Documentation

Sending a notice

This page is also in the Courier wiki: https://github.com/rsjsoftwareltd/courier/wiki/Sending-a-Notice

Everything about writing a notice, previewing it, sending it and following what happens next. The page names are the ones in the console's left-hand menu: New notice and History.

Remember that Courier makes no emergency-delivery promise, and that a notice shown on a screen has been displayed, not necessarily read.

Who can send #

Administrators can send to any computers or people. Senders can send only to the audiences an administrator gives them (under Message Settings -> Audiences), and see only their own history. A notice that reaches more than 25 computers or 50 people needs the sender to type the number to confirm; an administrator can change those numbers, and can switch on a daily limit, under Message Settings -> Sending.

The New notice form #

1. Send to. Choose Computers (tick the computers, with a filter box, Select all and Clear) or People (type usernames, and optionally Active Directory groups). Audiences covers both.
2. Title and message. The toolbar above the message adds bold, lists, a heading or a highlighted line, and you can choose the text size and font (Formatting a notice). The form shows how much of the message you have used. Take care over anything you would not want a whole room to read: a notice on a screen can be seen by whoever is using that computer.
3. Expires after. 15 minutes, 1 hour (the default), 4 hours, End of today, 1 day, or Custom minutes. The form tells you the longest allowed. A length counts from the moment you send; End of today is a fixed moment, worked out when you open the preview.
4. Preview... Nothing is sent from this form. The preview does the sending.

The form keeps what you have written if you go to another page and back. Start from a template (when your administrator has made some) fills in the title, message and expiry; you can change anything before you preview, and it asks before replacing text you have already written. A template with blanks shows a short form instead (a date, a room, a choice from a list...): fill it in and the notice is written for you, shown under the form as "This is what people will see". Edit the words by hand (it asks first) turns it into an ordinary notice. Who receives it is still chosen below, as always.

The preview #

The preview dialog shows:

• The notice as the computer will show it, with your school's name and logo above it if they are set (General Settings -> School).
• Goes to: who it reaches in words -- the computers by name, or the people and how many computers each is signed in on.
• Closes: the exact local time it will close, kept current while the preview is open. Anyone who has not acknowledged it by then will not see it again.
• Warnings. A computer without the Courier module cannot show the notice until you enable Courier on it (a link opens Agent Settings). A computer that is offline collects the notice when it comes back, as long as that is before the notice closes. A person no computer has reported signed in yet gets the notice when an enrolled computer reports them, as long as that is before it closes.

The Send button at the bottom says how many computers it goes to. Pressing it asks the server to work out who the notice reaches once more. If that is not what the preview showed (a computer went offline, an enrolment changed, a group's members moved), the preview updates, says what changed, and you press Send a second time. Back to editing has the focus when the preview opens, so the irreversible choice is one deliberate move away.

If an answer goes missing #

If the network drops or the page closes while a notice is being sent, Courier does not guess. Previewing the same notice again asks the server whether the earlier send made a notice, and offers to open it, or to send it again as a new one. Sending the same notice twice by accident is prevented: repeating a send carries the same request key.

Results #

After you send, you land on the notice's Results page: its text, six counts, and a row for every copy handed out, with the time of each step.

The page refreshes itself every few seconds while the notice is open. After it closes it keeps looking more slowly for a while, because a computer can still report an acknowledgement made before the deadline, then stops and says when it last looked (there is a Refresh link). Expired never means acknowledged, and an acknowledgement that arrived after the deadline is labelled as such. Download CSV saves the results.

A Failed row gives the reason the computer reported, in plain words.

History #

History lists the newest 100 notices, newest first: when it was sent, its title, who it went to, how far it got ("2 of 3 acknowledged"), when it expires and who sent it. A row opens that notice's Results. Administrators see everyone's notices; senders see their own. Download CSV saves that same list, so it holds at most the newest 100, never the older ones; when it is cut off, the file says so. Older notices are not shown or exported, but they are kept for the period the school chose, a year by default, and deleted once a day after that -- see Settings below.

Settings an administrator can use #

Under Configuration in the left-hand menu are three pages, each with its own tabs: Message Settings (Audiences, Sending, Templates, Retention, Directory), Agent Settings (see below) and General Settings (Users, Access, Updates, Backup, Logs, School, Appearance, Activity, About). An address you bookmarked for a tab, such as #directory, still opens that tab.

• Users (General Settings) -- add accounts, change roles, reset passwords, disable or remove accounts.
• Directory (Message Settings) -- the read-only Active Directory account and the OU limit (Audiences).
• Retention (Message Settings) -- how long History is kept. It is counted from when each notice closed, and is separate from a notice's expiry. Shortening the period deletes the older notices straight away.
• Templates -- wording you reuse: a name that only you see, a title, a message and an optional default expiry. Anyone who can send can start from one; nothing is ever sent without a preview. Add up to 10 blanks (short text, longer text, date, time or a choice from a list) and write {Label} in the title or message where each goes; the Insert buttons do it for you. A blank that is not required drops its whole line when left empty. A template does not choose who receives the notice.
• School -- your school's name and a PNG or JPEG logo, shown in the console's top bar and in the preview. The console tells you the size limits when you choose a file.
• Logs -- the latest lines of Courier's log, and Collect logs for support, which downloads a diagnostics .zip (see Troubleshooting).
• Appearance and About are open to everyone: Appearance is where you pick a theme (Light, Dark, Slate or Forest, each shown as a small picture) and, for administrators, the school's colour; About shows the version and links to the documentation, discussions, release notes and problem reports. Your own password is changed under Users, not Appearance.

Agent Settings #

Agent Settings is for administrators and is where the RSJ Agent gets onto your computers. Deploy has the Connection secret (shows, hides and rotates the secret your computers present; rotating it means every computer using the old one must be enrolled again), Deploy the RSJ Agent (the script) and Find computers in Active Directory, whose Run AD discovery button searches the directory with the read-only account saved under Message Settings -> Directory (only your school's OUs if you limited Courier to them there; computers that have not signed in for 30 days are left out). Devices starts with Registered: the computers that have the RSJ Agent and have checked in -- who is signed in, whether they have the Courier module, when they were last seen, online or offline -- with Send a notice beside each. Reset machine key gives a computer a new key at its next check-in, for a computer that has been rebuilt. The other lists are what it found that has no RSJ Agent yet: Unregistered, Unreachable (a push could not reach it, with the reason) and Excluded (left out on purpose; Restore puts it back). Tick computers and choose Deploy selected to push the RSJ Agent to them over WinRM with a Windows administrator account typed for that one deployment, which Courier never saves or logs. WinRM is off by default on Windows 10 and 11 clients, so for those use the script. Courier module switches Courier on, or off, for the enrolled computers.