Support Forum

As of 1.0.0.18 we have a new announce maintenance plugin working in Habitat.

See the video here on how to use it.
The Video

Announce Maintenance now uses the new Patch Manger to find the groups that you have schedules for and allows you to select from those groups to send a pre maintenance message to users at a given time frame notifying end users to leave their computers on and to save all work before going home for the day.

This simple notice 1 hour before the end of the work day will typically increase patching success up 15% to 30% across the MSP.


#1 Announcement Window
Sets the time of day you want messages to go out to end users.

#2 Same Day
This tells the announcement service that the patching schedule is set for Late PM and not Early AM. If the patching groups schedule is set to 1AM to 5 AM and we announce on "Same Day" at 3pm the announcement will have gone out 12 hours after the patching services started and ended. To account for this time change you unselect "Same Day" which will send the announcement at 3PM the day before the patching window starts.

#3 Message Title
This is a friendly name for the message. We will be using this more in the future as we expand Announce Maintenance to have multiple messages ability.

#4 Patch Group
These are the patch groups we found setup with schedules in your Automate environment. If this drop down list is blank then you have no groups configured in Automate Patch Manager. Select the group that represents your Windows workstations.

#5 Message Box
This is the message displayed to the end user when Announcement is made. This should be a simple one line message with no special characters, quotes and such.

#6 The Master Switch
This turns on and off the automated announcements for all systems.

Once turned on the Automate Server will monitor for the schedule to come due and will fire off announcements when the time comes. The automation will schedule the Announce Maintenance script to run on agent during announcement window. The script will look to see if the user is logged in and if so will pass the message along with a OK button. When user clicks OK button we record that click as an acknowledgement by user along with the date in the database.

Future versions of plugin will provide access to that data directly in plugin but the data is there if you want to use SQL plugin to fetch.

I'd love to see the ability to enable and disable this by client or device as needed, especially with the initial rollout. Turning this on for our patch groups will generate a ton of support calls. Would be nice to be able to enable it client by client...

Ok I will look into that option.

Just FYI,

Next release will have a new EDF under each client, a check box to enable Habitat Announce Maintenance. This will turn on and off per client the announce maintenance service.

Master switch enables the service and the EDFs at client view enable each client.

Coming in Habitat Build 1.0.0.34

Thanks, Mark for the feature request!

I think I might be missing something or the announcement isn't going out for some other reason. I changed our patch policy to tonight 5/25 at 11pm. I originally set the announcement to go out at 11 but nothing happened. I now set it to go out at 12pm so will see what happens. But I don't see a script has gone out at all for it.

Agh... so 12pm has come and gone without a maintenance announcement. Not sure what else I could be missing to get it to work.

Nothing returned in SQL query.

results of the SQL queries.

I have had a chance to look over this and I have found a plausible issue. I will be releasing an update to Habitat (1.0.1.34) ASAP which will help resolve this issue.

Thank you!!