Communication Exam

Overview

Here is an "exam" you can take. If you are able to work through the "Know" and "Do" sections, you can consider that you have mastered the contents of this unit. This can also be a helpful review. An answer key is available: reach out to your school's point person or your Veracross account manager to get access. 

Know

Answer the following questions.

1. Describe the different parts of the Communications homepage. 
2. What are system groups? How do you find them? How are they generated? 
3. What are distribution lists? How do you find and use them? 
4. What is a communication detail screen? What are system emails and how do you find ones that have been sent? How can you find recent emails sent by VC users? 
5. What does it mean to be on the bounce or spam list? How do you get someone off the list?
6. What are channels and how are they organized? What options are associated with channels? Give some examples of channels a school might have and how they might be configured.
7. What sorts of things can you check when a user "doesn't get the emails"?
8. What is Composer? How does sending an email using it differ from sending with a distribution list? Name two ways to start a Composer email. 
9. What are merge fields in a Composer email? Distinguish between default and custom merge fields. Describe the process for launching a Composer email with custom ("data") merge fields.
10. What kind of content can you include in Composer emails? Text, images, videos, file attachments?
11. What are Composer themes and templates? What kinds of style elements can you configure?
12. What are news articles? How do you create them and how can they be used in portals?
13. Describe the elements of the Identity and Access Management homepage. What information do you glean from the queries there?
14. What is a user account? Who typically gets user accounts? Describe the process for creating a parent's user account. What should you check and what procedure(s) do you run?
15. What does it mean to impersonate? Who can do it? Why is it such a valuable tool? How do you impersonate someone?
16. Describe the Portals 3.0 platform. What are some of its key features? How can you use them?
17. How do you manage membership in a parent, student, or teacher portal? 
18. What does it mean to publish a query to a teacher portal? What are some use cases?
19. Why should a school consider using Veracross for all its calendar needs? Why might a school not want to do so?
20. Describe how you would create and configure a no-school event, an 8th-grade field trip, and an upper school faculty meeting.

Do

Complete the following tasks. 

1. A school is trying to email different groups of people. Give the Axiom URL of the appropriate system groups:
   • parents of 8th graders
   • applicants and their parents (two groups) applying for 19-20
   • upper school teachers
   • alumni who graduated in a year ending in '7
   • students and parents in any science class (two groups; you pick the class)
   • donors who gave in FY 13
2. Find a non-system email and list the recipient statistics: How many people received it? How many were on the bounce or spam list? 
   • How do you remove people from the bounce/spam list?
3. Talk through the steps for creating and configuring a channel. How would you create theme for use in this channel? What are the steps for creating a template?
4. "I want my staff to have their email address be their username when I create accounts for them. Also, when they get that welcome email from the system, I want to use lots of smiley faces :) in the email they get." What are the steps you should undertake to accomplish this?
5. Impersonate a user in your own or the demo database.
6. Talk through the steps for building a new component screen. Be creative but logical.
7. Create a query that could serve as a parent contact list. Include fields like email, phone, etc., and subtotal and sort by grade level.
8. "I want to add three staff members to one of the teacher portals and then disable three people's access while I'm there. How do I do that?" 
9. What are the event configurations for... 
   • ...a no-school holiday?
   • ...an 3rd grade assembly?
   • ...an evening meeting for middle school parents?