What’s the best way to Notify network users of outages or maintenance

There are times when one of our applications is down for maintenance and we’d like to let our users know about it before they start flooding our help desk with calls. What’s the best way to notify our users of an event on the network?

Some users are on our intranet, while others log in from the Web. Is there an application they can install to which we can send notifications messages?

I’m interested to hear what others have come up with to address this requirement. Thanks!

• Network status page, listing downtime schedules.
• Stick to a schedule, maintenance is not an emergency.
• A notice on the login screen sometime before the maintenance.
• Use a reverse proxy in front of your apps, makes it easy to redirect to friendly page.
• If no reverse proxy remap url “somehow” to a friendly page.

• Cluster* to eliminate the need for most maintenance downtime.

• If you do email target the distro to actual users of the down app! Internal spam is spam and will ruin the value of your communications.

Check more discussion of this question.

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