Penn Live for SAS Students

We'd like to welcome our new, incoming class of Penn Live users! We want to let you know about a couple of ways that you can learn more about Penn Live and get help, should you need it:

- this blog - whenever we encounter a topic of general interest relating to Penn Live, we post it to the blog. Checking back frequently or - even better - subscribing to the RSS feed is a good way to learn more about Penn Live.

- our FAQ - we maintain both a general and technical FAQ for Penn Live, located here:

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/help/pennlive/

whenever we see multiple help requests on a common topic, we usually write an article for the FAQ. If you'd like to learn about configuring a mail client or mobile device for use with Penn Live, you should find what you need in the FAQ.

- our help form - if you can't find what you need on the blog or in the FAQ, just fill out our help form and we will get back to you right away with an answer to your question:

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/forms/student_email_help.html

So, welcome, and please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions!

It has recently come to our attention that the there are some incompatibilities between Firefox 3 and Penn Live (Hotmail). When you go to check your mail using Firefox 3, it will work, but you will be in "Classic Mode," a version of Penn Live that does not provide the full user interface experience - e.g. you can't drag and drop messages.

You will get this message when you log into Penn Live using Firefox 3:

"You are temporarily on the classic version of Windows Live due to an error encountered during login. Before trying again, please clear your cache and cookies."

Please note that clearing your cache and cookies will not actually resolve the problem.

Microsoft and Mozilla are aware of the problem and are working to resolve it. In the meantime, if you encounter this situation, you can either use Penn Live in Classic Mode or downgrade your browser to Firefox 2. If you'd like to discuss other alternatives, just send us a note using our email help form and we'd be happy to discuss it with you:

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/forms/student_email_help.html

We're excited to announce that we now have 4000 students and alumni actively using Penn Live!

We've seen a couple of cases recently where Penn Live accounts have been locked due to students sending out mailings to a large number of recipients on behalf of their employers. We highly recommend that you do not send out bulk mailings from your Penn Live account. If you send an email to several hundred recipients, you run the risk of your account getting automatically locked. Your account can also get locked if you send out a large mailing and several of the recipients mark the message as SPAM.

If you do find that your account has been locked, please let us know and we can help you get it unlocked:

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/forms/student_email_help.html

We're excited to announce that we now have 3000 SAS students actively using Penn Live to manage their email!

If you haven't tried out Penn Live yet, we highly recommend that you check it out.

One of the coolest new additions to the Penn Live suite of applications is Office Live Workspaces. OLW allows you to create and store Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) online. You can then edit those files either through your web browser or through the copy of Office that you have installed on your computer.

For example, you can open a Word document that you have stored online from Microsoft Word. Whenever you click the "Save" button, your changes will be saved back up to the copy of the document that is stored online, seamlessly.

You can also share your files with other Penn Live users to facilitate collaboration. You can share entire workspaces or on a per-file basis.

OLW is a great to tool to avoid having to email copies of your paper to yourself in order to transport it around - and all of the versioning problems that come along with that! Speaking of versioning, OLW also keeps track of all of the changes you make to your documents and allows you to "roll back" to a previous version.

If you haven't tried it yet, you should definitely check out Office Live Workspaces:

http://workspace.officelive.com/

We're excited to announce that Windows Live SkyDrive now offers 5GB of storage space for you to use! If you haven't seen it yet, SkyDrive is a Windows Live service that offers you space to store your files online. You can even share individual files and folders with your friends quickly and easily. And, now, with 5GB of storage space, you should have plenty of space to store everything you need in your SkyDrive.

We highly recommend that you check it out:

http://skydrive.live.com

We're excited to announce that the Penn Live email service will become available to all SAS graduate and professional students in early January! If you are a SAS graduate or professional student, look for your invitation to sign up for Penn Live shortly after the winter break!

Do you already have a commercial Hotmail account - an account that ends in @hotmail.com, @msn.com, or @live.com? Do you want to be able to quickly switch between your commercial Hotmail account and your Penn Live account, all while keeping your school email separate from your personal email? You can do this by using Windows Live's Linked-ID feature.

You can find more info on setting up Linked-ID's here:

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/help/pennlive/hotmail.html

Please note that when you delete a message in Penn Live it will only sit in your deleted items folder for 3-5 days before being removed from the server. If you're unsure about whether you want to delete a message, you should think about filing such messages in a folder before moving them to the deleted items folder.