Where I work (Statistics Canada), all our central IT section ever uses is an e-mail notice for communicating with users like me. I get that doesn't work when the problem is the e-mail system but in about 20 years of working here I have never found that to be a problem. Problems with the e-mail server are generally infrequent & short-lived. We have close to 8,000 machines & a dual internal & external network for security reasons & our e-mail system seems to be extremely rugged (we only seem get a two or three down periods of a very short duration each year - hours or minutes).

Of course, we are conservative as hell, we are moving every single machine in the bureau from XP to Vista in a month because Vista has finally passed 2 years of testing. Despite the fact everyone else has jumped on Win7, we will probably move to 7 in about 3 to 4 years. Yet everything does work & real system-wide crashes or disruptions are almost unheard off.

So my question is do you really need something else besides e-mail notices?
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Jack