9/5 UPDATE: The System Messages solution is now available for download! Click here for details.

So what the heck does that title mean? If you’ve been following my blog you already know what we’re talking about – SunGard’s SharePoint Intranet and all the cool things we are doing with SharePoint. This is the next installment – broadcasting informational and/or critical alerts to our Intranet users.

Useful for a variety of reasons: Alert users when a system or service is down; a new feature has been deployed; a new flavor of coffee is available in the kitchen on the 4^th floor; the possibilities are endless.

So this was fairly simple, thanks to SharePoint 2010’s native status messaging API – SP.UI.Status. We created an interface for site or farm administrators to set and control messages:

The setting of farm-wide messages is managed through Central Administration:

Administrators can then set the message text (supports embedded URLs), the alert type, and if the alert is visible:

The settings are stored in a property bag and picked up by code in our master page:

(Example above is incomplete for brevity – missing executeQueryAsync call and related code)

When alerts are active – they show up on the site pages (or farm-wide):

Informational:

Warning:

Critical:

Another simple feature that leverages and extends the native functionality of SharePoint by allowing us to broadcast messages to our Intranet community. There’s more to come – we’ve hardly scratched the surface on what we’re doing with SharePoint. Hope you found it interesting. Be sure to look for my tweets and blog updates from the SharePoint Connections Conference starting March 26^th.