Maybe having a Twitter account, similar to the MSU Service Status would work.
On Feb 11, 2011, at 3:32 PM, STeve Andre' wrote:
> On 02/11/11 15:10, Leo Sell wrote:
>> On 2/11/11 9:53 AM, Al Puzzuoli wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>> Last night, there was planned network maintenance occurring in Bessey
>>> hall which resulted in from what I can tell, a bit over an hours'
>>> worth of downtime, starting at around 8:00 PM.
>>> I was made aware of the impending downtime only by a pure stroke of
>>> luck. At around 4:00 yesterday afternoon, a technician came to work
>>> in a phone closet that happens to be a few feet away from my office.
>>> I asked him what he was doing, and he informed me of the maintenance.
>>> I was able to issue a last minute, end of the day email, warning my
>>> staff.
>>> Luckily, there was nothing critical going on after hours in our
>>> department, but things could have been much worse.
>>> Also, if I had been sitting at home uninformed last evening, and my
>>> servers suddenly became unavailable, my first reaction would have
>>> been to catch the next bus back to campus to figure out just what was
>>> going on.
>>> I wonder what we can do in the future to insure better communication
>>> with departmental IT staff when these situations occur?
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>>
>>> Al Puzzuoli
>>> Information Technologist
>>> Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities 517-884-1915 120
>>> Bessey Hall East Lansing, MI 48824-1033 http://www.rcpd.msu.edu
>>
>> Al,
>> Checking on our Service Status postings, I found that notice
>> corresponding to this was posted there on Feb 8 just before 3:00 p.m..
>> See http://servicestatus.msu.edu/status_history.php?id=5385.
>>
>> The posting doesn't contain a lot of detail, but it was timely since
>> it occurred over 48 hours before the event.
>>
> How much effort would it take to have a couple of notices about outages,
> using the current system? I appreciate getting a couple days notice on
> stuff like this, but I also tend to forget about them. Having one, say 24
> hours before the event would be good.
>
> --STeve Andre'
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