Email 101 Part 7

Now that you know the techniques, try getting some of the things on the "Top 10" list, in Appendix E.

Employee Development: How to Get Your Employees Internetworking

This short Chapter contains a little advice on how to learn about the Internet. It should be clear from the preceding Chapters that learning how to use the Internet is a survival skill for many businesses.

Effective use of the electronic medium

o Saves employee time--time lost in phone tag, lost messages, and they three day time delay of surface mail.

o Avoids circuitous means of transfering data like printing a doc.u.ment, faxing it, and then rekeyboarding the data at the receiving end

o Allows businesses and individuals to self-publish, and distribute their work efficiently, whether or not the text or the graphical appearance is primary.

o Provides access to information, allows communication and distribution of doc.u.ments in a single, uniform fas.h.i.+on.

It should also be clear that Internetworking is not yet a smooth, easily learned process. It requires knowledge and skills that are not presently taught anywhere except on the Internet itself.

The next section discusses specific needs of different segments of people. The final section contains a fairly systematic exposition of the methods and skills needed to Internetwork effectively. But far from representing these sections as the last word on the subject, I would like to stress that the only way to learn Internetworking is through undirected exploration of the Internet.

This means you have to let your employees play, at least on their own time: play with programs, play with Anonymous FTP, and play with Usenet news. None of these activities are directly productive, but the playing pays off when you need a new program and someone in your office can

o pick the right Usenet newsgroup and retrieve its FAQ

o read the FAQ and learn about free software that will solve your problem and where to find the latest version

o connect to the software archive and (correctly) transfer the program--even though the intervening machine is of the "wrong" make.

o properly decompress and install the software.

When all this is done competently, in less than half an hour, you will have attained the goal of employee development.

A final caveat: *don't neglect Usenet news.* Usenet news is the most difficult of the "Internet basic services" to get because it is not really an Internet service. It is commonly found on Internet computers and commonly transmitted over the Internet, but it does not fit into the E-mail-FTP-telnet scheme of things. If your Internet provider does not provide the news, you may have to ferret it out by (1) getting an account on a public access UNIX system and (2) learning to use UNIX.

Command-line UNIX is no easier than command-line MS-DOS, but it is worth learning how to get on a UNIX system for the "rn" (readnews) command alone. All you need to know to get that far (and more) is contained in Appendix D.

Any guide like this will soon be dated in terms of information sources, techniques, and software. But Usenet is up to the minute. There, hidden among the many diversions of alt., talk., and soc. hierarchies, is the latest information on the computing environment of modern Internetworking. In the opinion of this author, learning to use a newsreader and reading the network news regularly is the *single most important Internetworking skill*. The Usenet newsgroups are Dewey Decimal System of the the true world library. Information can be found in plenty elsewhere, but guides to information are rare and priceless-- and the Usenet news is the guide to the Internet.

Special Concerns

This Part lists briefly some of the ways in which various groups of people can use internetworking skills.

Special for Businesses

I wish I had better news for business use of the Internet. I wish I could describe hundreds of free services of interest to *business* and tell you how to use the Internet for profit. But it's not there yet.

However, before you turn away with a sad but knowing smile on your face shaking your head over another unlikely technological dream--you've seen it before--consider this: the main potential of the Internet is as a communication medium. Is radio and television important to businesses?

What about newspapers and magazines? Or direct mail? Very few businesses make money by selling newspapers or operating radio stations, but many, many businesses use these media for advertising. You and your employees need to become adept at using this medium for the same reasons you've mastered layout of newpaper ads and writing form letters.

It is very important to understand that the Internet is not a broadcast medium but more like the telephone or mail system. It specializes in contacting individuals one at a time. In other words, you are not going to get a list of all 25 million E-mail addresses and bombard them every 10 minutes with a 30 second sound byte. Nor are you going to send 100 people a letter asking them to contact 100 persons each. On the other hand you might use the medium to contact a mailing list of your customers or self-publish a promotional brochure.