The Network Migration Staff Email

Since Holly played to my ego (post) ;) I've decided to post the email I sent to staff, changing a few things to keep the company anonymous. I like the email because I feel it struck the right balance of complexity and readability. Would love to hear some criticism for continued staff communication improvements. The email also gives you an idea of just how poorly this network was setup and just what the staff and I have been dealing with.

Hello All,

We will begin performing the server migration next week. Much of the work will be done without the need to shutdown our network, however, a key piece of it will create some downtime. On Friday, September 8, starting at 11 am, the network will be down. Most likely internet access will not be affected. While you may find that you have access to email and files, I ask you not to use them because we may interrupt you at any time causing the loss of data or you could interrupt us causing significant delay. Downtime should last no longer than that day.

Several changes will occur that will affect you. Please read about them carefully.

Email:
Email, run by the program Exchange, is being moved to one of the new servers. I will need to upgrade everyone’s Outlook to 2003. If you have Office 2000 or are unsure, please contact me so I can upgrade you as soon as possible. Outlook 2003 allows each desktop to cache email, which means if the network goes down you can still access your old email. Composed email will sit in the Outbox until the network is back up and then go out automatically.

Files and Folders:
Your data on the network is also moving to one of the new servers. This means that all the drives mapped on your systems will be eliminated since not only the location but the layout of our file structure will be changed. Take note of the following changes:

• All staff documents will be in an umbrella folder called Shared (similar to what we have now).
• Within Shared will be separate subfolders as follows (for this a graphic was made using Office's org chart tools):
• Departments – includes folders for each department, accessible only to the department staff, network administrator, and other approved personnel.
• Personal – includes each staff person’s private folder accessible only by that person, the network administrator, and other approved personnel. All personal folders will be listed by username.
  Projects – includes folders for temporary or ongoing projects that are not specific to any one department. Access will be determined by the project leaders.
• Filesto Share – a folder accessible to everyone to be used to share and transfer files instead of filling up mailboxes with attachments.
• Drive letters will also change. S will be for Shared; O will be the Departments folder; U will be for you, your personal folder; P will be the Personal folder. Yes, that does spell SOUP. I don’t know why.
• If you require any other drive mappings, they can be manually created or shortcuts to specific folders can be placed on your desktop.
• Your My Documents folder will be setup to redirect to the U drive. This way whenever you save anything to My Documents, it will automatically be saved on the network. Also, this means you don’t have to keep track of drive letters if you don’t want to. My Documents and U will be synonymous.

Network Printers:
Printers will be renamed to represent their function and/or location for easier reference. Network printers will be named Main1, Envelope1, Color1, and Development1. Your current network printer setting will not work. If automated printer installation is not successful, on Monday I will reinstall the printers on each computer

Login:
After the migration, some of you may notice a little black box appear briefly when you first login to your computer. This is a login script I have created to automate a few tasks like creating drive mappings and hopefully printer reassignments.

If you have any questions, and I’m sure you do, please feel free to contact me. I’d rather you ask me questions than work with what you don’t understand.

Thanks.