Tough morning. Arrived at work this morning and the Internet connection was down. Seems like a firewall configuration change prevented outbound access to the Internet.
True, but when you announce it in that way the ramifications of that failure is not fully understood by everyone. Many ignored that message as they did not need Internet access just them. They went about doing their business.
However, like many organizations we have an internal Blackberry Enterprise Server connected to our Exchange system. So while email was working in-house, messages were not being delivered to the Blackberries. This was not initially obvious and communicaitons did not go out alerting those users. The BES needs to connect to the RIM server prior to reaching the handheld devices and visa versa.
So now the problem, how do you let someone in the field know that they can’t send or receive messages on their Blackberry, when the tool used to let them know there is an outage (email) only works in-house to Outlook workstations?
I’ve thought that setting up a private Twitter account for out-of-band communications (SMS and the phone still worked). How about using a bulk text messaging service that can use a preset distribution list. Does anyone have any ideas.