Emergency Messages with DS

Have you ever needed to alert your user population immediately to an outage or problem? We've had instances where the e-mail system has been down and our management team has wanted to pop up a message to all or selected users so that they don't flood the help desk with calls. We've come up with a very simple mechanism to get the word out.

The first step is to get someone who doesn't mind their prose being displayed on every workstation in the company to type up a text file with a message. Something like this:

To All New York Users
*********************
The e-mail problems have been resolved. You should now be receiving e-mail normally.
If you are still experiencing problems please call x7563.
News Technology Team and Systems Support.

Then save it to a folder on the DS server with a name like msg.txt

Then we create a simple DS job that does the following:

copy the file to c:\Altiris\temp\msg.txt
notepad c:\Altiris\temp\msg.txt

We then target it to the machines in the affected area and set it to distribute quickly. Because we make it a txt file the download time is quick and it doesn't overload the DS server. When the crisis is over we disable the job.

I love when people come to me and say "Can we do this with Altiris". The answer is invariably "yes"!