On Monday, November 17, 1997 12:15 PM, Stuart Pierce
[SMTP:[log in to unmask]] wrote:
> Are you wanting to have something dial a pager and put some sort of code
> in? Look no further than and interex contribution called DIGIPAGE. Works
> great for us.
> -------------
> Original Text
> >From "Bruce Leonard" <[log in to unmask]>, on 11/17/97 2:21 PM:
> Hello. I have a need to have our HP system dial out and send a message
> to one of our programmers to let them know if a specific job fails to
run.

There are a number of 'gotchas' with notifications (we sell an advanced
notification systems, so we have worked through just about all of them).
 Here are some other things you may want to think about:

1) ESCALATIONS:  What should happen if the person who is supposed to
receive the page doesn't?  Should it try someone else, or perhaps call them
up on the telephone and read the error message to them?

2) SCHEDULES:  What does the software do when someone is not on-call, or is
on vacation?

3) PAGING PROVIDERS:  Does the software support the paging provider you
currently use as well the provider your upper management selects next week
(not every paging company support TAP protocols)?

4) INTERNET:  Does it support the current internet protocols for sending
pages, or the emerging standards like SMPP?

5) EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES:  Does it support PCS phones, PDAs, PageWriter's,
etc?  Shareware tends not to keep up with such evolution.

6) REMOTE INTERACTION: Is paging enough?  Or do your support people need to
interact with their environment remotely (acknowledge taking a problem to
the help desk, run ping test or scripts, etc) when they are not near a
terminal & modem?

7) INTEGRATION:  Does it integrate with both your current environment (hard
coded into jobs) as well as future environments (will it work plug-n-play
with OpenView IT/O, Remedy ARS, Tivoli)?

<plugmode>

TelAlert is a product which handles all this and a few dozen other nifty
features which would take too long to discuss here.  It runs on NT and
UNIX, and has MPE/V and MPE/iX clients (as well as clients for several
UNIXs, VMS, etc).  It has built-in escalation and scheduling features to
make sure a problem is handled by somebody.

It also has optional voice units that will read error messages to you over
the phone (great for logging non-critical errors into voice mail systems)
and voice menus for interaction via touch-tone phones.  Two-way pagers can
also be used for this interaction as well, which includes running scripts
on your hosts and receiving immediate feedback (with two-way pagers, it's
another page -- with phones the results from the script are read).

</plugmode>

Guy Smith
www.telamon.com