"InformaCast has a great deal to do with patient safety. It allows us to take better care of our dementia and Alzheimer's patients.”
- Mike Llewellyn, Chief Operating Officer at Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center
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Singlewire provides a cost effective solution to your paging needs, allowing you to manage it within the framework of your existing IT systems. And when you need to send an announcement, it’s as simple as picking up the phone, pushing a few buttons, and speaking your announcement.
IP speakers allow organizations to leverage their IP network for delivering overhead paging announcements. The IP speaker endpoints allow organizations an easy and cost effective way to implement an IP-based paging system or expand coverage with a pre-existing paging system.
Learn more - Consider Installing InformaCast Compliant IP Speakers
Columbia College uses InformaCast for sending campus-wide mass notifications and overhead pages when the school needs to close their campus.
Singlewire Software, developer of innovative voice applications centered around secure, fast, and reliable mass notification, emergency communication, and overhead paging, today announced the release and publication of the case study, “Columbia College: Quick, Reliable, and Efficient Campus-wide Notification.”
The case study features Columbia College, part of the Yosemite Community College District in Sonora, California. Columbia College uses Singlewire InformaCast, along with a network of 300 IP phones deployed across their campus, to send mass notification messages when they need to close the campus for safety during snow storms or power outages.
Brad Parkel, director of marketing at Singlewire Software comments, “Columbia College uses InformaCast in a very innovative way. They have designed their network in a way that allows notification to be sent to classrooms after the loss of power.”
InformaCast enables campus administrators at Columbia College to send notifications to all the phones on campus with a single message. Simultaneously, they can also send that same message to buildings on campus that have overhead paging speakers. In addition, InformaCast allows users to send messages to IP phones as well as many other endpoints, including IP speakers, email addresses, websites (like Twitter and Facebook), and SMS messages.
Read the case study - www.singlewire.com/columbia-college
Singlewire InformaCast is a full-featured, network-based, mass notification, emergency communication, and overhead paging system that allows users to simultaneously send an audio and/or text message to a variety of endpoints including IP speakers, Cisco IP phones, overhead paging systems, computer desktops, digital signage, SMS text, social media sites, and more. Singlewire InformaCast can be purchased through registered partners of Singlewire Software.
About Singlewire Software
Singlewire, based in Madison, WI, develops and supports innovative voice applications centered around secure, fast, and reliable mass notification capabilities. Our main offerings include: InformaCast, PushToTalk, and RemotePhoneControl. To learn more, please visit http://www.singlewire.com.
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- John Turner, Director of Networks and Systems at Brandeis University
Video Case Study - Brandeis University Implements InformaCast
"The first one {system} we fall back on is the InformaCast because we're guaranteed results for those first 10,000 phones we're going to hit."
Dennis Sullivan - Assistant Director/Emergency Manager - University of Louisville - louisville.edu
The Los Alamitos Unified School District integrates paging, bells, alarms, text alert messages along with simultaneous broadcast of audio and text to IP phones, IP speakers, desktops, overhead paging systems and much more with Singlewire InformaCast, Cisco, and SchoolMessenger.
Located in the heart of Orange County, California, Los Alamitos Unified School District (LAUSD) has always believed in high standards for its staff, faculty, administrators, and students. District officials rely heavily on collaboration and communication tools to generate quality education and growth potential opportunities to meet the needs of its students. In particular, LAUSD strives to build partnerships with the leading technology providers to supply the support and resources needed for its students to achieve academic excellence and develop unique talents in preparation for their future goals.
LAUSD had an outdated network and was unable to communicate effectively with key stakeholders, including the parents of its students. With the support of the community, the LAUSD Board of Education implemented a three-year Technology Use Plan to achieve its next level of technology-based curriculum. The plan called for a revamp of the entire network infrastructure, incorporating a solution that would enable all schools within the district to communicate general announcements, individual student related information, and emergency broadcasts to parents quickly and efficiently.
LAUSD turned to Cisco and its partners, SchoolMessenger and Singlewire, to accomplish its goals, moving from a decentralized to a centralized solution that provided a robust notification system for all of its schools to utilize across the district.
The latest version of Singlewire CallAware detects when a number has been dialed, for example 911, and alerts a pre-defined group of recipients via a text and audio InformaCast broadcast. It also gives them the ability to review a real-time audio recording of the call.
Singlewire Software (http://www.singlewire.com), developer of network-centric notification software for overhead paging, mass notification, and emergency communication, today announced the launch of Singlewire CallAware 2.0 for monitoring numbers dialed and call recording.
As a way of further expanding the functionality of InformaCast for notification, CallAware monitors and recognizes numbers dialed within an organization, including 911, and triggers an InformaCast alert message. This vital, real-time notification can immediately be sent to groups of people within the organization who need to know, like staff first responders and building managers. Notification can include a short text and audio description of the caller’s location in addition to a recording of the emergency call. Meanwhile, the call continues to local public safety officials without delay or interruption.
“It can be a real issue for large organizations when emergency first responders arrive at a building and the person at the front desk has no knowledge that an emergency is even taking place,” states Ken Bywaters, executive vice-president of product development at Singlewire Software. “With CallAware for InformaCast, a group of building first-responders can receive notification, listen in on the call, and begin triage almost immediately.”
With the call logging functionality inside of InformaCast, CallAware can also be used to monitor and record the time and location of mistaken 911 calls placed within an organization, helping to address costly false alarm charges from local public safety agencies.
CallAware is now included as a core feature of InformaCast with a license of 100 or more endpoints and one year of software maintenance. InformaCast is a full-featured, network-based mass notification, emergency communication, and overhead paging system that allows users to simultaneously send an audio and/or text message to a variety of endpoints including IP speakers, Cisco IP phones, overhead paging systems, computer desktops, digital signage, SMS text, social media sites, and more.
The InformaCast platform for mass notification and emergency communication was developed in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks to evacuate federal buildings within 15 minutes. Over 3,000 organizations in 45 countries have implemented InformaCast as their notification and overhead paging system. It can be purchased through registered partners of Singlewire. For more information, visit http://www.singlewire.com/informacast.
About Singlewire Software
Singlewire, based in Madison, WI, develops and supports innovative voice applications centered around secure, fast, and reliable mass notification capabilities. Our main offerings include: InformaCast, PushToTalk, and RemotePhoneControl. To learn more, please visit www.singlewire.com.
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Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) Implements a Singlewire InformaCast Solution as part of a Statewide Emergency Notification System.
Read Written Version | Watch Additional Video Interview Footage
The Challenge Culmination of comprehensive crisis management planning involved the need for a stable emergency notification system that could access multiple locations quickly and provide continuity in the notification process The Solution Implementation of InformaCast paging software that, in conjunction with the Desktop Notification System, and SchoolMessenger, allows contact across campuses through IP phones and speakers, legacy paging systems, computer desktops, SMS text messaging,and email The Benefits
"Having a bell, clock, and paging system that works together is a necessity for the school, especially in an emergency. It was great to have the time synchronized in the computers, IP phones, and IP speakers."
- Elena Alvarez, Technology Director at Christopher Columbus High School
Read more about Christopher Columbus High School's implementation of InformaCast.
Later this year, Singlewire will be releasing a plugin to InformaCast that will allow users to convert CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) messages into InformaCast broadcasts. In this video, John Pyeatt from Singlewire Software, explains what is in a CAP message.
Transcript:
First of all, what is CAP? CAP is the common alert protocol it provides an open, unproprietary, digital message format for all types of alerts and notifications. It's an XML-based format. And CAP messages are typically generated by organizations involved in public safety. Like here in the US, National Weather Service, Police and Fire, Traffic and Transportation, National security.
One thing to note is that CAP is a payload definition; it's not a transport or transmission definition. So while the actual contents of the message are well defined. How the message gets from point A to point B is completely undefined. If you're interested in more detail on the actual contents of the CAP format.
You can go visit the oasis-open.org emergency website, which at this URL, and I'll give you, all the gory details, regarding CAP. There are two basic, components to a CAP message. The important thing to know is, the values within CAP can be in one of three forms. They can either be free format text strings which you'll normally see for human readable things like descriptions and headlines, enumerated lists.
I'll go show some examples of that. And then lastly, name/value pairs. The first section of the CAP message is the Header section, and this is actually a required section for every message. There's six required fields for the CAP header. There's the identifier section element which must be a globally unique identifier for the centers of the message.
The sender field is the second one which says who or what organisation sent the message. There's a time stamp, when the message was sent. And then the next one is kind of important, it's a status field. When they send a cap message, they indicate what the basic status is of the message, whether it's an actual message, it's part of an exercise, system status, or test or draft.
The message type indicates whether it's a new alert, an update to an existing alert, whether you're cancelling. Most of the time, that's going to have a value of alert. You might see an update occasionally, if, as an example, National Weather Service issues and update to a preexisting tornado warning, as an example.
But even in that case, if you send an update, it is still going to have a unique identifier. And finally, the scope field, which is almost always public. I've never actually seen a private or restricted one come across. The second section that's important is the information section of a CAP message, and unfortunately, this one is an optional field or section, even though it has all stuff that's really kind of useful to humans.
But one capillar can actually send multiple Info sections and typically that's used for language code, because you can actually send multi-lingual messages in a single CAP alert, and they do that by sending multiple info sections, each of them having different which codes. You'll see this most often in places like Canada, where they're required to send it in both English and French.
The second field which is optional, but still usually kind of important, is the category field, which identifies, you know, what type of alert this is. And values, this is one of the enumerated list values, and it can either be meteorological, geographic, safety, which you'll see quite often for things like Amber alerts or missing persons reports, security, rescue, fire, health, environmental transportation infrastructure or my personal favourite, chemical biological radiological nuclear explosive.
One other thing to note, one info blast could actually have multiple category values. So you might see it quite often for if you have like a major earthquake, it might have both a geologic category and also an infrastructure one, if there's heavy damage. the response type is optional but you might see several of these which indicates what type of response the receivers of the message should take.
Typically when you see that, you We will also see in the info block under the instruction section which is what the actual details of what you should take take in regard to the response type. You know, take cover, things like that. Other fields in the information section, that are important, or possibly important are urgency, severity, and certainty, which gives you a sense of, you know, in terms of certainty how likely is it that an event will occur like for tornado warnings you'll typically see observed, because there's been spotted by either, by trains spotters or by doppler radar systems.
Things like tsunamis, might get possible. Ok. So we've defined what type of event it has, now you have to define, the CAP message has to define where what areas are affected by this. In the info section, you can have multiple what are called area definitions, and each area definition can be defined, essentially one of three ways.
The first way is with a Geo-code value, which is going to be a name/value pair these are usually well defined codes, that are understood between the generating organization and the receivers. As an example on the national weather service. You'll typically see UGC values or, possibly FIPS6 values.
A FIP 6 values in the United States refer to essentially, county identifiers. So as an example here in Madison, Wisconsin we're in Dane County so our FIP 6 number is 55025 for Dane County, but those are well-defined from a list.The other ways that you can define an area of geographic interest is either with polygon or circle tags.
And what they'll see with that is, in polygon case, is they'll define lat-long pairs on the globe to define a polygon that's an area of interest. You'll typically see this for something, some type of event that doesn't easily translate into geo-political boundaries. You'll see this for things like chemical spills, floods, possibly coastal warnings associated with hurricanes or tsunamis.
And then the other one is circle, which is similar to polygon, except that, instead of defining a series of lat-long points, they define one a lat-long point and then a radius in kilometers around that point.
"When we gave AeroScout the list of all our mandatory requirements, only InformaCast was able to fulfill those prerequisites for us. It did everything we wanted.”
- Mike Llewellyn, Chief Operating Officer at Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center
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Transcript of Video
TYVIAN TEMPLE: Within the BAA organization, we have about 900 sort of affiliates that work, that work within this area. That
ranges from you know, small retail outlets through to obviously, the major airlines themselves, BA, BMI, all the normal sort
of faces that you'd expect to see in an airport campus.
NIGEL WARBURTON: BAA have been in the process of replacing their IP network throughout the airport to a new standard that fits
best practice within the whole marketplace. Full three layer model, lots of security.
EMMA CORNISH: If for instance the package belt goes down or there's an urgent message that we need to pass across to all
staff, something to do with a particular flight or an issue that has arisen due to weather problems here at London Heathrow or
around the network. We also use it as a communications device to different departments and different staff members around the
terminal itself.
TYVIAN TEMPLE: From a voice systems point of view specifically, obviously the return on investment has already been apparent
with the Cisco IPT backbone. What it has enabled us to do is create one support model. In the past, the Legacy systems, we had
a dedicated PBX that provided paging and broadcast alongside the main house switch. In the new, and that was two help desks,
two support groups, and two different types of engineers that would come and support it. What we have now is obviously the
converged network, data and voice; we have our Cisco platform, and we have the InformaCast product nestled in that support
model. So we have one help desk, one number, and one set of engineers all trained for each one of those products. Makes it
much easier for the user community and obviously, it saves costs long run for BAA.
NIGEL WARBURTON: Naturally, you know security is a big concern. Having looked through the architecture, you know, separately,
with the InformaCast solution it does provide real security the way it can hop between ports, whether it can hop between
addresses, really does fit quite in my technical space.
TYVIAN TEMPLE: From a handover point of view, all the areas that we've now rolled out InformaCast to who've been accepted the
following day with absolutely zero snags to date that relate to the InformaCast product.
EMMA CORNISH: The staff have actually really enjoyed the new product. They enjoyed learning how to use it and also the fact
that it's a lot better than the old [upstall] that they used to use. So it has been received really well. We didn't have any
official training on it, but we found that the leaflets on the side of the phone have actually helped the staff with
everything they need to know in order to make or receive any communication calls, and it's been fantastic.
TYVIAN TEMPLE: A nice product to work is one that goes through the design phase nice and simply. It's capable of adapting to
some change in user requirements because user requirements at the start of a project and are never the same as they are at the
end; and you need the ability to change things or tweak things. We can provide multiple different types of presentation and
how people use their groups. So, we have one airline that has their groups very much displayed differently because that's how
they're used to using that product; where we can standardize all the others. So, it gives us a lot of flexibility. So from my
point of view, a product that can go through design without snags, come out design and go into implementation and be flexible;
and it delivers what it says on the tin, I think the InformaCast product has done that for me, which is really a nice app to
work with.
Singlewire CallAware for InformaCast allows you to send 911/emergency call information, along with a recording of the call, to your first responders.
Click on the link below to listen to this podcast.
Podcast Transcript
Ken, can you give us an overview of what CallAware and what type of feature functions it adds to InformaCast?
Sure, CallAware has been around for probably a couple of years and it's very heavily used, primarily, the number one use case is to send a notification when someone in an organization dials 911. So the idea is, someone in a company or school, or hospital dials 911, the security office wants to know about it immediately.
CallAware watches, in a very scaleable fashion, watches for any call going through UC manager to see if 911 is being placed and when it is, it triggers an InformaCast message that goes out to whatever phones or desktop or speakers the customer wants. it's a very effective way and inexpensive way, free, it's included in the InformaCast products family, to notify someone a 911 call is being placed.
I talk to a lot of people, particularly in counties where mistaken calling of 911 now incurrs a cost from the fire department or police department that has to respond to it. A lot of people, I didn't even know when 911 was being called until leaving the month when I get a bill from the county for all the times they had to come out here.
This at least lets them know hey, 9-1-1 a call was just placed from the phone, by this user, at this time. It lets them know what's going on. It's been very heavily used. You don't use it just for 911 but that is the predominant use case for it. So you are kind of touching on a couple of use cases with this You want to give an example, and is there a typical example, either in a business or manufacturing or a hospital that would really kind of show how it works.
Yeah, the use case is someone said, you know, in trouble needs to call 911. They call 911 and the security office gets the message that 911 is being called from that location or by that phone. And it allows them to respond very quickly, and anticipate what's gonna happen next instead of being caught off-guard by the fire department showing up outside.
Now with the new release of CallAware, there's also some added functionalitity for recording the call. You wanna just talk about how that fits into this process?
Yeah, our next release, which is available now, also as an option can record that 911 call that is being placed. So, when your call is placed, the recording starts and the notification is sent. The administrator or some authorized user can go into the web interface and listen to that call either afterwards or as it's happening.
Now, the caller and the recipient of the 9-1-1 call, the dispatch center, does not, you can't speak into the conversation, so you don't interrupt that call. But, you can configure it so both parties know the call is being recorded through a little alert tone or not, that's a configurable option.
So, if someone is making a 9-1-1 and they keep the line open for, let's say, a couple of minutes while they're interacting with the EMT or the dispatcher, are you able to listen in on that portion of the call while the call is still in progress?
Yes, yeah, you can listen to call as it happens or after the fact as well for review. And what types of organizations have been asking for or looking for this type of funcionality, is there one specific vertical industry in particular?
Well it runs the gamut, I don't know that it is particularly any one industry. It's pretty common thing across all industries. Anyone that has to deal with someone dialing 9-1-1 from a phone within the organization is someone who typically has asked for this. And when we've shown it to people its been very, very popular.
So, again, how can people get access to this functionality? You mentioned that this is a part of InformaCast. How does that work?
Well, it's part of the InformaCast product family, so it's available currently as the standalone Windows version and then it's going to be available in early May with our virtual appliance version, so it's all packaged together into a single, virtual appliance.
Well very good. And we'll be putting more information on the new version of CallAware up on our website. You can learn more by visiting www.singlewire.com/callaware.
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Read Full News Story on news8000.com
In addition to sending out emergency notifications through text messages and emails, Viterbo tested out a new alert system during the drill called Informacast. It broadcasts emergency messages through the university’s phone system.
"All the rooms that have phones right now, they're tied into the system. And then of course, it builds on that. As people hear, they can go out and warn other folks about impending weather," said Viterbo Campus Safety Director Dave Pleasants.
In the near future, Viterbo will also be implementing speakers in their residence halls to reach more people and locations with an emergency broadcast.
Read Full News Story on news8000.com
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For an introduction to Common Alerting Protocol Click Here
There are two main components to a CAP message:
The required “header section” contains a minimum amount of information about the alert.
The “information section” of a CAP message is optional, but contains most of the information people would find useful.
The “header section” contains:
<identifier> : must be a globally unique value - A message could be received from multiple sources. The <identifier> allows an individual, and InformaCast, to see that if two or more notifications are actually the same alert coming in from different sources. If a message is received more than once, InformaCast will only send one broadcast.
<sender> : identifies who sent the message
<sent> : time the message was sent
<status> : Actual, Exercise, System Status, Test, or Draft - The settings of this InformaCast plugin will include the ability to say, ‘I am only interested in Actual and System Status messages’. This was an InformaCast notification is not being sent to your organization over a Test message.
<msgType> : Alert, Update, Cancel, Ack, Error
<scope> : public, private, restricted
The “information section” of a CAP message is optional, but contains most of the information people would find useful. This part of the message can contain multiple <info> sections that each provide the notification in different languages.
Later this year, Singlewire will be releasing a plugin to InformaCast that will allow users to convert CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) messages into InformaCast broadcasts.
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Read Case Study (PDF) San Ramon Valley Unified School District (SRVUSD) encompasses the California communities of Alamo, Danville, Diablo, Blackhawk, and SanRamon as well as a small portion of the cities of Walnut Creek and Pleasanton. It is comprised of 28 schools serving more than 21,000 students in Kindergarten through Grade 12. The Situation SRVUSD was experiencing rapid growth and needed to modernize many aging schools. These needs led to the construction of eight new schools and the complete modernization of ten more. Facing construction cost inflation, SRVUSD was looking for ways to migrate to a district-wide telephone system and improve its school low voltage communications systems without exceeding its already-strained budgets. To capture substantial cost savings, San Ramon Valley began implementing a ‘one-wire’ solution. They no longer used seperate wires for phone, data, and speaker systems. Rather, they ran the entire infrastructure on ‘one-wire’, providing significant costs savings, easy administration, and a very modern platform that is easy to expand.
David M. Finstein - Associate VoIP Network Engineer, Brandeis University - www.brandeis.edu
Video Case Study - Brandeis University Implements InformaCast
The Client
Uplift Education operates a network of 20 high-performing, public charter schools serving over 6,000 students in underserved areas across the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.
The Business Challenge
Like many K-12 institutions across the country, Uplift Education works hard to provide students with an excellent education while keeping operating costs low.
One of the biggest challenges for Uplift is that each new school in their system is a building that has been acquired and converted into a school by the district. As a result, infrastructure like wireless networks, the IP data network, and overhead paging systems need to be designed to fit each location. The need to keep systems and networks secure at remote locations is also paramount.
Each school facility is managed by a principal and/or building administrator. Many of the schools were independently buying their own PA and bell systems. Some schools had one or the other, both, or neither. Whatever solution each school would pick, it was then up to the regional operational directors to implement, deploy, and manage it.
At one of the schools, the old megaphone system that was used was loud and intrusive. If staff needed to change a bell schedule or upload a new sound file, the system would take hours to update. None of the clocks were in sync. After getting feedback from senior directors asking about what other schools were using for PA and bell systems, it was clear that Uplift Education needed to find a comprehensive solution that would allow centralized management, localized access for each school, flexible design options, and be a scalable solution to meet future growth needs.
The Solution
Uplift Education met with their Cisco channel partner to discuss possible solutions. Since Uplift was already putting Cisco phones into every classroom in every school, they wanted to find a way to leverage the speaker on each phone. Singlewire InformaCast was the solution that met those needs, providing overhead paging, school bells, and much more.
Since InformaCast is a web-based, network-centric software solution, a broadcast can be triggered from either a web interface or a Cisco phone, making it a versatile solution that can adapt to the needs of each school. Campus directors who spend time away from their computer can pick up any phone, log into the system, and initiate an ad-hoc, live audio, or pre-recorded broadcast to the school.
In the locations within a school where there weren’t any phones, like hallways, the auditorium, and the gymnasium, Uplift added IP speakers, which could be plugged directly into the IP data network versus implementing a completely separate and redundant analog overhead paging system. After they began looking at schools, they quickly realized that in most scenarios, a school didn’t need more than four speakers.
The scheduling notification feature in InformaCast also gave Uplift the ability to ring school bells. Because the system uses pre-recorded WAV audio files, the recording of a bell or tone can now be a specific person’s voice or a customized message. Administrators from each school location can log in, access InformaCast, and change or customize the bell schedule for just their school.
InformaCast also provides Uplift with an emergency notification system. For example, if there was an intruder in the building, a message could be sent to each classroom instructing teachers to read their phones. Then, with the scrolling-text-message capabilities in InformaCast, details about the security threat and lockdown could be discretely provided to the teacher in the text display on their Cisco phones without alarming the students. The message will stay in place on a phone until a teacher acknowledges the message and clears the screen.
Teachers and staff use InformaCast every day in new and innovative ways. One school in the district is piloting the use of Cisco WiFi phones in the parking lot and car lines, replacing the use of walkie-talkies. They can use all the InformaCast features directly from the Cisco phone through the WiFi connection that is already present. Using the InformaCast features allows someone outside to send a message to all of the classrooms saying, “John Doe’s mother is here to pick him up.” If he is in a classroom being tutored, the message will still reach him. Because the schools are already equipped with a wireless Internet connection, there is no additional cost to roll out this feature, except the cost of the individual wireless phones.
Uplift has also begun implementing Singlewire’s CallAware in their schools to track 911 calls. If a 911 call is placed somewhere in the school an InformaCast message can be sent to the office with details including what phone the call was placed from and what time it was placed. With this information staff in the office can quickly and efficiently direct emergency response workers to the right location in the building.
Return on Investment
The investment made with InformaCast has been returned in many ways. Because it operates on the IP data infrastructure and leverages the existing phones, the additional cost of building and maintaining two separate networks for overhead paging and passing bells is eliminated.
IT staff is able to implement and manage the InformaCast application centrally, as a part of the existing IT network in their data centers, and provide localized access for each school. Because there is no need for specialized staff training on multiple systems and onsite maintenance visits the school district saves both time and money.
Not only was the solution cost effective, but it was also a simple one for Uplift to implement. At the end of the day, it’s a professional system that’s easy for staff to use, customize, and adapt to the organization’s changing needs.
The Client
Columbia College, located in Sonora, California, is a part of the Yosemite Community College District. Columbia College educates approximately 2,000 students every year and employs 100 faculty members.
The Business Challenge
Like many organizations today, Columbia College was using an outdated paging system that limited how fast they could send out notifications across their campus. Their old paging system enabled them to page to their school’s existing digital phones, but they could only send notification to 24 phones at a time. At that pace, it took a very long time to get a message out to the approximately 300 phones on their campus. Those 300 phones weren’t located in one big central building either. “Our campus has about 20 little buildings and they are spread out around a little reservoir,” explained Fred Grolle, a network technician at Columbia College. Having to repeat the same message over and over again was keeping Grolle and other administrators at the school from getting notification out to their campus quickly and efficiently.
Because of their location in northern California, the campus was often closed down because of inclement weather conditions. “The biggest problem we have is that we often get snow and we need to alert the students that we are closing campus for their safety,” explained Grolle. “It’s a hilly campus, so when we get snow, we don’t want cars slipping and sliding as they leave and we don’t want people tripping. We want to get the word out to all the students and faculty that we’re closing campus.”
With the 24-phone limit, reaching students quickly to alert them to inclement weather was nearly impossible.
The Solution
Columbia College decided to implement InformaCast as a replacement for their old paging system because of its versatility and speed. With an InformaCast system in place, Grolle and other campus administrators can now send notification to all the phones on campus with a single message. Simultaneously, they can also send that same message to buildings on campus that have overhead paging speakers. In addition, InformaCast allows users to send messages to IP phones as well as many other endpoints including IP speakers, email accounts, websites (like Twitter and Facebook), and SMS messages.
InformaCast can be accessed in two ways: users can set up and send notifications through an easy-to-use web interface or through their phone’s interface. Administrators at Columbia College use their phones’ interfaces to send the majority of their InformaCast messages. “We have set up a service on the phone that allows me to page out some prerecorded canned messages (because a snow day is pretty much going to be the same story every time). I also set those services up on various administrators’ phones so that they can make the call and either do a live page or one of my canned pages,” explained Grolle.
InformaCast in Use
Aside from weather alerts, Columbia College uses InformaCast to alert people to the loss of power on campus.
“Let’s say we lose power,” said Grolle, “As soon as the power goes out, we have a page that confirms, ‘Yes, the power is out. We are considering whether we are staying open or closing, but for the time being, the school is open.’ Of course, you can’t page to an IP phone that has no power.” To solve this problem, Grolle and his team configured all of the network switches and phones with UPS battery back-up, enabling the phones and network to continue working for approximately two hours. This gave administration at Columbia College a limited window in which to make their decision about whether or not to stay open. “After about half an hour to an hour, the decision is made to stay open or to close. And, if we were to decide that the school was to close, we would page out to tell the students to leave campus and the staff to locate to a central building.”
Singlewire Support
Columbia College has an extended maintenance contract with Singlewire, which gives them access to all of the latest versions of InformaCast. In addition to these upgrades, they also have access to Singlewire’s online Knowledge Base and world-class support team.
“I have talked with Singlewire Support for various reasons and I have always been very happy with their quick response,” said Grolle. “Sometimes you call companies [for product support] and you get the run around, but I have been very pleased with Singlewire.”
Return on Investment
The investment made with InformaCast has been returned in many ways. Not only was the solution cost effective, but it was also a simple one for Columbia College to implement. At the end of the day, it’s a professional system that’s easy for staff to use, customize, and adapt to the organization’s changing needs.
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"Some patients respond better to a voice that is familiar to them. InformaCast has the ability to individualize the message, not just with the language, but even if a specific person would respond better with the voice of their mom, we can use that and record that voice.”
- Donna Valencia, Nursing Manager at Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center
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