As the impact goes up, consider adding a reminder update right before the maintenance. In Statuspage, for example, we include an option to send a reminder message an hour before the maintenance period begins. In general, anything longer than a week of advance notice will need a reminder closer to the actual downtime. The further in advance your initial announcement, the more reminder updates you should schedule in. Email is the most common channel for announcing scheduled maintenance.
Social media messages and in-app banners are also popular. We certainly recommend using a status page to announce maintenance periods. The benefit is that it creates a single place to manage and post your scheduled maintenance updates.
You can post announcements to your page and have email announcements sent to subscribers automatically. This is best used as a supplement to an email and Statuspage strategy.
Embedding an announcement in the app that will be impacted is another approach, and a great way to put the update in context. Our experience as a company with employees spread around the world is that it's critical to communicate very thoroughly to avoid confusion and resulting loss of productivity. Scheduling Your Communication. If at all possible, give your users at least a few days' notice for planned downtime.
This gives them enough time to prepare themselves and to mitigate the effect on their work environment. The larger the impact on users, the longer the lead time needs to be. Server maintenance on important systems should be communicated at least a week ahead of time; minor ones a day or two. In most cases, a single email is not enough. Depending on the expected impact, send one a week ahead of time, one a few days ahead of time, one the day before, and one the day of the planned downtime.
Not all of your users will remember a single notice, so use multiple notices to keep reminding them as the scheduled time gets closer.
And don't forget to follow up after the systems are back online. Let your users know that the downtime is over and they can work again. For scheduled downtime, select a time that is the least inconvenient for the majority of your users. If your users are worldwide, you're always going to affect some of them. But if there are time zones with significantly fewer users than others, plan your maintenance around those user counts. Admittedly, this usually means it will be a very inconvenient time for the IT administrators.
But it's better for the company as whole to inconvenience a few administrators rather than large parts of the business. If possible, communicate the upcoming downtime using multiple channels.
Hardware failures, corrupted software, malicious hacks or even just human error — IT outages are an inevitable fact of life. Unplanned outages come out of nowhere, putting both your business and operations at risk as well as costing time and money. Raising awareness around outages will save the IT team time and effort responding to multiple service requests.
This is more efficient for everyone — and allows the IT team to focus on the work they need to do. To make this even easier, and increase the effectiveness of your communications, here are ready-to-use IT outage notification message templates are available right now for your IT team to use - just select, edit and send.
For planned outages, effective communication will give staff time to prepare in advance. Send multiple reminders to staff in the days coming up to a planned outage to ensure staff are prepared. The IT Team will advise when all services are restored.
For unplanned outages, timing is everything. Staff need outage alerts as soon as possible to avoid frustration and an influx of Helpdesk calls. Inform them of alternative systems to use during the outage period so that they can keep working.
SnapComms offers alternative methods to get employee attention for important messages. Alert templates get immediate employee attention for unplanned outages, cyber-attacks or any other type of urgent IT message. Delivered directly to employee screens, these Alerts bypass email so they get seen and get read, without adding to email-overload. Desktop Tickers provide helpful status updates at a glance. Scrolling newsfeed-style messages appear at the bottom of employee screens, delivering timely information without disrupting busy staff.
Templates for Alerts and Tickers combine best practice design with pre-written content to make delivering successful messages fast, simple and efficient. Use these templates as a guide for your IT outage notifications. All you have to do is update with the relevant details of the current situation and hit send — and everyone can be informed within minutes.
An outage notice should be something that is straightforward and to the point, using plain language so that your employees understand that there are known issues affecting your systems. There are many different ways to inform users about outages. This can include emails, information on the intranet, pop-up alerts, desktop tickers, company discussion forums, collaboration platforms such as Teams, push notifications, SMS text messages, screensavers and digital signage.
It is important that however you choose send the information, you send it in a time sensitive manner. An outage notification is a piece of communication sent to users of the software and other technology systems to let them know that the service is unavailable, or is going to be unavailable at some time in the future.
It is used to advise people about both scheduled maintenance and unforeseen incidents that cause disruption to systems. This can include upgrades to software, bugs that need to be fixed, or malicious activities that impact services.
Sending an outage notification is good for productivity so that people are aware of the issue and can plan their workflows to reprioritize other tasks while the system in question is offline.
Send urgent notifications to any corporate devices: PCs, phones, tablets, etc. Bypass information overload. Deliver key information even if the computer is on screensaver mode, locked or sleeping. Read more: 10 Most Common Helpdesk Problems What sort of information should you include in an outage notification?
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