>This is great as long as a human resource is available to intervene when it's time to shut down. Scheduled maintenance after hours often doesn't have the luxury of this assumption. Even scheduled downtime during normal business hours seems to get screwed up at times...
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>Having a LAN Administrator available to go whack users with a cudgel when they don't do what you want is a luxury that often isn't available. It also relies on the user being around to be whacked; I've been bitten more than once by having several data entry operators all go out for an extended lunch (left at 11, came back at 3, and I needed to do something at 12:30...) or where someone is working from another site.
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>If I have to, with a single (at times annoyingly large) site, I can find out who has the stuff open and go over to the machines and exit the app(s) (only to be greeted by howls of dismay when the operators got back.) Even with easy physical access, with password-protected screen savers running, there may be no easy way to safely get them out...if multiple sites are involved (lets say offices in Trumbull, NYC, and Osaka) it may not be feasible to go visit each machine.
>As long as you have assurances that users (1) will cooperate, (2) can be reached in a timely fashion, and (3) aren't going to be in a uninterruptible state in the app when you need them to shut down, the email request followed by visits by a LAN Admin carrying an electric cattle prod is the best approach. If you don't have these assurances, there's a strong chance that if you don't defer until cooperation is secured, the forcible discconect of the app from the data will screw up the tables.
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>Even with gentle shutdown, data entry is sensitive to being interrupted, and it's important to let the operator know that either a transaction in process was committed as far as it had been entered (not my preference) or backed out entirely and to always be consistent in this treatment of data in flux. It's important to let the data entry operator know not to throw away the first 5 pages of an order if they walk away for a quick (read 3-4 hour) lunch break in the middle of entering a PO that arrived in the mail.

I like the cattle prod idea < s > Yes, occasionally a forcible shutdown needs to be done, and there is a little occasional data loss. But this happens from other network problems, anyway, so it's not like it's a new event in a user's life. And they do learn, sometimes easily, sometimes the hard way, to adhere to downtime schedules...we always have backups from late the night before, just in case, anyway, so not much will be lost from early morning maintenance...