Help Desk Announcement (HDA) Posting Policies and Guidelines

These guidelines are adopted in connection with Help Desk announcements to allow users better management of their email accounts and to standardize policies and procedures in the posting of messages.

Policies and Guidelines

Message Categories
Help Desk announcements are initially categorized as follows:

1. University Policies and Procedures
   These are announcements involving policies and procedures that are university-wide in application. 
2. Academic Announcements
   These announcements include a call for papers, invitations to professorial lectures, seminars, workshops, or other activities that are academic in nature.
3. Non-Academic Announcements
   These announcements refer to activities relating to DLSU offices but are not academic in nature.
4. General Announcements
   This category is used for announcements that cannot be classified any other way.
5. Sympathy Messages
   These announcements contain notices of the death of a member of the DLSU community or his/her immediate family.

Posting of Messages
The following policies shall apply to requests for the posting of announcements:

1. Only official announcements can be posted through the Help Desk Announcement (HDA) service.
2. An announcement is considered official if it originates from a DLSU department/office and from a DLSU email account.  
3. Affiliate organizations and groups are requested to send announcements to their members directly or through alternative means. 
4. Accredited student organizations and individual faculty members who would like to post via Help Desk are requested to forward their announcement to the supervising office for vetting and posting.
5. Help Desk will send a copy of the announcement to the requester for final checking before posting and archiving. It is the responsibility of the requester to ensure that the details in the announcement are correct and that the announcement uses inclusive, non-stereotypical language, mindful of the different diversities such as gender, different abilities and talents, age, race, ethnicity, neurodivergence, political and philosophical affiliations, socio-economic status, etc. If needed, please consult the APA EDI Inclusive Language Guidelines available here.
6. Once posted, the announcement can no longer be recalled or re-sent.
7. ITS shall not be responsible for the content of the announcements.
8. The lead time for posting the announcement is as follows. 

Note: Lead time does not include Saturdays, Sundays, or holidays.

However, requests that are 30 days in advance of the posting date will not be accepted.

The same announcement may be posted for a maximum of two (2) times only, provided that the second announcement is at least one (1) week after the initial announcement.

9. The same announcement may be posted for a maximum of two (2) times only, provided that the second announcement is at least one (1) week after the initial announcement.
10. Announcements with up to 20 lines will be posted in full. Those with more than 20 lines or 2000 characters and/or contains attachment or image, will be posted with a link to the full details of the announcement.  Links will expire after one (1) month.
11. Announcements in the category of ‘University Policies and Procedures’ will be archived for one (1) year. All other announcements will be archived for one (1) month.

Standard E-mail Templates
The following are the standard e-mail templates to be used in posting announcements to ensure uniformity of the common Help Desk Announcements.

1. Scholarship Grants/Programs – includes announcement for application of scholarships sponsored by other DLSU partner universities and organizations.
2. Memo – includes announcement that contains policies/procedures/reminders.
3. Job Posting – includes job openings posted at the Work @ DLSU website.
4. Call for Papers/Research/Proposals – includes announcement calling for research proposals, papers from DLSU, and other external organizations.
5. Lectures/Workshops/Seminars – includes lectures/workshops/seminars conducted within DLSU University.
6. Sympathy Messages – includes death announcement and the like.

Target recipients
Help Desk announcements may only be distributed to the following target recipients:

1. Community (includes all members of the community with a DLSU email account).
2. Students (includes all enrolled undergraduate, graduate, and TDSOL  students).
3. IS Students (includes Nursery to Grade 12 students).
4. Employees (includes Teaching Faculty, Academic Service Faculty, Administrative Professional Service Personnel, and Co-Academic Personnel)

Announcements intended for a subset of the target recipients enumerated above should not be posted through the Help Desk. A specific distribution list, which functions like an ordinary email address, may be available for use. For such cases, the message can be sent directly by the sender to the distribution list without having to pass through the Help Desk. The Help Desk will inform the requesting party when an applicable distribution list is available.

Specifications of announcements
The following elements must be present in the request:

1. Subject of the announcement
2. Sending department/office
3. Reply email address (this must be a DLSU email address)
4. Copy of the announcement (free of any errors in typing, spelling, grammar, etc.)
5. Target recipients
6. Posted announcements cannot contain attachments