I’m researching how banks and credit unions notify internal folks of various system status’?
For example, if your core system is unavailable, how do you let your staff know? Email? SMS? Broadcast Alerts?
What if they don’t have keep email open all day, how do you keep them informed?
Are there existing systems out there? If so, what are they?
Brad G.
This is from a consultant’s perspective that has been in a lot of banks and CUs but when I see systems going down it is either a mass email coming from the IT department or someone briskly walking around telling everyone that, “Core’s down, core’s down.” ;)
JB D.
Mass email, and sometimes we use the CCM paging feature to tell the branches… For the most part we don’t have to tell our users when the core is down, but more when its about to go down.
Robbie W.
Otto – We’ve been using mass email internally for a while now, but we have recently written a little app that gets installed on all client machines that can pop up certain alerts that get issued through our intranet.
Otto R.
Thanks for the feedback everyone, I do appreciate it.
Last week I put in place a system that we’re going to roll out to a limited group of people in our company. Here’s what I’ve setup:
1. A blog engine where system notifications will be published and the status updates will become either edits or replies to the blog post. Only a small set of staff will have publishing rights. I installed BlogEngine.net since it has a couple of key features we wanted.
2. BlogEngine.net allows us to create “pages” of content. On each of these pages, we are going to publish what services run on every server. For example, if we say Server X is going to be rebooted in 30 minutes. The staff can find out what services will be affected during the reboot.
3. I built a quick and dirty tray application that monitors the RSS feed and displays a notice near the system tray. The notification has a link to the blog post and 200 characters from the post. The tray application also has links to the last 4 posts and if the posts and only shows a message when it is published. The tray icon will also change if there was a post within the last 10 minutes.
More than likely, I will turn this topic into a blog post and if possible, allow people to download the tray application (not sure if I’ll include the source or not).