National eXtension Initiative

We are excited to announce that About eXtension is in the process of being completely redesigned. We’ve been working on the redesign for a while and are close to rolling it out. We’re hoping to do this in the next week or two, so we wanted to give you a sneak peek of what’s coming.

Most noticeably, the site has a new look. We’ve created a simpler homepage that will better introduce new visitors to eXtension. In addition to the visual redesign, we reorganized all existing content currently available. New sections such as ‘Get Benefits’, ‘Get Involved’, Get Started’ and ‘Tool Directories’ make it easier to find the information you need and help new and existing members leverage all the resources that eXtension has to offer. We’re looking forward to the new site. We hope you like it too. Thanks!

eXtension will host its next national video conference on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 from 2:30 to 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time (1:30-3:30 p.m.
Central; 12:30-2:00 p.m. Mountain; 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., Pacific).

Agenda, August 1, 2:30 – 4 p.m. EASTERN Time

1. Welcome
–Update on Signed Agreements
–eXtension Update
2. eXtension Fellowship Program
3. Infometrics Report
4. eXtension’s News application
5. Be, Grow, Create Call to Action
6. Learning Management System/Professional Development Community
7. Corporate Development Report
8. Questions & Answers/Discussion

To join the video conference, go to: http://real.unl.edu/extension.

To phone in questions call (800)900-4447 To FAX in questions send them to
(859)323-3986 To email questions, send them to questions@extension.org

TECHNICAL TROUBLE NUMBER: 800-755-7765

Tomorrow morning we are rolling out some new features for the eXtension Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) application (http://faq.extension.org/) to help users manage questions submitted from ‘Ask an Expert’ on the eXtension Public Site (http://www.extension.org/). The changes include the ability to opt-in to (or opt-out of) automatic question assignments as well as default email signatures for responding to questions. The User Preference page also got a little face-lift with the addition of tabbed navigation. The new features will be live Wednesday morning, July 18th. Here’s an overview of what’s new:

Incoming Question Assignments
Previously, when a user defined their Areas of Expertise and Geographic Regions, the user was automatically assigned incoming questions that matched their selections. We’ve now separated those two actions. This way a user can indicate their expertise to their colleagues in the system and then decide how — or if — they would like to help with incoming questions. There are a number of ways that users can help field incoming questions, and these new options can be found on the Areas of Expertise preference tab in a box called “Be a Pillar of the Community”. We hope that users will opt-in to help handle incoming questions, but we understand that it’s nice to be able to turn it off every once in a while

Email Signature Preference

There is another new feature on the General Preferences tab called “‘Ask an Expert’ Email Signature”. This lets you set a default signature line that is automatically added to your response when answering an Incoming Question. This is just a default — you can always edit it on a per-question basis.

Your Profile Page

We also made it easier to get to your User Profile page. Simply click on your name at the top of the browser window.

And once you get to your User Profile page, you’ll notice that your Areas of Expertise are now links. You can click on any item to see a list view of all users who have selected that same area of expertise. This can be a great way to see who else shares your interests.

We hope that these changes make the FAQ application a little more useful and easier to use.