HI Toni,
 FEDIX has developed a "free"  service
(i.e. the company contracts with several federal agencies to develop and
provide this to  us to use with no cost to us directly).  The concept is
very interesting, but it is appropriate that you (as well as many of us) ask
evaluation questions before jumping in.  This service competes with other
such commercial services (InfoEd's GENIUS/SMARTS system & I believe IRIS
is also developing something similar).  What those other commercial services
may offer above & beyond the new FEDIX Alert is for them to respond to (and
since they are on the listserve, please feel free to comment!).

 The questions which should be considered at each institution are:

1. Talk to your academic computing director.  The additional burden of such
services may pose an *enormous* drain on your existing mail system.  For
instance, 200 faculty receiving approx. 10 announcements daily
(*very* conservative estimate), results in an additional burden of half a
 million
messages annually.  The number of announcements received daily is determined
by how liberally they fill out the "research interests" coding, so generally
you want them to expand on the topoics, not limit them.  This could be a huge
drain on resources.  For instance, if there's no way for your campus to
restrict this to faculty & grad students start registering, the numbers get
out of hand very quickly.  On the other hand, why have such a service if
you don't encourage people to use it?

2. Think about your own ability to monitor *this* listserve.  Do you check it
on an immediate basis every day?  Do you have the available time to read each
message with the same degree of attention?  Do you have a great deal of other
e-mail mixed in with your listserve messages?  YOur faculty have the same
problems with time management and the tremendous increase in distribution
of electronic information.  With so much mail coming to them, it might
be easy for something really important (like one of the major federal
initiatives!) to be "buried" among a dozen messages of lesser importance.

3. What would be the Research Office role in such a system?  Receiving
automatic "copies" of everything sent to every faculty is indeed
impractical.  So when they follow up with you regarding one of these
announcements, what will be your method of securing more information in
order to help them follow through?

4.  What about all the agencies & private sponsors not included in the
FEDIX Alert?  Wouldn't you essentially have "two" methods of disseminating
information if you used FEDIX for some, and one of the commercial services
for others?

5. Finally, does your Research Office have a WWW homepage?  If so, is there
a way that such a service could be modified in order to make your Web page
the central place for faculty to seek this type of information?  If so it
seems it would make the role of the Research Office in providing assistance
much more effective.

These are just topics for consideration....every campus (I believe) is
struggling with this issue and trying to find the optimum solution for
their specific constraints.  The movement is definitely toward more
redistribution of grant information electronically.  However, there is
more than 1 solution to how this can be structured, because after all, what
we are really concerned about in the end, are "results".  Finding effective
ways to get the "appropriate" information into the hands of an
"appropriate" faculty member in a timely way.

Good luck with your own campus process.

******************************************
* Jane E. Prudhomme, Director    *
* Research and Sponsored Programs  *
* University of New Orleans        *
* New Orleans, LA 70148            *
* (504) 286-7154                   *
* Internet: xxxxxx@uno.edu                *
*  Web Page: http://www.uno.edu/~orsp    *
******************************************