leaving the room).
- The computer/AV must be always left in working condition - it is extremely irritating to walk in to a meeting room and struggle with technology for 15 minutes, as you all know.
- Always check the room calendar ([email protected]) for availability before making your reservation for this room. CSL experiments are usually planned ahead of time, and they usually take entire days/weeks -- so we should be able to let you know in advance if we need to move your reservation elsewhere.