Network notifications

Sending them an email would seem like the most straightforward way to do this.\

Or, look into the MSG.EXE command, which can send a message to a user.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/186480

Or for earlier versions of Windows (e.g. XP), NET SEND

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/net_send.mspx?mfr=true

An email is not what I'm looking for, it will be an intranet, not internet and there will be no email facilities available.

I would ideally like to have a situation whereby each user on the network has a shared folder on a machine (not running as a server ideally but just a PC) When a file is transferred to their folder, or updated, I would then like to either send a message in a pop up message box to their particular machine to alert them or else have a means of flagging that folder, such as a colour change or similar, so that when they check they can see that there is an update awaiting them.

This will be difficult indeed!

I have successfully used Task Scheduler to run a .bat file to run a script that checks the contents of a folder. The folder was used specifically as an electronic Fax repository and the Users were notified when a new Fax was dropped into it. The script watched for changes to the number of documents within the folder and would open a Notepad, displaying the message "A new Fax has arrived!". However, it only opened the Notepad message on the machine where the folder resided and this is not exactly what you need.

It sounds like you will need to write some scripts to watch the properties of documents within that folder. The scripts could be triggered to run by a .bat file. You could use Task Scheduler to run the .bat file every 'x' amount of time, like say 10 minutes, or 5, or 2, or whenever. The problem I see is how to get the script to recognize that the 'modified time/date' has changed. I have never been able to write any scripts to do this and have needed 3rd party solutions to create a temp database to capture specific properties of a document on a timed schedule, then when the .bat file (and relative scripts) was run, another temp database was created with the new properties captured. A comparison between the two databases will show any differences to the properties and the software would display a message stating what has changed . "Document A has been modified at xx time". Doing all of this on the local machine may have some performance impact and you may want to look at a 3rd party program to do this for you.

I guess a good programmer could make this all work but that is all the advice I can provide. Hopefully someone else will add some ideas.

I found an open source solution myself using Google.