Sending and Receiving Messages

The ability to communicate directly with your employees through ePro Scheduler can help maximize the system's potential and increase work flow efficiency for your administrators and/or schedulers.  

Important things to note:
The following walk through is based on default control panel settings. The following options can be enabled at any time upon request.  

• The 'Show Sender Email' option includes the sender's email address in the body of out-going messages sent to recipients' personal email addresses. 
• The 'Send Message Replies To Sender' option allows you to have responses sent directly to the sender's Self Service mailbox instead of the Management Level Master Mailbox. 
• The 'Block Deletion of Messages From Sent Message Folder' option prevents all users from deleting messages contained in the Admin Sent Messages folder. 
• The 'Send To Current Schedule' option was recently added to the hard coded drop down options. This allows you to send a message to all employees currently working on the schedule at that moment. 

 

Getting Started:

To begin, you will navigate to Message Center > Send Message. This will take you directly to the Send Message Manager. This is a management level tool.

• The 'Employees' drop down menu allows you to choose recipients from the list of active employees. (At this time, when selecting individual employees only an email and inbox message will be sent and not a text message.)
• The 'Send To' field displays the names of the employees that have been selected from the employee drop down menu along with the email listed in their employee profile.
• The 'Message Group' drop down menu gives you access to the default message groups as well as any custom message groups that have been created. The default message groups include separate groups for all employees that possess a certain qualification or certification, all employees that belong to a designated home cost center or district, and finally - the master list of all employees.
• The 'Registered' radio button allows you to track the status of sent messages to determine whether the message has been received and/or viewed.
• The 'Required To Acknowledge' radio button forces employees to read and acknowledge the message when they first log into the system before they can access any other pages. 
• The 'File Attachment' link allows you to attach additional downloadable documents to the message. 

 

 

 

Sending Messages to Specific Employees:

If you need to send a message to an individual or to a couple specific employees, you will do this with the Employees drop down menu.

First, you will choose the employee from the drop down, then you will click the blue 'Select' button. This will populate the Send To field with your selected employee(s). By default, the message will not be registered (meaning you will not be able to view the message's status), and employees will not be required to acknowledge the message upon logging in. You may adjust such settings as desired.

You are then ready to draft your message and click the green 'Send' button. 

Note: Choosing the gray 'Clear' button will clear the form and allow you to restart. 

 

Once you have sent the message, a copy will be saved in your Sent Messages folder (Message Center > Message Folders > Sent Messages).

 

The Sent Messages folder displays all messages that were sent in a given date span.

 

 

Sending Messages to Message Groups:

If you need to send a message to pre-arranged group of users, you will do this with the Message Group drop down. Selecting this option will clear out any users previously added with the Employees drop down menu. 

You have access to two types of groups: Hard coded system groups and custom groups. The hard coded system groups are All Employees, By Qualification, By Certification, By Home Cost Center, and By District. The custom Message Groups are shown below the hard coded groups. [For more information on setting up your custom Message Groups, Click Here.]

In our example, the custom groups are named Human Resources and Scheduler Group. 

 

If you select a hard coded group such as the 'All Employees' option in our example, you will have access to the 'Send By' field. This allows you to select EMail and/or Text Page and is based on the information listed in the employee profile. 

 

If you select a custom Message Group, you will not have access to the 'Send By' field since those details are configured directly in the Message Group. 

Once you select your Message Group you are ready to craft your message and click the green 'Send' button. 

 

 

Employees Receiving Messages:

After sending out a message to employee(s), they will see a notification in the upper right hand corner of their page, indicating a new unread message. 

Clicking on this icon will take them directly to their Self Service mailbox where they can view their message. 

 

Employees can also access their inbox by navigating to Self Service > General Info > Message Center. Here they will see both a send form and their mailbox. 

 

If the employee has a personal email listed in their employee profile, a copy of the message will be sent to this location as well. 

The subject line in the email will indicate that the message was generated by ePro Scheduler on behalf of the originator of the message. In our example, you can see the sender was 'Arlo A.' 

 

 

Employees Responding to Direct Messages:

Employees have a 'Reply' option beside messages in their inbox. Clicking this link will populate the Message Form above with a reply subject along with the original message. 

Employees will have access to send either to the scheduler or to a group but not directly to a specific user. They can then enter their message and click the green 'Send' button. 

 

When responding to the scheduler, their response will be sent directly to Message Center > Message Folders > Master Mailbox. Here you can view all messages received by a date span.

  

 

Sending Registered and Required to Acknowledge Messages:

Keeping track of messages that have been read or acknowledged can be done by using the 'Registered' or 'Required to Acknowledge' options. A Registered message allows you to track the status of messages viewed by employees. A Required to Acknowledge message forces the employee to click an acknowledge button before they can access the system.  

Like a normal message, you will choose to send to specific users or a group. Once you have updated the message with the your specific settings, you will click the green 'Send' button. 

 

Once an employee logs into the system, they will automatically be prompted by a window that requires they click the red 'Acknowledge' button. 

 

Administrators can track which users have read and acknowledged the message by navigating to Message Center > Message Folders > Registered Mail. 

 

Here you can view all registered messages that have been sent by date span. To view a report tracking user status, click on the blue date hyper link shown below.  

 

This brings up a report allowing you to view which users have read or acknowledged the message. You can also pull a report in either a PDF or Excel format by selecting the radio button of your choice and then clicking the grey 'Output' button.