Is there a group policy I can use to send many users a message daily?

[GregD13]

Can anyone suggest how I can easily automate a daily message to be sent to a select group of users (or maybe a 'pop up' on thier desktop) at 4:30 for a reminder? I was hoping maybe group policy would do it but don't know how.

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Greg

 

[acl03]

Well one thing you could do is write a batch file to do a "net send" command on one of your servers. You could schedule this task to run at 4:30 each day using scheduled tasks in the control panel.

net send 192.168.2.5 Hello!
net send DNShostName Hello!

Would send a message box saying "Hello!" to that IP address or DNS Host Name.

This would only work if you knew which hostnames you wanted to receive the message. You could probably get some VBScript to pull a list of machine names from an OU, and then send the message to each machine. If you wanted to do that, you'd probably want to post in the VBScript forum.

Another option is to create a Logoff Script in group policy to tell the users a message every time they log off (or, even put a statement in there to only display the message if the time is between like 4:25 and 4:35 PM or something.





Thanks,
Andrew

 

[kmcferrin]

You can't set up timed messages with group policy, but you can execute scripts. You can only specify logon or logoff scripts though, so unless you want to specify a logon script that sleeps until 4:30 and then pops up a message, you're probably out of luck. That might work, but if your user logs in at 8am there's a lot that could happen that could prevent that script from actually executing.

If they are on the same PCs every day, you could schedule a script to run at 4:30 that pops up a messagebox. That would be pretty easy. I use a similar scheduled script to reboot certain PCs in the middle of the night.

If it is the same group of people every day, you might be able to schedule a single script on your server to run that does a NET SEND to those specific users.