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"!
This is exactly what I have been tyring to make work. I don't see a Run Script box in my list of Task Steps. What steps are you choosing to set this up.
The my attempts to run a vbs file keeps asking for admin pw on the local machine. If I can run the script without all the permission hassels thu a Ghost Console task, that would be great. Any help with this would be appreciated.
Instead of opening an application, why not open a nice message box with the info like this Just make a Run Script task in DS with the code below
'vbscript On Error Resume Next Dim MyVarMyVar = MsgBox ("The E-mail servers are back up. Sorry for any inconvenience.", 64, "Systems Support (555)555-5555")' MyVar contains just an ok buttonWscript.Quit(MyVar)