| PublicationDate: 6/21/99 Summary: SFATECH available for all systems Author: PSS - Program Systems Service June 21, 1999 Dear Partners, We are pleased to announce the availability of SFATECH for technical assistance for all of the Departments SFA systems and software. SFATECH is an e-mail list serve sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. Its goals are to provide accurate and timely answers to technical questions about the Department's SFA systems, software, and mainframe products and to create an environment where users of SFA systems can help one another resolve technical issues. How does it work? What does this mean for ED on FINAID-L and FINNET-L? Why the change? How do I sign up? How can I get more information about SFATECH? Here's how it works: If you have a technical question about one of our SFA systems or mainframe or PC products, write it up in an e-mail and post it to the list serve. Department staff or the Department's contractors for the system about which you have a question will see your posting and begin working on a response. Please note that you must subscribe to SFATECH in order to send and receive postings. Questions and answers will be posted to the list so that everyone can benefit from the information. Of course, some inquires will take longer to answer than others. If your inquiry will take more than a day to resolve, we will contact you directly to acknowledge receipt of your inquiry. All services provided by this list serve, including customer service assistance, are paid for by the U.S. Department of Education. You will not be charged for any inquires posted to SFATECH, even if a contractor has to call you to resolve your issue. Remember that this list serve is for technical issues only. Non-technical questions will be forwarded to the appropriate office for response. Answers to non-technical questions will not be posted to the list. Note: In the interest of providing you with timely responses, the Department's contractors have been authorized to respond to technical questions without having their responses cleared by the Department. Here's what this means for ED on FINAID-L and FINNET-L: Now that SFATECH is available, we will no longer respond to technical inquiries posted to FINAID-L or FINNET-L. Also, we will no longer post technical announcements to non-ED lists. Our technical announcements will be posted under the Electronic Announcements area of IFAP (http://ifap.ed.gov) and to SFATECH. Why are we doing this? Two reasons: 1. Having an official ED e-mail list serve makes for better customer service. List serve technology is an excellent vehicle for you to ask us your technical questions, for us to answer them, and for all SFATECH subscribers to benefit from the information. 2. Bob Quinn and Pete Weiss, the list owners of FINAID-L, pointed out to us that over the past few years the amount of SFA technical issues on FINAID-L has increased. We agreed with them that it would be more appropriate to use the Departments resources to handle this kind of specialized customer service. Here's how to sign up: Subscribe to SFATECH by sending a message from your e-mail account. Address the e-mail to: listproc@inet.ed.gov Leave the subject line blank. In the body of the message, put: subscribe SFATECH yourfirstname yourlastname For example, if your name were Pat Smith, you would send a message as follows: TO : listproc@inet.ed.gov SUBJECT : subscribe SFATECH Pat Smith And that's it. More information is available on the SFA Technical Support web site at: http://www.ed.gov/sfatech/listserv.html You can also e-mail questions you have about SFATECH to us at sfatech@ncs.com |