Parent email addresses, shared contacts, sherpa?

[Demetri Orlando]

Has anyone found a good way to make parent email addresses be part of your implementation? When I was at Norwood we used Exchange and parents emails were in the global directory with a naming convention of "Parents_of_<student name>". This way, faculty could easily email any student's parents.

 

Constraints that need to be imposed on this include:

- only allow the faculty to send messages to these addresses (no non-domain-users and probably also no students) in order to protect the parents from unwanted emails.

- best if the parents' actual email addresses are never revealed to the users.

- some form of automated (scripted) update process coming from a spreadsheet exported from our SIS.

 

I was thinking maybe I should make a google group for each parent pair, and then have the parents be "members" of the group. This way the group becomes an email address that domain users can send a message to, and I can dis-allow posting from web.

 

Today I came across Sherpa Tools which is advertising a "shared contacts manager" that sounds promising.

 

Is anyone doing anything like this and/or using Sherpa Tools?

[Denise]

Looking forward to the responses to this!  Thanks for posting it.