HALi Announcer was an idea that I had while sitting at my desk composing an email. I was composing an email to a company regarding the renewal of a license that was coming up in 10 days time. This sort of thing is common in IT Management, where you have many different contracts from many different vendors. For example your back up systems, Desktop licensing, Anti Virus and so on and so on.. This can become increasingly demanding and quite tedious trying to remember to email the vendors near the time that the license might expire. I thought what if I could get HALi to do all this for me. I started to think about how I could do this and came up with the idea that if I created a database that would be read by HALi every minute, I could schedule emails to be sent out at any given time and date and it would enable me to send emails as either HALi or myself. The recipient would be under the impression that I had sent the email only a few minutes ago but in reality I might have composed that email 3 months ago! I could set up my entire years worth of renewal emails in a matter of minutes. I could also use HALi Announcer to send out emails regarding planned Server maintenance without having to send these emails out as me personally. HALi would act on my behalf informing users of upcoming server maintenance events.

HALi Announcer has caught me out on a couple of occasions where I have had a reply to my email that I had composed many weeks ago. I thought "What? I don't remember that!" :)

Last updated, August 2018