How To Post A Message To Univeristy of Phoenix Newsgroups Using Outlook Web Access

This post has specific application for University of Phoenix online or FlexNet students. I've written several times about how I dislike having to use Outlook Express for newsgroup access, but the Outlook Web Access is much worse. Today I finally figured out (I'm a little slow) how to work around the biggest problem I've had with OWA: getting posts to show up in the newsgroup in the proper thread.

If you've used newsgroups before, at least on a newsgroup reader, you know that a discussion thread has a high level post and all of the other posts are threaded through it. I guess you could represent it like this:

My main post
---first reply
------reply to reply
---------reply to reply to reply
---reply to original
------reply to reply
---another reply to original
------reply
---------reply
------------reply
---------------reply
------------------reply

It can be very hard to follow a discussion in a newsgroup even with this hierarchical format. Now imagine if a post that was responding to another post down in the bowels of this discussion suddenly showed up as a top level post, almost as if this post was a brand new topic. However, when you read this post, it appears to be a reply to somebody but there is no context whatsoever to help you identify what the point could possibly be.

Outlook Web Access works like that. I've been in classes where a lot of students had to use OWA in order to meet their "two posts per day for four out of seven days in a week" and following any discussion is difficult. Early on in my FlexNet experience, I wrote off OWA for anything further than submitting assignments when I can't connect to the newsgroup. This does happen once in a while. However, today, I found a way to reply to a post while keeping my response in it's proper place within the thread. I did a screen capture using FastStone Capture (free software that you cannot afford to live without) and posted the picture here. The picture isn't very good here, but if you click on it you'll get full size. I blacked out the names of my fellow students for privacy.

This is the procedure. Now, if you've long since figured this out then you probably aren't reading by this point. If you're new to UOP or if you've been there for a while like me and never bothered to figure this out, the procedure is just like above. Step 1, place a check mark next to the message you are responding to. Step 2, click "Reply Group". For extra measure, I added a "Re:" followed by the subject that I was responding to in case this didn't work. It did, however, so I'll be using OWA in the future when I need to.