To inform users and lower duplicate service desk calls we send out an email to users when there is a downtime (server crash, network issue, etc). A number of our users use generic task worker PCs, these PCs do not have our email client installed on them (licensing cost). Users have the ability to check their mail via WebMail but only do this periodically. As such many users are unaware of downtime notices that are sent out so we are looking for another channel to notify our users.
I did some searching for messaging solutions and stumbled across OpenFire+Spark. I installed in on some VMs to test drive and I am impress how well it worked out of the box. That said, we do not need\want a fully featured IM client on each station. My question is can anything be done with OpenFire or Spark to limit client functionality? Ideally the users endpoint wouldn’t even display an icon in the systray and the only interaction they would have is closing the “toast” notification popup that would tell the user about current known issues.
So is something like this possible (without a major code rewrite)? If not, are you familiar with some other open source project that might be a better fit for our needs?
Thanks