Notification System Charter

4/26/2005

Notification System Charter

Version / Date / Author / Notes
1.0 / 04/26/2005 / Tatiana Burek
Markus Stobbs / Initial version
1.1 / 5/20/2005 / Added and expanded sections

Background

SCD currently uses the following disparate notification mechanisms for change control and system downtime:

  • NETS change control (
  • SCD change control form for permanent system changes (
  • HPS downtime notification form
    (
  • SCD Daily Bulletin email
  • weg-users group mail script to send email to all user accounts on web.ucar.edu
  • several mailman mailing lists for individual services
  • several mail aliases such as scd-users, non-scd-users and user-down-time
  • all-ucar-staff email group is only used in emergencies at the request of management

All these disparate systems result in inconsistent notification of scheduled changes and downtimes as well as inconsistent policy across SCD groups. In addition, users receive notification about things they don’t need to or care to know.

Objectives

The objective of the project is to create an integrated downtime and change control notification system that provides targeted notifications to the people who really need to know about server and service downtime and changes. The system would track what admins and users are interested in what servers and services. It would perform email notification and also provide a calendar and running record via a website. The application would contain business rules that enforce a consistent SCD-wide notification policy.

Scope

  • The scope is currently defined as meeting the computing-related downtime and change control notification needs of SCD.
  • The scope of the project may be changed to provide computing-related notification for all of UCAR.
  • Sysadmins can create and edit

Project Components

  • Develop straightforward web forms sysadmins to create notifications.
  • Enable users to select what servers and services they want to be notified about
  • Provide UCAS password security for users with admin priviledges for select UCAS accounts.
  • Develop a consistent divisional notification policy represented by business rules in the application.
  • Develop a customer database with a data model that supports tagging users as members of one or more service groups.
  • Host the notification system outside the standard WEG production infrastructure to enable notification during emergency downtime.

Resources

Project Manager / Markus Stobbs
Project Team / Tatiana Burek
Leonard Sitongia
Stakeholders / Tom Bettge
SCD Section Heads
SCD Group Heads

Dependencies

  • SCD Customer Support Structure project
  • Extraview project
  • Server Infrastructure Review project

Risks

  • Group differences may make itdifficult to develop a unified divisional notification policy.
  • Technical difficulties that may arise with using different services in the project such as e-mail client, DB, web-browsers. (I don’t see these as risks.)
  • High level of security could create problems on different stages of the project. (I would delete this bullet unless you see specific issues here.)

Future Enhancements

Any new additions shall be part of another project or shall be designated as phase two of this project.

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