If you're on Slack or Teams all day long, you may forget how much you rely on it... until the service is interrupted.
Even the biggest and best messaging platforms of the internet have their occasional outages. If your company relies on chat for all its communication, this could have a major impact. Here's why:
You likely don't keep your phone numbers of your staff close at hand.
Your team is likely distributed and email is not checked immediately enough to ensure everyone will see an "all hands" announcement.
Your team is probably in different time zones.
Chat applications like Slack or Teams enable people to be working from mobile devices.
You would normally announce something this significant ON one of these services, so it being down makes it even more difficult to announce.
What's the fix?
Your team needs a "rendezvous point" where they can agree to go somewhere else on the internet in the event your primary service is down.
This could be an open Zoom meeting link with a pre-set, everyone-knows-the-code address. It could be a Google Meet. It's likely not going to work as a large recipient email thread or a group text message.
Here's a power tip: have your IT person set a "meet.yourdomain.com" link to take everyone to the rendezvous point. This will make it super easy to remember (instead of zoom.us/12327837831873273) and once people all arrive at the fallback location, you can decide as a group how you want to conduct business until your primary service is restored.
You'll need to decide if you want that alternate chat/meet link to require authentication or not, as many people don't regularly log into their chat application. This means they may not remember their password to the site. The downside? You might have unauthorized guests in your rendezvous point. Consider the trade off of easy access to security.
Sites go down, but your team need not be in the dark during an outage. Just agree on the failover plan and make it an easy thing to access and remember.
Commentaires