I experienced a significant outage yesterday, and it highlighted the need for a robust method to communicate with staff when services like Teams or Email go down. Currently, we lack a centralized company portal for these notifications. I'm interested in hearing from anyone who has established effective communication strategies for similar situations. What approaches or tools have you used?
5 Answers
We had a SMS system for emergencies when I worked at a previous company. It was set up after a natural disaster, and it really saved us. Something like that could definitely work, especially if Teams goes down too.
Everbridge is our go-to for mass alerts. For the recent incident, internal email worked fine, but if that fails, having a backup alert system is crucial.
True, but during outages, internal emails were hit or miss for many!
Incorporating a phone tree can be effective. Have the directors spread the word. Make sure this method is part of your disaster recovery and business continuity plan.
Yeah, but what if all our VoIP phones fail? That could complicate things further.
Hosting your intranet on SharePoint is a solid option. It can serve as a go-to place for announcements. Just make sure to have a backup plan because if SharePoint goes down, it won't help much!
Totally get the humor, but it's true—my organization uses SharePoint too, and we've had our shares of downtime.
Having email alerts set up with Exchange can complement using SharePoint.
We use ManageEngine's announcement feature for mass notifications. It’s a reliable way to get the word out during outages.
Nice! I remember ManageEngine working great for similar situations in the past.
Which specific tool in ManageEngine do you recommend for alerts?
That’s exactly the idea I’m leaning towards, but I want to explore all available options first.