On occasion I will use the ‘net send’ command to fire off a quick message to anyone working on our servers. Usually in the form of a script that will notify everyone I am about to reboot. I was surprised to find it didn’t work at all when running under Vista (Well not that surprised)
After some digging around I found that Vista now has a new way to do this – the MSG command (I suspect the msg command has been around before that…but this is the first Windows OS where net send has been removed). Here is the syntax:
MSG {username | sessionname | sessionid | @filename | *}
[/SERVER:servername] [/TIME:seconds] [/V] [/W] [message] username Identifies the specified username.
sessionname The name of the session.
sessionid The ID of the session.
@filename Identifies a file containing a list of usernames,
sessionnames, and sessionids to send the message to.
* Send message to all sessions on specified server.
/SERVER:servername server to contact (default is current).
/TIME:seconds Time delay to wait for receiver to acknowledge msg.
/V Display information about actions being performed.
/W Wait for response from user, useful with /V.
message Message to send. If none specified, prompts for it
or reads from stdin.
If you wanted to send a single message to the server named ‘Server2003′ it would look like this:
C:\msg /server:Server2003 console “Server will be rebooted shortly – Please save your work asap!”
Now I can reboot my servers without giving someone a nasty surprise 
