“It’s definitely a pleasant surprise when you can take something that’s ten steps long and turn it into three.” - Peter Lord, Senior Solutions Architect, Singlewire Software
One of our senior solution architects, recently returned from an on-site visit to one of our university customers. He was on-hand to train the school’s public safety and public relation officials on how to use InformaCast and to work through any technical problems that might come up at the last minute.
While the full test of the system was a success, the major takeaway he had was not the technical achievement of the test, but rather how easy it was to now send mass notification. In the past, public safety officials would pull out a long list of systems to log into and people to contact in an effort to get an emergency message out to as many people as quickly as possible. Expecting hours of detailed instruction and a new list of complex procedures, they were amazed to learn that their emergency notification procedure now consisted of logging into the system, writing and recording a message, and clicking the “send” button.
We recently sat down with Peter Lord, our engineer on this project, to learn more about his experience, and talk about what it’s like behind-the-scenes at the test of an emergency notification system.
Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below.
Well, we had a large university contact us and they were looking to have a way to simplify how their users would send an emergency notification and be able to reach the entire campus both quickly and efficiently. The main goal for this was that there was a single portal so if there was an emergency situation.
In the past the customer had to log into System A. Log into System B. Call somebody to do XYZ. Call a different person to do the next item. And so this whole process of being able to alert the campus community quickly and efficiently was really scattered and just not possible. What they were looking for then was a central portal and InformaCast fit that need for them using the new plug-in architecture.
What the plug-in architecture brought to the table was a way for Informacast to reach out to various other services, both on network such as e-mail but also off network such that they could post a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed. The Informacast solution for years has also you know hit the Cisco IP phones.
We also have the IP speakers that were placed at various outdoor and large open areas around campus. There were three separate communication clusters and hundreds of IP speakers scattered across the various network. At a large university like this, it's very common to have disparate administrators servicing different phone systems as well as outdoor speakers and horns placed in large open campus areas.
It was, it worked. There was a documented process. But in an emergency situation, the last thing people are thinking about is make sure I follow step A, step B, when really in a panic people need to be able to do things quickly and efficiently. It was a big deal. They notified the whole campus community, notified the Press and we were on site with campus relations, the IT departments, as well as police.
For the large scale tests at the campus relations team, sat down at a computer. Logged in to Informacast. Typed in some text. Recorded some audio. The message was sent. Within two and a half minutes the first round had activated all the phones and pushed content to the various other social media, e-mail and other end points.
By five minutes it had updated in every location. and was rebroadcasting. Looking at it we hit just under 7,000 phones on one communications manager cluster. Another 4,000 phones on a second call manager cluster. And then about 300 phones on another communications manager cluster. Likewise there was a couple hundred IP speakers and various social media emails and other endpoints involved as well.
It's definitely a pleasant surprise when you can take something for them that's ten steps long and turn it into three. It's a significant time, especially from a non technical and user perspective.
And it sounds like they were trying to replicate what would happen if there be in an emergency, someone who is in a non-technical role needs to communicate, they sit down, log-in, put in the information, and then click a button to hit send.
That's Exactly what it is. It's non-technical people needing an easy way to alert the entire campus community. The initial reaction everybody looked and said, wow, that was incredibly easy. When we trained the end-users, there's always a little resistance because what you get the feeling is that as the vendor you're coming in and you're going to make their job more difficult.
Because you're going to add something to the list things they already have to do. So I like to refer to it as the ah-ha moment, and it's when the user sees what, how easy you can make things for them. So when we were training the end users, it's a room full of thirty people all looking at you, and you can tell they're not real happy because we're about to add something to that list of things they have to do, and by the time I was done, they had scheduled an hour, and it took me five minutes.
to say, you log in, you type this, you record this, and that's it. You're done, and the look that I got was one of surprise. And then a hand would get raised and say "that's it", and it was that aha moment, and you install InformaCast and it talks to all these things natively. We have plug-ins available on the website, for free, many of them, that can be downloaded and just plugged in to InformaCast.
So many of the emails and social media sites. It really is a lot of teams coming together and using teamwork to make something like this possible.
One of our senior solution architects, recently returned from an on-site visit to one of our university customers. He was on-hand to train the school’s public safety and public relation officials on how to use InformaCast and to work through any technical problems that might come up at the last minute.
