Send a maintenance notice

Who can use this:Administrator

Before planned maintenance, or when urgent work means VirgilTrack will be unavailable, warn people with a service notice. It reaches everyone in the organisations you choose, and nobody can switch it off.

Before you start

Only system administrators can send notices. Anyone else sees “Only system administrators can send announcements.”
The page isn’t in the menu. Open it by adding /admin/announcements to VirgilTrack’s address, for example https://virgiltrack.virgilfinance.com/admin/announcements.
Know the start and end time of the downtime, and what people should do before it starts.

Send a notice

Open /admin/announcements.

The page is headed Maintenance and downtime notice.
Type a short Title, for example “Planned maintenance on Saturday 25 October”.
In Audience, keep All organisations, or choose one organisation.
Set From and Until: the date and time the downtime starts and ends.

They start as tomorrow, 18:00 to 20:00. Check both before you send.
In What people should know, say what will happen and what people should do, for example “VirgilTrack will be unavailable while we upgrade the servers. Save your work before 18:00; reports in progress are kept.”
Tick Also send a text (urgent or unplanned downtime only: texts cost money) only if the notice is urgent.
Select Send notice.

Send notice stays greyed out until you’ve filled in Title and What people should know. While it sends, it shows Sending…. Then “Notice queued for … people.” tells you how many people it is going to.

The Maintenance and downtime notice page with the Title, Audience, From, Until and What people should know fields, the tick box for also sending a text, and the Send notice button — Warning people about downtime

What people receive

Everyone whose account is open in the chosen organisation gets the notice; with All organisations, that is everyone on VirgilTrack. Deactivated accounts don’t.

Where	What it shows
Email	A “Service notice” with your title as its subject and heading, the time (“When”), and your message. It ends with “We’ll keep the interruption as short as possible. Questions: +264 81 783 0750 or info@virgilfinance.com.”
In VirgilTrack	A notification with your title, and the time followed by your message.
Text message (if you ticked it)	Your title and the time, with a link.

The time appears as one line. For downtime within one day it looks like “Saturday 25 October, 18:00–20:00”. Across two days, it shows both dates.

Emails are sent even to people who have switched other emails off, because system notices can’t be switched off. See Notifications.

Who gets a text

A text only goes to people who allow texts in their settings and have a verified mobile number. VirgilTrack doesn’t send texts between 20:00 and 07:00 in the person’s time zone; a text sent at night waits until 07:00.