One Monday morning, employees at a small business in French-speaking Switzerland arrive at work and see an unfamiliar window pop up—a system message with a logo they’ve never seen before. No one had told them anything. The help desk isn’t open yet. Speculation runs wild: a virus, a hack, a security issue. Within minutes, the entire morning’s workflow goes haywire.
At Infologo, an IT service provider based in Lausanne and Geneva, we’ve seen this scenario play out often enough to have established a clear rule: the deployment of a workstation management tool always includes user communication. Not as an option, not as an add-on service. As a prerequisite for success.
Technology alone isn’t enough when no one is warned
From a technical standpoint, deploying remote desktop management software is simple. A tool like Action1 lets you roll out an installation across your entire fleet in just a few hours, without having to physically touch the machines. Clean, efficient, and invisible.
That’s exactly the problem.
Although the installation is invisible to the IT administrator, it is not invisible to the user, who suddenly sees an unfamiliar window appear on their screen. Workstation management software generates status messages, update notifications, and progress windows. To someone who hasn’t been warned, these messages are indistinguishable from a real security alert.
In the deployments we supported this year, none of the “user” incidents had a technical cause. They were all simply the result of confusion stemming from a lack of prior information.
What Bertrand Saw at a CIO He Knew
Bertrand, the director of Infologo, witnessed such a rollout at the workplace of an acquaintance. A workstation management tool had been installed without prior notice. The next morning, the atmosphere in the offices felt more like a crisis center than a normal workday. Questions were flying, as were assumptions. How much time was wasted? How many people were called in to reassure everyone? The technical side had gone perfectly. The human side was nonexistent.
This kind of incident is not uncommon. It is even predictable—and therefore preventable.
Two Actions That Change Everything
To prevent technical deployments from being perceived as incidents, we have formalized two systematic practices at Infologo.
The first: send an email to the customer before installation. Not a generic email saying “an update is coming,” but a message that shows what the software actually looks like. A screenshot of a sample message, with an explanatory note: “Here’s what your employees will see. This is normal. It’s us.” In Action1 messages, the Infologo logo is included by default, specifically so that the source is identifiable. But users still need to know this before they see the message.
The second: give a brief presentation to a key user at the end of the deployment. Not a training session. Five minutes with the administrative assistant, the office manager, or anyone whose natural role is to answer questions from their colleagues. Jessica, one of our employees, did this at one of our clients’ sites at the end of a recent deployment. The result: zero panic calls the next day. The user had been able to explain to her colleagues what they would see, why, and what to do.
This is not an isolated incident. We have decided to make this approach standard for all future deployments.
What we recommend to our customers at Infologo
A successful IT deployment is one that no one talks about the next day because everything went smoothly. To achieve this, the rule is simple: everything the user will see must have been explained to them before they see it.
In practical terms, this means sending a preventive email before installation—including a screenshot of a typical message—and giving a five-minute presentation to a key user as soon as the deployment is complete. These two actions take no more than an hour of work. They save hours of crisis management.
For small and medium-sized businesses considering the deployment of a workstation monitoring or management tool, the question to ask your service provider isn’t “How long will the installation take?” but “How will you inform my employees?”
If your next deployment is coming up and you still don’t have an answer to this question, please contact us before you do anything.
