We are on 9.1 M030. We have 20-30 users across two sites at present. Most of our communications are for system administration purposes.We use a combination of an global Windchill user email list and the alert banner to communicate short-term information like necessary server restarts, check in reminders, etc.
The alert banner is very effective as it can be enabled or disabled via a text file (html snippet) without restarting Windchill. It appears on every page in Windchill so the users will see it any time they access a Windchill page. This really helps when Windchill is configured to default to the last page accessed instead of always going back to the user's home page. The alert banner is JavaScript so it could be changed to display your ticker tape suggestion. However, many users consider flashing or scrolling text to be a distraction. We found simply displaying the message as static text in red gets their attention.
We also use JConsole and the Active Users MBean to see the current active Windchill users. We call individual users if they are still on the system when we are ready to shut down the server.
This isn't exactly what you are requesting and I'm getting off topic. I have seen several larger companies who maintain a separate"community" web site listingcorporate standards, help, FAQs, calendar,etc. The alert banner can include a URL to the community site and notify users of recent changes in the community web site.We haven't connected the two in our implementation yetbut our preference would be to link to the community page directly from the Windchill banner where "E-mail this page", "Help", and the other persistent links reside. Maybe someone who has already linked the two can share their example?
