Information is the key to getting people involved. Too much can cause disinterest and even prevent involvement. Informing the right people also takes a lot of planning.
Three groups of people need to be informed.
1. End user - registered owner
2. Manager for 1
3. Last logged user
Each user can handle a single mail for each computer in question, but a department manager could be very irritated to get 30 emails that don't necessarily require action. The mail to the manager should have a few multidimensional arrays. The matrix displayed will quickly inform the manager about each computer and its status. Owner, location, last user, model, and date and time of exchange should be available.
To get the information, the query should collect the matrix based on manager mail address (select id, [fields] where manager_id = [string]). An update on the same objects should then be made, filling in mail_to_mgr as true so it's not possible to send duplicates of the information (update ... where mgr_id...).
That's simple enough. Now how to send a bunch of mail to a bunch of different people without clicking one at a time... Once again, multidimensional array. Each first level array passed to the mail function. Perhaps all this and the managers' lists can be done at the same time, polling the managers' lists of clients and passing them to the manager email then polling the users list and pumping the mails to them... It's been suggested that we contact the managers to see if there is a time which works best for them. That means we're going to adjust ourselves to 72 different managers... Something says that won't work so well. We are however looking at too many computers.. I forgot to filter those which are collected. :(
Report of progress here will come later.
Update 18-Aug:
The multidimensional arrays worked out very well. Each computer has a database field for each recipient. As soon as the recipient has been informed, the field is updated with the date and time the mail was sent. The mail function will send to the list collected by the database which excludes those records where the mail has already been sent. This enables me to send an individual mail to those who are manually configured and a collective email with dynamic values for all the rest based on different criteria. I chose to base the emails on the day we scheduled the exchange. This sends mail to each manager for each day. That splits up the load and keeps the users and managers informed on a date basis instead of a bulk informational email. It also allows us to be flexible with the rollout if a crisis should come that prevents us from keeping the schedule. We will easily be able to push all remaining plans down one day if users are not both planned and informed.
Week two starts tomorrow. So far only one complaint on Tuesday last week when the manager got an email the day before the exchange since we decided there really was no reason to wait until Wednesday to roll. The information since that day has gone out two or three business days in advance with no further complaints. We have Wednesday with no plan yet, but I'm planning on possibly moving Thursday to Wednesday after we know what Monday's results are. Fridays are no good day to roll out computers, so it's possible to move Friday to Wednesday. We'll see how the team feels.
