Office Service Accounts
Categories: End Users Information Uncategorized
A shared email account (service account) has proven to be a very useful tool in several Extension offices. A service account provides a variety of uses beyond just having an email address for people in the community to contact the Extension office (although that can be useful as well). One of the best uses is for setting up social media accounts such as Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. This helps prevent offices from getting locked out of a social media site due to the site being set up via a personal account. For example, let’s say an office has an FCS Facebook page that has been established from the FCS educator’s personal Facebook account. The educator regularly updates the site, posts important dates and events and shares various tools for their county. One day the educator decides to take another job and leave Extension. Suddenly, that Facebook group is no longer available for use and the new educator that follows will have to re-establish a new Facebook page and get all of the existing members to join the new page. Service accounts are also great for digital assets such as eBooks, iTunes Accounts, shared office devices and any other online accounts used by an office or department.
Setting up a service account is easy. Simply contact your support specialist and provide an email address/service account name (i.e. countyname.oces@okstate.edu) and two names of people in your office that will be in charge of managing the account like the CED and a secretary. The primary person will be in charge of maintaining the account and making sure the password (similar to the OKEY passwords that expire every 120) doesn’t expire. The secondary person would serve as an “alternate” in case the primary person were to leave the position, the account is locked or expires.
Having a service account can be a true asset for offices as more tools such Quicken, Microsoft Office, social media sites, cloud storage and other digital assets are becoming more engrained in our workplaces. For further questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact your Support Specialist.