Updating users when email goes down

steve_f

When your email system goes down, how does your IT team contact users to notify them about timescales etc before it will be back up?

Put a message on the Intranet, and train users to look there when email goes down?
Internal Instant messaging that you may have?
Word of mouth/phone the IT contact in each dept/location and ask them to spread the word?

Something else?

Just curious thanks.

vCole

Usually an announcement in the building. Or call Dept. supervisors

blargoe

For something unscheduled that looks like it will take a while, we'd broadcast a voice mail to everyone. If it's like 30 minutes or less, the large number of calls we'd get would get the word out that it's down and would be back very soon.

HeroPsycho

Corp intranet website usually in large environments I've worked in.

deadpool287

we have an intercom system.

royal

We developed an application that will turn Cisco phones into an intercom system. So we use that and we sell this application as well.

msteinhilber

royal wrote: »

We developed an application that will turn Cisco phones into an intercom system. So we use that and we sell this application as well.

InformaCast? A company I worked for toyed with the idea of Cisco (they went with Nortel instead unfortunately) through what was then still Berbee at the time. Looks like a pretty slick system!

At my current job, we typically end up replacing the greeting on our helpdesk VM with a note about the outage, and give a quick call to each of the admin assistants at each of our offices since they tend to be one of the first points of contact from our end users checking to see if there is a problem on their computer too...

royal

Yep, InformaCast.

Ahriakin

I wrap my shirt around my shoulders like a cape and stand at my office door and cackle something like "Tremble mortals for I hath taken they internet and they soft port, it shall return upon my whim!...or when the domain controller reboots, whichever comes first"

What I particularly like is when users come to you and ask is "the server down?"...because there's only one right? Not 25+ sitting behind the glass they just walked past .

tiersten

Ahriakin wrote: »

What I particularly like is when users come to you and ask is "the server down?"...because there's only one right? Not 25+ sitting behind the glass they just walked past .

Nah. They know that there are multiple servers usually. They just expect you to know precisely what server they're talking about without them being specific. Their problem is always the highest priority of course

astorrs

Change the announcement message on the service desk number so that they have to listen to the latest updates on the status of any problems, cuts down dramatically on the number of calls that come in.

For anything very serious you want to communicate it to the dept heads, etc that are effected so they understand who is running the incident response team and who they should contact for updates - leave it to them to distribute it to their employees if they want to.

malcybood

We handle outage notifications as follows;

A) User affecting - Announced on intranet home page news feed (which is sometimes the best way to keep a secret lol)

We have SMS notification facility as part of out corporate mobile phone contract. It lets us inform groups or all users with a mobile/cell phone that a service is down through the portal. When a new user joins the company they're placed into the relevant region based on their office delivery details for the phone by the network operator and we can access the service through a web portal.

C) If there is an outage on any WAN link our ISP sends a txt to myself and some other people that need to know only (24/7). We don't inform users here as it may only be a WAN backup link that is down which needs fixed ASAP but is not visible to the users. If it is user affecting i.e. both WAN links down we phone a site contact mobile which we have on all site configuration sheets and ask them to spread the word round their office.

D) Same as C for link traps on email servers and firewall issues, we're notified by SMS text if there are any issues and communicate to users if required.

Updates are put on the news ticker on the intranet throughout the duration of the outage depending on the severity.

dales

On discovering a problem we tend to:

Kick out the lowest paid member of our department with all our cups, they myst return within 30 seconds with hot cups of water otherwise....

the doors to the office are locked promptly and phones unplugged to avoid the torrent of calls and abuse then we.

sit back with a nice relaxing cup of tea reboot the server whilst watching the angry faces pressed up against our windows.

Eventually they drift away when they see us using email to send round the funnies that got trapped in the spam filter!