Send Message
Administrators can send a bulletin message to a specific user, or to all users
This feature may be useful if you want to send important information to users. For example, you may want to inform users of a new program which is supported by KeyServer.
Selecting Send Message... from the Admin menu will bring up a dialog to send a message to all users. You can also get this dialog by right-clicking in the list of users in the Connected Clients Window, without having a specific user selected, and selecting Send Message to All... You can send a message to a specific user by right-clicking on the user in the Connected Clients Window and selecting Send Message...
At the top of the dialog, you will see either Message to All Users or Message to: username depending on whether you are sending a bulleting to all users or just one user. Following that is a text field where you can type the message you wish to send. Clicking OK will send the message to the user (or all users).
The following macros may be placed in the message, and KeyAccess will replace them with the appropriate values:
- ^d
- date on active KeyServer
- ^D
- date on local (KeyAccess) computer
- ^f
- "KeyAccess" (name of client software at start up time)
- ^n
- network name of active KeyServer
- ^t
- time on active KeyServer, shown in local (KeyAccess) time zone
- ^T
- time on local (KeyAccess) computer
- ^u
- name of user
- ^^
- single caret ("^")
Additionally, there are two Emergency Options in the lower left of the dialog. Normally, you should not need to use either of these options.
- The Send All Bulletins Immediately option is only available when you are sending a bulletin to all users. It will cause all messages to be sent immediately, instead of sending the message to one client at a time. This option will only make a difference at large sites. On small sites, the time required to send each message one by one is hardly slower than the time required to send all at once.
- The Force Immediate Disconnect option will cause KeyAccess on any computer that receives the message to immediately disconnect. After doing this, all running programs on the client computer will continue to run, regardless of whether they are managed or not, and even whether they are keyed or not. New launches of unkeyed programs will immediately succeed, and new launches of keyed programs will cause KeyAccess to reconnect to the KeyServer, in order to request a license. KeyAccess will also reconnect to KeyServer if the client computer is restarted.
 | Do not depend on this message system to deliver crucial messages! Although the KeyServer guarantees delivery to all users who have a good network connection to the KeyServer, they may be away from their computer when the message arrives. Users who have configured their KeyAccess to Remove messages after 5 minutes will miss the message if they are away from their computer for more than five minutes. |