Strategies for keeping users informed about maintenance

[tommy]

How are You keeping Your users informed about scheduled maintenance?

Do You do it inside SC or outside SC or both?

[gavster]

What type of maintennance? We have a nightly re-cycle of SC (due to the fact that v.4.05 has a serious memory leak that uses up the shared memory really quick) This happens at 4.00am as the last task in the back up. There are no alerts sent out as it is common knowledge (our previous software, Solve Central, did the same). When we need to implement a change we use a marquee that is in all user formats to broadcast the message at least 2 hours before.

[gavster]

Sorry about that... the forum went a bit weird on me!


ADMIN EDIT: I have removed the extra post.

[tommy]

What I mean is both implementation of new functionality and lfscan/lfmap maintenance including regen of indexes etc.

[gavster]

As well as the forward schedule of change for management purposes, we have a dedicated role for this kind of thing(process manager). This person is responsible for the ITIL process more than anything but any requests for new functionallity etc goes through her and is brought up in a weekly workshop. All requirements are then passed to me to devlop then handed back with documentation, so the training/notification is handled by the process manager through high level documentation via email.

In regards system maintennance, this is all handled by Change management and is done at a weekend.

As we have only been live with SC for about 4months and our roles are not clearly defined we are still trying to find the "best fit" but recently this has been working fine.

I hope this anwers your question, or I might have just waffled !!! hahaha