bulletin.hlp

1 BULLETIN
Invokes the PFC BULLETIN Utility.  This utility is used for reading,
adding and deleting message.  Users are notified at login time that new
messages have been added and the topics of those messages are
displayed.  Reading of those messages is optional. (Use the command SET
READNEW while in BULLETIN for setting automatic reading.)  Privileged
users can add system bulletins that are displayed in full at login
time.  These messages are also saved, and can be read by BULLETIN. 
Messages are automatically deleted after a specified expiration date,
or they can manually be deleted by either the submitter of the message
or a privileged user. 

 Format:

      BULLETIN

BULLETIN has an interactive help available while using the utility.
Type HELP after invoking the BULLETIN command.
2 Description
The BULLETIN utility is a utility to display messages to users when
logging in.  Users are notified of messages only once.  They're not
forced into reading them every time they log in.  Submitting and
reading messages is easy to do via a utility similar to the VMS MAIL
utility. Privileged users can create messages which are displayed in
full. (known as SYSTEM messages).  Non-privileged users may be able to
create non-SYSTEM messages (unless your system manager has disabled the
feature), but only topics are displayed at login. 

Folders can be created so that messages pertaining to a single topic
can be placed together.  Folders can be made private so that reading
and writing is limited to only users or groups who are granted access.
Alternatively, folders can be made semi-private in that everyone is
allowed to read them but write access is limited.

When new non-system messages are displayed, an optional feature which a
user may enable will cause BULLETIN to ask whether the user wishes to
read the new bulletins. The user can then read the messages (with the
ability to write any of the messages to a file). A user can enable the
notification and prompting of new messages feature on a folder per
folder basis.  However, the exception is messages submitted to the
default GENERAL folder.  Users are always notified at login of new
bulletins in this folder, but can disable the prompting.  This is to
give non-privileged users some ability to force a notification of an
important message. 

Messages have expiration dates and times, and are deleted automatically.
Expiration dates and times can be specified in absolute or delta
notation. Privileged users can specify "SHUTDOWN" messages, i.e.
messages that get deleted after a system shutdown has occurred. 
"PERMANENT" messages can also be created which never expire. 

Privileged users can broadcast their message (to either all users or
all terminals).

A user can select, on a folder per folder basis, to have a message
broadcast to their terminal immediately notifying them when a new
message has been added. 

An optional "Bulletin Board" feature allows messages to be created by
users of other systems connected via networks.  A username can be
assigned to a folder, and any mail sent to that user is converted to
messages and stored in that folder.  This feature originally was
designed to duplicate the message board feature that exists on some
Arpanet sites.  However, with the addition of folders, another possible
use is to assign an Arpanet mailing list to a folder. For example, one
could have an INFOVAX folder associated with an INFOVAX username, and
have INFO-VAX mail sent to INFOVAX.  Users could then read the mailing
list in that folder, rather than having INFO-VAX sent to each user.
Optionally, the input for the bulletin board can be directed to be taken
from any source other than VMS MAIL.  This might be useful if incoming