OutageNotice

OutageNotice has just had a massive pre-christmas update. Outage notice is now powered by Rails 2.0.2 and resources_controller. New features include account default settings and icalendar attachments on notices.

Wishing everyone an outage free christmas!

OutageNotice streamlines the process of sending Outage Notices. This allows System Administrators and support teams more time to attend to their systems and also, and more importantly, more time to focus on the content of their outage communication.

The Lone Sysadmin has a great write up on Outage Notices.

“I hate outage notifications that don’t actually say anything. Sure, I’d rather know ahead of time that something is going down, but there are several other qualities that I think any communication like this should have. The key is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What would you like to know if you were them?”

The Lone Sysadmin’s essential outage notice communication requirements include:

• Why is this happening?
• What affect to users?
• Who is doing the work?
• Be postive.
• Provide updates.
• Be honest.
• Don’t apologise. Thank.

Read the full article How to Write An Outage Notice.

Similar thoughts from 37 Signals in their manifesto Getting Real, Publicize Your Screwups.

Seth Godin also picks up on the honesty requirement in Three important lessons from Dreamhost.

• general tidy up of notice new/edit form
• now using XC2 calendar . This calendar had some nice javascript hooks and Xin seems like a nice guy.

Liftoff! OutageNotice has launched. It's a softly softly launch though as not everything is a 100% ready. My plan is rapidly update and implement all the really obvious missing bits.