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8.7

Advice needed on domain client messaging/communication solution

Asked by meirionwyllt in Chat / IM Software, Windows 2003 Server, Exchange Email Server

Hi, heres my next project.  I need some advice on messaging/communication software that I can roll out on the domain, so that we in the IT dept can inform users via some kind of popup whenever a server is down, rather than us being flooded with phone calls from 2000 people!

Ideally, at the clients side, there would be an icon constantly in their System tray, and whenever a message comes from IT, the icon would change colour and a popup/balloon notification would appear, one that the user must dismiss to get rid of.  The icon would stay at this changed colour until the server is back up, when another massage would come from IT to say this.  The icon would then return to its original state.

The thing is, we are in local government, and what with having to save £16 million over the next three years, we would like to be able to use either freeware/open source, or technology that we might already have, i.e. a feature already in Windows/Office 2003/Exchange Server.

Our Exchange Servers are currently experiencing lots of disk/diskspace isses so doing it via email or using our current exchange server is not an option, because our exchange server goes down often, due to an intermittent power problem in our server room.

However, we do have a spare licence (and a spare server PC) if we wanted to install exchange server (or whatever other software) on a server dedicated to user messaging if need be.  We would be maintaining this server ourselves (rather than our under-staffed server team) and keeping it in our room rather in the server room, so the risk of this extra server going down is negligible.

We want this system to be independent from as many things as possible, so using our Intranet as a messenger is out of the question since that also goes down occasionally.

We dont want to allow the users to be able to send, only receive  the sending to be done only by IT Support.

A colleague of mine said something about Office Collaboration Server, but I dont know anything about this.

What would you guys n gals suggest as a cheap but effective solution?

Thanks.
[+][-]08/28/09 11:13 PM, ID: 25213131Accepted Solution

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Zones: Chat / IM Software, Windows 2003 Server, Exchange Email Server
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Solution Provided By: Kaffiend
Participating Experts: 2
Solution Grade: A
 
[+][-]08/28/09 08:44 AM, ID: 25208839Expert Comment

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