How to communicate IT infrastructure downtime

I share a a best practice how to communicate an IT infrastructure downtime (e.g. because of maintenance activity) within an organization.

This time (yes) I recommend using Outlook for this use case but not an Email ;-) 

The key takeaway is to create a meeting invitation.

The advantages of sending this information via a meeting are that

• the receiver will be automatically notified by the meeting reminder independently if he has processed the invitation (contrary to the approach by email that might be overseen)
• the downtime will be displayed in the Calendar (also independently if the invitation has been processed or not.)

I recommend the following meeting options :

• Set the meeting NOT to Request Responses (especially useful if you have a big company) to avoid your Inbox getting spammed by them
• Set the meeting time availability as Free in order not to block the Calendar of your users: Most of the time the downtime do no make them unavailable for meetings. If you don't do this on the Sender's side, every receiver will have to handle this manually himself i.e. change the meeting availability to Free and most likely he will forget and have his calendar blocked by your invitation.