Podcast – Overview of Conference Call Plugin

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Brad Parkel

Learn more about the new Conference Call Plugin for InformaCast from Singlewire Software

The Conference Call plugin allows a user to automatically initiate a conference call session with a pre-determined group of phones. For example, when an emergency is declared and an InformaCast broadcast is sent, all public safety managers are automatically called and placed into a conference call session to discuss the situation. Members of the conference call group also have the ability to listen to the broadcast message before accepting the conference call request.

Were here today talking with Ken Bywaters executive vice president of product development. Welcome Ken.

Glad to be here. We're here today to talk about the Conference Call Plugin. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what this is and why it's important. Sure, Brad, we've had a number of customers who have come to us and said, you know, when we send out an InformaCast message, that's a one time event. And it goes out, very efficient, very fast just to everyone in text and audio then after that often we need to do something in addition to react to the event that has just taken place. So we've built within our plugin architecture. We've built a Conference Call Plugin that allows you to build a conference call with as many people as your Call Manager will allow. We use the conference facilities on Cisco Unified Communications Manager to build the conference. But essentially every person in that conference can have up to three numbers, so, cell phone, home phone, alternate cell phone, whatever. When you send out a message Say it's and emergency, that there's a gas leak with in this facility. That message goes out with InformaCast just like it always does. Then when that message goes out, at the same time a conference call is created with, let's say in this case, the facilities people, the security people and maybe even the local fire department. Their phones ring how ever you've configured it. And the first thing that person on on the other end hears, after they've answered is "There's been an InformaCast message sent." Now that's a customizable message but out-of-the-box says there's been an InformaCast message sent, press 1 to hear the broadcast first or press 2 to join conference immediately. And so then all those people can get on the conference call, discuss what's happened, and kind of plan to the next step and back on InformaCast you have full reporting so you can see who has answered that conference call and at what time and all those things. So it's a nice way to bring everything together, not just within that notification, but a continuation of that events, so the customer can adjust to whatever message they have sent.

Yeah, do you have, have you had a lot of interest on the part of certain customers, or a certain industry, that would use this?Well I'd say we've had across the board interest. In particular, initially it's come from government agencies or some of the defense work that we do. They seem to be most interested in this first, because they typically do large scale, mass notification and want some continuation planning that has to follow into that. But in addition, you know, all industries, K12, healthcare, manufacturing, they've all expressed interest. Cause it doesn't have to be just a mass notification or emergency message. It could be a routine thing. It could even be a meeting reminder, or a quick planning session that you want to send out and get everyone on a conference call for. so broad interest in it I"d say. So, for people who are using InformaCast currently this is a plug-in to InformaCast 8.0 or later, and then it configured right inside of InformaCast. Do you want to explain that? Yeah, you do need this InformaCast 8.0 or later like you said, but once you do that, the plugin allows you to create your conference call. So I'd say, I'm going to create a conference call with me, with Brad and the police department let's say. Don't get nervous, but we'll include them. That's an example here. Once I've done that when I go back and InformaCast in my groups, I may send out you know a message, build a group. I can send a message to all of Singlewire and maybe desktops , digital signage and all of those things that we do but then it also That conference call with me, you, and the police department will show up, and I can just place that in my group. So any time I send a message to that group, we're going to get called in a conference and a conference call is going to be started. So it should be very similar to the way other end points are setup with in InformaCast right now, in groups. Yes, it is since we make that conference call look like an InformaCast end point, which is really the job of any plugin that we have. It makes those other systems look like an end point that you can group within InformaCast. Now this plugin will be available on the website. There is a cost associated with this one. There are other plugins that are free on the website. Can you talk about how the purchase process goes with this one in the If you just contact sales at Singlewire or your territory manager, it's a very straight forward thing. We download this electronically like we do everything else. You purchase it, we give you the download and license and you install it and run with it. There's no annual maintenance on it or anything; it's a one-time cost. The list price is just under three thousand dollars.Very good. We'll be looking for this to show up here very soon, within the next few weeks, definitely fourth quarter of 2011.Yes, very exciting.All right Ken, thanks for your time today.

Thank you, Brad.




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Podcast – Overview of Singlewire Phone Report Tool for InformaCast

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Brad Parkel

The Singlewire Phone Report Tool uses the IC PhoneGroupSourcePrimer files to generate a tab separated report of data and to locate phone IP addresses. The phones can then be queried directly for their XML data and have a report generated.

Learn more about this tool from Singlewire by listening to the podcast or transcript below.

The Singlewire Phone Report Tool is available to customers and registered partners of InformaCast. Click here to learn more and request a 30-day free trial of InformaCast.

 

Peter, can you talk about the Phone Reporter Tool, you know, what it is and why it was developed?

Glad to. The Phone Report Tool is really targeted to three audiences. One is internally here at Single Wire. Our support team is gonna use it. Network engineers and Cisco partners would use it while deploying in InformaCast and for the handover process. And Cisco phone administrators can use it for inventory tracking of their phones and assets on their own network.

The Phone Reporter Tool works by querying InformaCast to find all of the phones that InformaCast has pulled from this UCM cluster or clusters. And it could be run either in a quick report mode or a slower but more detailed report mode. So the value that each group gets from this is, here it's Singleware, our support team can give this to a customer and have them run it and get a very detailed report of how those phones are configured and very quickly see whether or not the InformaCast installation was done properly.

Likewise our partners who are out doing installations can use this tool to do the same and when they leave this could be part of the hand over documentation to document all of the phones in the organization for the customer.

As far as end customers using this for asset the management. A lot of times new phones get put out on the network and if you don't capture the information from that phone at that time there's no real easy way to pull the serial number, let's say, from the phone without walking to every phone or in querying every phone individually.

The Phone Report Tool can be run from a central location, and it will query all the phones and pull that information into a spreadsheet for the customer. Okay, this is something that runs outside of formacast it sounds like.

Yeah, it's a self contained executable. You can double click it and it's a menu driven tool. It's got two options. It's the quick report or the more detailed report. And it generates tab separated value reports that can be opened with Microsoft Excel.

Great. Do you...how often do you find people using this? Is it...I mean, a partner probably is using it very often when they're implementing. But what about an end user?

I...you know, it's up to the customer. If they want to do monthly reports to compare to make sure phones that are being deployed are dump sold properly. A network architect can make sure that their knock is doing, adding some of these changes properly by viewing this phone report and our support team uses it quite extensively to double check the settings for customers calling in for support.

Great, how did they install and get this running?

It's the great thing. It's a self contained executable, so there's no installation required. They download it off our website, double click the file and choose option one or option two.

Sounds easy enough. Thank you, Peter.

Thank you.




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Podcast – Common Engineering Questions – How to Implement InformaCast

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Brad Parkel

Are you about to implement an instance of Singlewire InformaCast in your organization? Are you concerned about what issues you might discover and you install and begin testing? Want to know more about what needs to be configured on your network?

We’ve put this question to Peter Lord, one of Singlewire’s Senior Solution Architects. He discusses the common problems network admins run into and details the simple fixes to bring resolution. For over a decade Peter has been implementing the InformaCast mass notification and emergency communication software in organizations large and small. Peter’s list of certifications include: CCDP, CCNP-V, CCNP, CS-CIPTDS, CS-CIPCCES, CS-CUSS, CCDA, and CCNA, in addition to certifications in Microsoft and CompTIA.

Listen to the podcast below or read the transcript to learn more about the common network engineering problems when installing InformaCast for the first time.

I'm here talking with Peter Lord, Solutions Architect at Singlewire Software. The long and short of it, you are very familiar with technical implementation of InformaCast. In organizations you're a guy that's on site in many cases. And in previous jobs you were actually that person pulling the levers and making things work.

Right, I bring an integrator, a network engineer perspective to the Informacast installation and sales perspective. OK, what we're looking to talk about today are just common technical problems that maybe you've seen when you've been out in the field or an end user would see if they're sitting down to implement InformaCast for the first time.

Alright so, what are some of the things that you see as major technical hurdles that you know an engineer might find when their looking to implement? Well, the great thing about our documentation is that it's really thorough. The downside to that is our documentation is quite long. But people who are familiar with InformaCast and our documentation and follow through it step by step.

Really get through the install process and things just work. The downside is that we're dependent on a lot of other pieces, there's a lot of moving parts to Informacast installation.

So the first common issue that I see is that a lot of people don't have one web access enabled on their phones. And two, that the authentication URL is not set under the enterprise perimeters on CUCM. Both of those settings require phones to be reset.

So what people end up seeing then is they install InformaCast, they think they have everything configured properly. And then they go to do a test and when they do that test, nothing happens. So the two common causes for that are the web access not being enabled and the authentication URL not being set at the phone level.

The next most common problem is that when somebody does do that test, they install InformaCast, do that initial test. The phone gets the text and the lights come on and makes a little beep noise but none of the audio comes out and this is the big red flag that says multicast routing is not enabled.

Because the phones got text but the phone did not get the audio. The only piece of InformatCast broadcast that uses multicast is the G.711 u-law multicast audio stream.

Another common question that people have is what platform should I use to run InformaCast? InformaCast runs on Windows or we also have a virtual appliance which has a Linux backend. The major difference between these two is that, with the Windows installation you have administrator access to the server, so you can do what you want on that server.

Where the virtual appliance there is no root access, so what comes on that server is what's available on that server. Nothing can be added minus a plug in. So the real difference between the two then is if I have a new installation of InformaCast and I don't need any other peripheral applications, like the Legacy Paging Interface, CallAware and PushToTalk.

The virtual appliance is a very easy way to get an InformaCast server up and running very quickly. If I have an InformaCast installation that's going to require the functionality of CallAware, Legacy Paging Interface or PushToTalk. It starts to make more sense just to use a single Windows server to host all those applications.

So those are probably the places where people should look to when their starting out, just to being aware of kinda those as the common pitfalls or, or problem areas. Precisely, and we do have a compatibility matrix on our website as well that shows what versions of InformaCast work with what version of Cisco Call Manager, Call Manager Express and the Cisco IP phone models.

And you mentioned documentation at the beginning that is something where you can find answers to all these questions and troubleshooting and those types of questions and answers.

Very much so, there is a lot of very good documentation on our website. Not only the software installation manuals but a quick start guides, video tutorials, tools and other tips to get people moving in the right direction.

And maybe we should mention here too if there are problems or questions, customers with a extended maintenance contracts can contact us here at Singlewire Software. We have a support team in place that can walk through and point people in the right direction and get 'em going pretty quick.




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Podcast – Singlewire Multicast and SNMP Network Testing Kit Overview

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Brad Parkel

Singlewire Software has developed two simple software tools that network engineers can use to determine whether your organization has multicast, SNMP, and AXL set up correctly on the network. These tools offer a great “quick check” of the network and are an easy way to validate that your systems are configured correctly. The Singlewire Multicast Tester can be used when your organization is not getting audio but insist that multicast is working on the network.

Learn more about this tool from Singlewire by listening to the podcast or transcript below.

The Singlewire Multicast and SNMP Testing Kit is available at no cost. Click here to learn more and download.

OK, Peter can you tell us about the multicast and the SNMP network testing kit that you have on the site?

Yeah, the SNMP networking tool or the CUCM tester as I like to call it and the multicast testing tool are things that I developed for our support team mainly and for implementation engineers because when some of the more common errors that people run into involve these items.

So looking at the multicast tool, InformaCast requires multicast to get the audio out to the Cisco IP phones, the IP speakers and any other audio in point on the network.

Multicast is something outside of the scope of something we really provide support for because every network environment is different and based on network vendors we really suggest that the customer use the network vendor's best practices when deploying multicast on their network.

However generating multicast on a network can sometimes be challenging and then listening to that, or find that multicast traffic is another challenge. What this multicast testing tool does, it has 3 options.

It can run as a server to generate traffic, it can run as a client to listen for traffic and then outside of that option it can also, for lack of a better word, high jack to Cisco IP phones and have one send multicast and the other receive multicast. Using this tool then I can put a multicast to work and then have clients listening for this multicast stream and various other points of my network.

Thereby I can start to trace hop by hop how I want to route that multicast traffic and where it might be failing on my network. The SNMP CUCM tester does a few varying tests and this works by querying Call Manager directly for information that InformaCast might be looking for when it's gonna gather, it's data from the CUCM cluster or clusters.

The main purpose for this is you can verify the setup and configuration you've done on CUCM to make sure that all the steps that were taken to get the CUCM configured were done properly and that the CUCM gives you values that you expect to see. So it can ask for how many nodes are in the cluster, how many phones are registered to a particular node.

It also makes an AXL query to the call manager to make sure that AXL is enabled. It could also look at individual phones on the network to make sure that web access and the authentication URL are set properly.

Really the main goal behind these tools are to make sure that during the planning phase of an InformaCast installation installation, the various pre-requistites are met before a network engineer goes on site to deploy the solution.

How far ahead of time is that typically done? The weekend before or an hour before that momentation or does it vary?

It's pretty varied. A lot of the times, you know, people, it's kind of an afterthought. So that's why these become really helpful for our support team. If somebody goes on site to install InformaCast and all of a sudden audio doesn't work, it' s a pretty big red flag to say that multicast isn't routing on that network.

At that point our support team can offer the multicast tool where that network engineer can then use the multicast tool to properly help them properly configure multicast on their network. And what do you hear from engineers at customer sites? This is something that I'm assuming very well are valuable to them.

Very much so. I've got great feedback about the multicast particular even for network engineers who aren't using InformaCast, it's very helpful if they're trying to deploy and troubleshoot multicast. Yeah, most network administrators are at least aware of multicast, you know, some organizations might not be running it.

This is a fairly common occurrence that you see.

It really is. A lot of the times a lot of customers don't have any other applications on their networks using multicast. Music on hold source from CUCM can be unicast or multicast and if the customer had not reason to have multicast enabled on their network before it sometimes strange concept when they want to use InformaCast, because this is the first tool.

This is the first network application that's going to require multicast on their network. The SNMP Network testing kit which includes also the multicast tester and they're both available as kind of one unit on our web site you simply go on to Singlewire.com, you need to be registered use of Singlewire and the Singlewire web site, partner or customer to get this content.

Customers and partners can download but if by simply logging on to Singlewire.com, clicking on Support, and then clicking on Additional Resources.

Thank's Peter.

Thank you.




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RemotePhoneControl for iOS Video Demonstration

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Brad Parkel

Watch this video to learn more about RemotePhoneControl for iOS

RemotePhoneControl for iOS is a great way for network and phone administrators to test your Cisco IP phones. It’s also a great tool for remotely training your staff on how to use their phones.

Learn more about RemotePhoneControl for iOS

Hi, I'm Pat Scheckel with Singlewire Software. I'm going to show you our RemotePhoneControl for the Apple iPad.

You can see here that we have a software representation of the screen of this phone. And anything that I do on the screen here will take place on the phone as well.

So, first thing I can do is I can zoom in. I can get a closer look at the screen and see how it resizes. It will also adjust if I rotate, as will most applications on the iPad.

Next, if I go ahead and go off hook, I'll very easily be able to control the phone, make a call, look at settings. Anything that I can do by sitting in front of the phone, I can do from this RemotePhoneControl application. So in a help desk type scenario or in a upgrade of a communications manager scenario, CISCO collaboration engineers around the world are able to use this application to very easily take control of a phone that's far away and test to make sure that any changes that were made were successful.

And you can see how it dials the phone. Now I'm going to hang that up. If you're interested in learning more about this application, you can look us up at Singlewire.com. Or you can download it at the Apple app store. Thank you.

 


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Podcast – Singlewire Phone Wiper Tool for InformaCast

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Brad Parkel

The Phone Wiper Tool clears the screens of IP Phones of stale content. It can be run interactively by providing answers to questions, or given a config file. Using a config file, the program can be scheduled to run via Windows Task Scheduler.

Learn more about this tool from Singlewire by listening to the podcast or transcript below.

The Singlewire Phone Wiper Tool is available to customers and registered partners of InformaCast. Click here to learn more and request a 30-day free trial of InformaCast.

We're here talking with Peter Lord, Solutions Architect here at Singlewire. Peter, do you want to talk about the Phone Wiper Tool? What it is and why it was developed?

Glad to. The Phone Wiper Tool can go out and clear the screen on a Cisco IP phone. Informacast is very good at getting text and audio out to these phones. Very quickly and very efficiently. If that text content gets to a phone though, and, for example, if that phone is in a public area the content of that screen may not be cleared for some time until someone manually manipulates the phone.

Likewise a lot of the audio and text that Informacast pushes is time relevant. So after a period of time the information is really stale and no longer relevant to the current day or time. For example, if somebody goes on vacation and comes back, you know, a week later, whatever was pushed to the phone, probably isn't relevant anymore.

Same thing for testing. If I'm a network admin and I want to test my InformaCast solution, when the users come in the next day there might be a test message on the phone. With the Phone Wiper Tool, then, it gives a network admin a way to sit in a central location and clear the screen on every Cisco phone in their enterprise or target individual v-lans or subnets.

So you're able to clear out one phone or multiple phones in a building or an area. Correct. Yeah, you can clear out a single phone. You can clear out a V-lan, or you can clear out the entire enterprise. The nice thing about the tool is that it simply closes the services pane on the phone. So if somebody is actively on a telephone call or using the phone in a telephone sort of manner, the phone is not affected when the commands get pushed to it.

Okay, so who is typically using this tool? An administrator, a phone administrator, or server administrator that's doing maintenance on the system at any given time?

Right, it would be the network admin or the server admin who's primarily responsible for the InformaCast application. They would be doing this after they send some sort of a text-based broadcast. And this could be done double clicking a tool and answering a few questions or they can schedule this to run at particular times.

So if you're using the InformaCast during the day, in the middle of the night when nobody's around you can clear all the phones in the organization by scheduling the tool to run. Numbers that I've heard I heard about 6,500 phones could be cleared in about 20 minutes using the tool.

Right. All right. And how is this installed? Is this something that runs with the Informacast?

Actually, that's the great thing. There's no installation at all. It's a self-contained executable, so all you have to do is double-click it, or use a task scheduler to point at the EXE.

Where do, where do people get this if they're interested?

It's available up on our website at singlewire.com and under the the support link.




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Implementing Mass Notification and Emergency Communication

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Brad Parkel

“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.




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Valcom Analog IP Clock/Speaker for K-12 Schools

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Brad Parkel

Learn more about this IP-based device that features an analog clock face, popular in K-12 schools. (Valcom Part Number - VIP-431-A-IC)

Hi, I'm Pat Scheckel with Singlewire Software and I'm speaking to you today from the Singlewire Briefing Center. What I'm going show you now is the Valcom analog clock face with the built in power over ethernet IP speaker. This is something our customers have asked for over the years, particularly with our K-12 customers, because they want the best of both worlds.

They want the old fashioned analog clock face, and they want a power over ethernet IP speaker that can server for broadcast, and that keeps time according to the network time protocol. So, now I'm going to plug it in. And when it was unplugged of course the hands weren't moving. But now it will synchronize with the InformCast server and the second minute hand will catch up to where they should be.

I had it unplugged for about a minute or so. And now you'll see it, in just a few seconds it'll synchronize and catch up. This is particularily important for those customers that have many clocks and for which synchronization is a real pain. Now you can synchronize off of one time source and you can do that across an entire district and keep those clocks synchronized.

And here you can see if move, it jumped forward, and now it's back to the proper time. This is available today through any of Valcom's distributors, and you can learn more about it at our website at www.singlewire.com. Thank you.




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Whitepaper – How to Modernize You School’s Bells, Overhead Paging, and Mass Notification in Times of Austerity

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Brad Parkel

Cut costs, improve safety, and realize efficiencies by combining passing bells, overhead paging, and emergency communication into one system.

At a time when many schools are facing budget constraints, larger teacher-to-student ratios in classrooms, smaller staff sizes, and aging school buildings, administrators are being asked to do more with less. To compound this problem, there is a growing expectation to provide quick and effective communication with staff, students, and parents in the event of a school emergency. Knowing where, how, and when to make improvements to address these needs can be challenging.

In the following whitepaper, we’ll look at the ways you can modernize and consolidate your school’s bells, overhead paging system, and emergency communication system to save money and time.


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Overview of InformaCast Mobile Messenger for Cisco Cius Tablets

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Brad Parkel

Singlewire Mobile Messenger Application for Cisco CiusWatch this short 2-minute video on how the InformaCast Mobile Messenger application works on the new Cisco Cius tablet.

There is no-cost for this application, however you will need a working version of InformaCast 8.0 or later.

Hi, I Pat Scheckel, Singlewire Software. And I'm going to demonstrate for you the InformaCast Mobile Messenger application for the Cisco Cius Tablet. I come in here, going launch the application. This is our way of launching or initiating a broadcast from the tablet and sending to any InformaCast end points you have configured in your system.

I can either send a prerecorded broadcast, or I can record my own. In this case I'm going show you how to record your own. So I'm gonna come in here, I'm going put in new text, write test. Scroll down I'm going do the long message text as well. I can also record live audio, and I'll do that now.

This is a test emergency message. This is a test.

Now I've recorded my audio I'm going to select my recipient groups to sent it to. I'm going to scroll down.

I have my group. I have my text. I have my audio, and I can send my newly created custom message. I get my confirmation. I click yes.

This is a test emergency message. This is a test. And you can see that it played the broadcast that I recorded just a moment ago.

This application is available on the Cisco Cius App HQ download page, or you can find out more about it at singlewire.com. Thank you.

 

Singlewire InformaCast Mobile Messenger for Cisco Cius

Learn more about this InformaCast Mobile Messenger | Visit Cisco AppHQ for download

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New Phone Wiper Tool Available From Singlewire

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Allie McGuire

Singlewire has a new Phone Wiper tool available for download on our website.

The Phone Wiper tool provides a way to clear the text content of an InformaCast message off the displays of Cisco IP phones. When InformaCast sends a broadcast that contains text to IP, they typically display that text until someone manually clears the text from each screen. With the Phone Wiper tool an administrator can run the tool interactively or schedule it to run and clear the screen s of all the phones in the organization.

Examples:

  • For Common areas where people may walk past a phone frequently, but nobody typically touches it (lobbies, hallways, conference rooms, etc.). A phone in such an area could display stale data for days or even weeks.
  • If people go on vacation, when they return they could have content on their phones from while they were gone that has no significance upon their return.
  • For maintenance windows where installation or testing with InformaCast is performed, the phones do not have to display a test the next morning when the users arrive.

By using the Phone Wiper tool the Cisco IP phones have the InformaCast text removed from the display without interrupting any telephone functionality the phone may be doing.  The Phone Wiper tool closes down the Services Pane of the phone, but nothing more.  This means you can run the Phone Wiper
tool without worry about disconnecting calls.

To download the Phone Wiper tool visit us online. Please note that you will need to log into the site to gain access to this material. A Singlewire login can be created with a valid maintenance contract number. If your maintenance has expired please contact your sales rep for information on how to obtain a new extended maintenance quote.

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Case Study – Joy Global / P&H Mining

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Allie McGuire

P&H Mining Equipment, a division of Joy Global Holding Company, is a worldwide leader in the manufacture of underground and above-ground industrial mining equipment. Products include electric mining shovels, blast hole drills, mobile mining crushers, conveyor systems, and drag lines. Joy Global and P&H Mining employ thousands of workers in assembly plants
around the world.

The Singlewire InformaCast software application enabled Joy Global/P&H Mining to transform their Cisco investment into a network-based mass notifi cation, emergency communication, and overhead paging system. Singlewire CallAware, a free add-on to InformaCast, was used to monitor the phone system for specific numbers dialed, including 911.

Download the Case to Read More – PDF

 

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Customize Mass Notifications with InformaCast

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Allie McGuire

“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

Related Posts – Case Study – Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center | Video Case Study – Laguna Honda

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Joy Global Uses Singlewire Software to Send Emergency Notification

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Brad Parkel

Joy Global / P&H Mining use Singlewire InformaCast with CallAware to help keep workers safe.

InformaCast is used as part of their emergency notification system to quickly alert plant workers of an event and provide information. When used with Singlewire CallAware, managers are also able to monitor when the company emergency number or 911 is dialed within the organization so that on-site first responders can be directed to scene.

InformaCast and InformaCast CallAware allow Joy Global / P&H Mining to leverage their investment in Cisco unified communications infrastructure and Algo Communications Soluitons for alerting manufacturing plant workers in the event of an emergency.

We invite you to watch the short 3 minute video case study below to see how InformaCast is used at Joy Global/P&H Mining.

Joy Global is a holding company that's headquartered in Milwaukee. Largest manufacturing facility for our P and H division is also located in Milwaukee. We manufacture large electric mining shovels, blasthole drills, and draglines. Basically, they are effectively the largest moving machines on Earth.

They are the size of houses yet are still mobile. About two years ago our Safety Department approached us on a way to get people alerted to you either evacuate areas or even just a case of tornadoes or other storms to take shelter. They actually went out on their own and it installed a, an alerting system on their own.

So we were coming in with a phone system about two years behind them. You know, well we're working hard toward is actually integrating the two systems and at some point potentially phasing out the Legacy system. A single button push on our security guards phone is going to activate the system.Our very first test with Informa Cast and with the Legacy Learning System that they had installed, very huge success, the people were amazed that the phones could do that, it was the talk of the plant for about a week, of what we could do with the phones.

So, because we could break down by zones and even down to individual phones, the Safety Department was all over that.

So we knew about the paging capabilities with the InformaCast but it was kind of a secondary product. We originally wanted the Call Aware product to alert the guard shack of someone dialing 911. You know, going around the private, or the internal number that they were supposed to dial. If the Fire Department were to roll up, saying, "Where is your emergency?" Again, 45 acres, we have no idea where this person is.

We did have a gentleman a week and a half ago have a heart attack and they dialed the internal number. The internal first responders showed up but there was a young woman that was right there, right by him when he fell down, had the AD hooked up to him and pretty much every one is certain that she saved his life, 'cause he was the AD picked up no pulse, no heartbeat.

And that, it zapped him and but that you know, that case the call was made, the security guards knew who was calling.

They had someone they could speak to and find out more information but they see them by the one dialing thirty three thirty three, at least that the CallAware system would have made them aware where that call was placed. The nine, nine out of ten comments were to the effect of "I thought this was just a phone system." You know, they didn't have any concept that they're not just phones, but this is a communication system.

You know, their, their so used to you know, the phones is your phone, and your email is your email, and you know, never shall the two meet or at least that was the mind set and the fact that we could use both audio, use audio alerting or visual alerting, that was great.

Want to learn more about Singlewire’s integration with Algo Communications systems as featured in this case study? We invite you to click the link below to request our integration whitepaper.


algo-communication-systems-download


To learn more, visit: Joy Global | P&H Mining | Algo Communication Solutions | Cisco | Singlewire Solutions for Manufacturing

 

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Berbee to Singlewire – A Decade of Software Development with InformaCast

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Brad Parkel

Ten years ago a group of software engineers at a Berbee Information Networks created an application designed to send notification on Cisco IP phones. Originally called the Emergency Broadcast System or EBS, it soon would become known as InformaCast.

For many years, customers often referred to InformaCast as “The Berbee” when talking about their notification needs. 3,ooo customers and one decade later we’re still working on improving and enhancing the InformaCast platform under the new company name of Singlewire Software.

We recently caught up with several Singlewire staff members that were instrumental in the development of the software in those early days with Berbee to record this short video.

We started writing applications in 1999, writing applications for Cisco Voice. At the time I was heading the software development portion of Berbee, that was an interesting idea. And so we started writing applications just for phone. The census bureau had actually approached us with an idea to kind of play off some things we'd already built, which was they wanted a way to notify all the people in their facility.

That kind of came and went, they didn't have funding for it, but then on September 11 their parent organization, Department of Commerce, could not evacuate the building like a lot of people couldn't and they came to us and said, could you finish this off. They asked us, well, have you tested to X thousand phones?

No. So, Cisco made available to us, a facility down in Richardson, which they were using for Call Manager development.

Even though we are able to use multicast to send the audio without which it wouldn't work at all, we still have to individual communication to each devise to say, "Hey participate in this."

That lab was very heavily scheduled, so they said, "You can have this gear from Saturday morning until Sunday night. So, you can have this over a weekend, and you have to come here to do it," things worked out as we hoped.

Two weeks later, they purchased everything. They were in a big hurry. As I remember there was only three requirements and they were very loose requirements, they said, "make it easy to use, because the people using it will be under stress if there's an event" and they're not technical people, they're security personnel with other things to worry about make it easy to create zones.

They have a very large facility in Washington, and they wanted to create two hundred and fifty zones within that one building. And then don't bring our phone system down, because the first thing someone does in an emergency is call their family and friends. So those have been three of our guiding principles ever since then.

And it's held up well from first customer all the way to what we are today.

Our customers have come up with all these amazing ideas that have pushed it in new directions. And, you know, the product does 20 times what it did to begin with, and it's still growing.

To learn more, see: New Company Formed to Focus on Mass Notification and Physical Security | Former Berbee executives buy back part of company, form Singlewire Software

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fulfill Your IP Paging Requirements with InformaCast

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Allie McGuire

“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

Related Posts – Case Study – Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center | Video Case Study – Laguna Honda

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Use the Singlewire Script Plugin for Sending Notification to Other Systems

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Brad Parkel

As a way of further expanding the number of people reached with InformaCast broadcasts, the Script plugin allows Java and JavaScript programmers to build a custom integration script for sending an InformaCast broadcast. The integration can be deep—relaying audio associated with the broadcast—or simple, depending on how much code is written, and how much of the exposed interface is used.

The Script plugin requires installation of InformaCast 8.0 or later, knowledge of the Java and/or JavaScript programming languages, and any system that can be integrated via the network with an API capable of performing HTTP GET, and HTTP POST requests.

When you need to integrate InformaCast to other systems in your organization, use the InformaCast scripting plug-in. Here's how it works. Using the free scripting plug-in, Java and Java Script programmers can build custom integration scripts for your broadcasts. Integration can be deep, for example, relaying audio associated with the broadcast or simple.

When setting up a message group in InformaCast you can see and choose your customized system integration from the list of options. When you send notification to your organization, information will automatically be sent to your system. Use Singlewire Informacast to integrate notifications with other systems in your organization.

Learn more about our solution by visiting www.singlewire.com forward slash plug-ins.

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Improve Patient Safety with InformaCast

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Allie McGuire

“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

Related Posts – Case Study – Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center | Video Case Study – Laguna Honda

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Get Started with the InformaCast Virtual Appliance

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Brad Parkel

Learn more about how to install the InformaCast Virtual Appliance for your organization in this three-minute video.

Hello! I'm going to show you the fastest way to get Singlewire InformaCast up and running in your environment. This is a new product we're calling the InformaCast Virtual Appliance. First, download the virtual appliance from singlewire.com. A virtual appliance is a single file called an OVA file. This virtual appliance contains both a linux operating system and the InformaCast application.

Next, I'll show you how to turn the OVA file into a running <span class="STsearchMatch">virt</span>ual machine in your VMware ESX environment. Let's see this in action. We've already downloaded the OVA file from singlewire.com, now let's deploy it. First thing we need to do is to tell VSphere where the OVA file is, we'll confirm the size of the virtual appliance, we'll give the virtual appliance a name, and we'll choose what network to connect it to.

Now let's deploy it. So now that we've deployed, lets open the console to that virtual machine. And power it on. So you see at this point Linux starts to boot and you can see here the boot is complete. Before we can start installing and using InformaCast, we have to assign the server's IP address.

Lets log in as the default administrator and assign one. So we assign an IP address, and a default gateway and accept those values. So next let's switch over to a web browser. And log in to the administrative interface of InformaCast. So here's the login page. I've shown you how easy it is to deploy the InformaCast Virtual Appliance.

Please visit our website at singlewire.com/informacast for more information. Thanks for listening.

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Post InformaCast Notification to Your WordPress Blog

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Brad Parkel

With the InformaCast WordPress plugin, you can send text broadcasts from InformaCast to WordPress instances. Once you have created a WordPress instance, you can configure InformaCast to treat the destination WordPress instance as a new recipient that can be assigned to a recipient group just as you would a phone or a speaker.

Possible uses for the WordPress plugin include: sending organizational-wide announcements like weather statements, emergency communications, and event updates to a WordPress blog site where it can be viewed by individuals inside or outside the organization.

When you send notification to your organization, automatically post it to your organization's WordPress blog. Here's how it works:

Using the free plug in for WordPress in InformaCast, simply type in the login credentials for your organization's blog account. When setting up a message group in InformaCast, you can see and choose your WordPress account from the list of options. When you send notification to your organization, text from your message will automatically be posted to your blog site for others to see.


Use Singlewire InformaCast to easily post notification to your WordPress account. Learn more about our solution by visiting singlewire.com/plugins.

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