Requesting Recommendations for Communication Tool

[scalawagd]

I am looking for ideas and recommendations for a communications tool which would be used to inform our end user community about high severity incidents. Currently we send communications via SMS, email, and post info on an intranet site with outage info. We use BMC Remedy for incident tracking, so we would like a tool that is capable of interfacing with Remedy and can send communications via SMS and email. I am finding the search for vendors a struggle. If anyone has some suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. I have a decent list of requirements, but I don't want to bore all of you with that yet.
Thanks!

[Azard]

Hi, depending on the severity and impact of the incident, ie, network outage, email not available, I think you may be very hard pressed to find something that will fit your need.

Two things to look at, which are very "old fashion":
1) phone broadcast messages,
2) using the loudsystem in your office. This may be a problem if you share the loudsystem with other companies in your building.

Other than that, you may try to set up a primary contact in each of the various groups/departments and allow those key contacts to spread the information throughout the organization.

I'm not sure if that answers your question or not, but it may be something to think about in absense of a tool.

cheers,
_________________
Azard Omardeen
ITSM Service Manager Certified
Consultant and Trainer

[scalawagd]

Thanks for the reply. Currently we use a communication function within the Remedy Incident Tracking system to send outage notifications via SMS and Email. This works, but we would like to evaluate other vendors and set up a subscription based communication that is independant of Remedy but can still interface with Remedy.
We have issues with users of separate Remedy schemas not being able to access the same communications module. Also, if there is an issue with our Remedy system, we are unable to send the notification to our user community.
I might be making this seem more complicated than it needs to be. I am searching for vendors and I seem to be finding a lot of comprehensive tools, but all I need is the communications piece.

[UKVIKING]

there are many ways to communicate to the users
the hard part is whether they read it, treat it as spam etc etc

SMS is one way... however, this should be used intelligently and with soem caveats

1 - we instituted a SMS page when there was a Priority 1 (critical) ticket raised and SMS the senior mgmt automatically./every 15 minutes The problem was that there were an average of 20 P1s a day which meant 60 to 60^6 SMS essages going out

2 - What happens when the outage is to your email/sms system.. how is that communicated when u are offline

email - mail notificiations should be done in line with some sort of internal web site notice board

phone

if you are a help desk .. you should have a phone greeting that can be updated and goes away after a while. it is quite funny/sad when you call and the help desk says 'update (date 3 days old) on problem ,..... '

and the rest you know

the keys points

are

what information is transmitted
whom gets it
why
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter