My network isn’t perfect and neither is my team. We have had too many major outages, some human error – some hardware error, lately. For various reasons, we need a speedier method to communicate to the userbase that we have some sort of issue.
A broadcast email isn’t the answer – particularly when email is the system that is offline. Voicemail isn’t the answer – the vmail message is stored in exchange… (thanks, cisco)
Walking the floors of the office is slow, and we could have it fixed before that’s done… And it’s less than technically elegant.
Intercom is bad – we likely have clients around.
So here’s what I’m thinking: I want an XP service based app on every desktop that will listen for a broadcast, either from a server or from another client that has author proviledges. There would be an icon in the systray, with green/yellow/red/gray colors to indicate status. Perhaps a communications bubble pops up when there is a status change. Clicking on the message or the icon gives you a dialogue explaining what is going on, possible workarounds, etc.
Some admins would have the ability to change the status, and edit the message. There should be canned templates to select from on the admin app, but fully editable.
I’ll take suggestions for other types of solutions, too. There will be a version of this posted in the discussions… The main point is fast and easy communications with the users. Thanks.