Overview of Maintaining the News Service

Through the news service, Information Center Facility users can read up-to-date news about courses, new products, operational changes, or other topics of interest at their terminals. As a news administrator, you can make news immediately available to users by adding or modifying a news item.

As an administrator, you:

Add new items
Modify existing items
Delete old items
View news items
Print news items

Each news item consists of:

Category – The general subject of a news item. The category can be up to 20 characters long.
Item – The title or headline of the news item.
Begin Date – The first day users can read the news item.
End Date – The last day users can read the news item.
Priority – Y (yes) or N (no) to indicate whether the news is of major importance.
Text – The content of the news.

Users can use the category, the item or title, and the date to see subsets of news items. Therefore, it is important that you follow conventions for these fields. Before creating the first news item, determine the number and type of category names to use. Decide also the kinds of news that are priority news.

Before You Begin

Before you begin maintaining the news service, read the online tutorial. The tutorial describes how to perform the tasks for maintaining the news service. To read the tutorial:

On the main menu panel for administrators, select the option for maintaining the news service.
Type T on the COMMAND line of the first news panel, and press the Enter key.

For detailed information about using a particular panel, press the HELP PF key while you are on that panel.