Singlewire Resource Blog » Podcasts

Podcast – Overview of Conference Call Plugin

Brad Parkel — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:00:19 +0000

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.

Podcast – Overview of Singlewire Phone Report Tool for InformaCast

Brad Parkel — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:30:00 +0000

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.

Podcast – Common Engineering Questions – How to Implement InformaCast

Brad Parkel — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

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.

Podcast – Singlewire Multicast and SNMP Network Testing Kit Overview

Brad Parkel — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Podcast – Singlewire Phone Wiper Tool for InformaCast

Brad Parkel — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

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.

Implementing Mass Notification and Emergency Communication

Brad Parkel — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:30:00 +0000

“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.

Lots of Options for Deploying IP Speakers with Singlewire InformaCast

Brad Parkel — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 12:00:00 +0000

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.

There are a number of different options for IP speakers and there's a number of different options for IP speaker manufacturers. The great thing with having now five different IP speaker options, with that being A&D, Atlas Sound, Cyberdata, Valcom and now Barix, you can do multiple different things.

You can either retrofit existing installations of analog speakers or taking existing analog speakers and potentially convert them into IP speakers with some of these Paging Gateway or converter devices.

But as well as looking at it from the standpoint of, you know, adding new overhead paging systems. Not wanting to add old amplifiers, old wire, copper wire to run these lines to devices. What you're going to do now, just very similar to what you did with your IP phones many years ago is add those devices to the network.

Aesthetically, there are a ton of options for IP Speakers. You drop ceiling speakers. You have outdoor horn-style speakers. You have the speaker clock combination with the LED display. Some of the LED displays of those IP Speakers have the capability of scrolling text with some of the different manufacturers.

And really what you're looking at, I think now the list is close to 50 different models that are compatible with InformaCast, which really gives you a ton of different options.

From a speaker placement design standpoint, many of IP speaker manufacturers help with that configuration or assistance. I mean really it's a question of them just asking for your floor plans of your organization and saying, according to audio acoustics best practices they can take that floor plan and design and tell you that you need to place an IP speaker here. You need to place one there.

According to what they need to do, so really it's not even a question of someone coming on site and doing a walk through any more. It's just an idea of the density of an organization, where wall placements are at and potentially, you know, the ceiling height and the different options for mounting speakers, whether it be drop ceiling speaker or something that needs to be wall-mounted.

So, there's a ton of different options with them, and now at price points that are very reasonable for individuals. Some of them are higher-end because they have many more functions and some of them are lower price just based of the fact that they're just more of a standard speaker than they are anything else.

Very similar in what you saw in traditional analog systems.

Learn more – Compliant IP Speaker Overview | Consider Installing InformaCast Compliant IP Speakers

Schools Turn to InformaCast to Save Money with School Bell in Times of Austerity

Brad Parkel — Tue, 31 May 2011 16:00:00 +0000

Consolidate bell & clock system and PA system onto one network for cost savings and improved flexibility

Singlewire InformaCast enables you to manage your bell schedules, centrally program and manage your clocks and provide you a means of immediately sending an emergency notification to your entire organization with the click of a button.

Yeah so it's helping. You know, what we hear sometimes in the budget cuts is that they're pulling back the facilities and maintenance people that are doing that day-to-day work. Now, what they're trying to become is more efficient with their time and how they send their people's people out to each site or how their resources are being allocated.

The concept we talked about before of, you know, 60 different schools, 60 different bell systems, and having someone have to jump in a van, drive to each location, manage those bells.

That costs time and that costs money and it also costs resources, to have someone be able just to do that from their desk is in turn saving you money. And instead of having a lot of people manage those systems, you're actually consolidating meaning being able to do it through just a few individuals, and potentially giving them the ability to do different tasks that they weren't able to do previously because they were burdened with other things like managing the bell scheduling system.

Now, if things are happening throughout their facilities that they need to do more day-to-day routine maintenance, it's not gonna be something where you have to prioritize. Is the bell scheduling is more important than fixing something that's broken at a location?

So just from that standpoint trying to do more with less, you're definitely taking advantage of that with InformaCast.

Learn More – Watch On-Demand K-12 Demo | One-minute Video – School Bell Software with InformaCast | Consider Installing InformaCast Compliant IP Speakers

Integrating IP Speakers and Analog Speaker with Singlewire LPI

Brad Parkel — Thu, 26 May 2011 15:00:00 +0000

Singlewire’s Legacy Paging Interface (LPI) allows you to incorporate your existing paging system with our InformaCast® application. You save money and time by leaving your existing paging system in place, and you gain functionality and versatility in your paging abilities. With Singlewire LPI you can integrate with existing analog paging systems and newer IP-speakers.

Yeah, so you may see in many organizations where they have existing analog infrastructure, an existing system that's in place, some of these are older antiquated systems that, you know, are twenty, thirty years old.

Some are, you know, we even hear about, are older than that or they're on their last leg. Some of the speakers that were connected to that system may not work any longer, and people will say OK we don't want to try to fix the system anymore we're just going to gradually migrate to IP speakers and put those into areas where the older speakers may have failed.

The other concept too, is you think about it from that zoning concept of IP speakers versus analog systems now. The analog systems typically are very large areas like warehouse maybe even a large office where it's a single broadcast zone.

You may use those but supplement IP speakers in areas that wouldn't reach to or if you need to do individual zoning in different areas within that facility to put those IP speakers where you need some granularity.

So, a question of how big of a zone do you need, you know, sometimes analog makes a lot of sense because it's a one very big zone and some of the price points will make more sense to go analog but if you're really looking to get granular with zoning IP speakers typically are a better solution.

Learn More

Watch our short white board video on LPI

A New and More Cost Effective Way to Ring Your School Bells

Brad Parkel — Mon, 23 May 2011 13:45:00 +0000

Centralizing your bell scheduling system into a software based solution can save your school district money and time. Our solution enables you to manage your bell schedules, centrally program and manage your clocks and provide you a means of immediately sending an emergency notification to your entire organization with the click of a button.

So the bells are basically configured through the software. We specify a time. Now we can actually specify a time down to the second, or we can trigger an alarm or an audio notification using InformaCast.

Those audio tones are just basically wave files saved within the InformaCast system. So they can be customized. They can be tones you're familiar with. We do provide example tones for you to use, but we have people get very creative with that and potentially record their own spoken voice. We had a school district in Wisconsin where the principal recorded the passing bells. It was him saying the passing period one is happening at this time, please report to period two, that was their passing bells.

Or you can do the traditional ringing tone, that a lot of people are used or just some steady tone options but it's really the concept of specifying the time within the software, the type of tone that you want to have and you can select different options for tones. So maybe the first period passing bell is one tone but the ready bell for the next period is a different tone let students know that there's a difference between those, and then just scheduling those throughout the day.

You know, 7 AM bell one goes off, at 7:05, bell two goes off to let people know that they should be class at that time.

Learn More – Singlewire Bells and Clocks solution One-minute Video | Online K-12 Demo

A Do Nothing Solution for Updating Your School Bells for Daylight Savings

Brad Parkel — Mon, 16 May 2011 13:00:00 +0000

InformaCast automatically updates the clock and bell schedules to reflect the changes in daylight savings time, saving school districts time and money.

Learn more about Singlewire’s solution for bell scheduling by listing to this short podcast.

Yeah, so because we're running on a Windows platform, the system is updated for daylight savings, those bells and clocks are in turn being adjusted at the same time so those, the time source is that InformaCast server, which most people point some type of network time protocol source NTP so that they're getting accurate time throughout their entire school district.

So you don't have to be concerned that at this school the bell else going off a minute before the ones at the other location. Everything is synchronized and playing those audio streams alt the same time across the entire district, and if daylights savings time comes through, everything is just automatically adjusted in and it doesn't require additional maintenance of the system at that point.

DialCast: An Updated and Easier to Use Version of ReliCast in InformaCast 8

Brad Parkel — Wed, 11 May 2011 15:00:00 +0000

Podcast interview with Singlewire Technical Architect Brad Jungemann.

Learn more about DialCast by listing to the podcast or reviewing the text transcript below.

Well, there's two different standpoints. There's the administrative standpoint of the setup and configuration.

Some of those steps in the ReliCast feature were a little cumbersome or multiple steps. We basically took a five-step way to initiate a broadcast down to a one-step or one or two-step configuration.

So, in the call manager, this is communications manager, previously you were calling a route point in ReliCast, hitting a CTI port, going to call park, going to a CTI port, and then to InformaCast, which... Admin user, that's a lot of work.

Now at CTI route potentially a CTI port involved, and then right to InformaCast. So we've simplified the steps. From a user standpoint, just even introducing both of these features, the ability to pick up from any phone within your organization to initiate a broadcast, is very powerful.

And then, also, if you ever wanted to have it configured where from a cell phone potentially, an off-network being able to call into it, so if that CTI route point is accessible in your dialing plan and you could call to that number, you could potentially use your cell phone to be prompted for authentication and trigger and InformaCast notification, which is very powerful.

Well, there's multiple options. There's ability to pick up the phone, have a list of phone numbers that you would potentially dial, each number being unique with a unique message associated with it.

And by dialing that phone number, it just automatically will trigger InformaCast broadcast, with the option once again of being prompted for authentication.

And all of these options, too, are either accessible from the phone or through the web administration page of InformaCast to trigger notifications, too.

Singlewire Paging Gateway™: Deploying Mass Notification Across the WAN with Unicast

Brad Parkel — Mon, 09 May 2011 11:24:16 +0000

Some customers have challenging Wide Area Network (WAN) environments, making it difficult to support using multicast. Singlewire’s InformaCast solution uses multicast in order to provide the speed and scalability of network-based mass notification. To accommodate these multicast-challenged environments, Singlewire has developed the Singlewire Paging Gateway ™.

The solution provides:

Ability to send mass notification broadcasts across the WAN using unicast, which is then converted to multicast at the remote site by the Singlewire Paging Gateway
Ability to compress the audio stream across the WAN, consuming 75% less bandwidth (20 kbps vs. 80 in an uncompressed stream)
Easy installation as a plugin from within the InformaCast software administrative interface

Deployment options in two formats: as a software virtual appliance, or as a dedicated hardware appliance http://www.singlewire.com/paging-gateway.

We're here talking with Jerry Steinhauer, Chief Technical Officer at Singlewire. Welcome, Jerry.

Thanks, Brad.

We're here today to talk about the Paging Gateway, the new Singlewire Paging Gateway that will be introduced here in the next few weeks or so. And you're here to talk about that. Can you tell us a little bit more about why we're talking about it and what it is?

Sure. We're really excited to kind of enter this, this new stage in our product development, but before I can really talk about what the Paging Gateway is let me give you a little bit of background.

So, multicast has always been a building block of our scalable paging solution. So, what that means is when InformaCast triggers a broadcast, each device is going to receive that broadcast by joining a multicast group, and this is really efficient.

This allows a single multicast talker on the network to send to tens or hundreds or even thousands of phones or speakers simultaneously so it's very scalable. We believe very strongly in multicast as a protocol, and we've been able to build very large installations for our customers as a result.

But the downside is that there are some customers who can't run multicast on their networks, and as a result can't take advantage of InformaCast. The big example here is managed MPLS networks.

So, some customers can have outsourced the setup and maintenance of their wide area network to a service provider. And when some of these customers ask their service providers to configure multicast the service provider says, "No, sorry, we're not going to do that," "We're going to make this cost-prohibitive for you because we really don't want to do that."

And so, these customers have been unable to participate in InformaCast historically. What the Paging Gateway does is to transmit multicast over parts of the network that don't support it. So the example that I just used was the wide area network. We're really excited to release the Paging Gateway because it addresses this particular pain point for our customers.

Now, how will this be used? You talked about a network or campus. Are you talking connecting buildings between places within a city, or even over a larger geography like a couple states? A branch office, central office type set up?

So if you, if you think about your network in terms of islands of multicast. Going back to the generic example I used earlier--if there's an InformaCast server at headquarters, and the wide area network is unicast only, then the main site and each of the remote sites would be considered a multicast island.

They can talk multicast in locally, within each part of that network. So within headquarters, you can talk multicast to other devices, but multicast doesn't pass over the wide area network. So, really you, you think about this in terms of islands of multicast within your your larger network.

So, the headquarters would be an island, and each remote would be an island in this hypothetical situation.

Now, how would a customer use Paging Gateway?

So, basically the way this works, the way we envision this working, is to install InformaCast at the headquarters site, install a Paging Gateway at each remote site, then we go through some configuration on the InformaCast side.

And so, when InformaCast sends a broadcast, it's going to send that audio as a Unicast to the Paging Gateway. So, InformaCast to the main site, originates that audio as Unicast traffic, sends it over the wide area network, and then the Paging Gateway turns that back in to multicast for phones or speakers at that site.

Now where is the Paging Gateway run?

So, the Paging Gateway is going to be installed at each of those multicast islands.

So, we, in our hypothetical example here, we would install Informacast at the headquarter site and the Paging Gateway at each of the remote sites.

Okay, and what makes up the Paging Gateway? Are there, is this an appliance or software, how does this work?

Great question. So, to begin with, the Paging Gateway does require Informacast 8.0, which we just released in the last few weeks and this is because the Paging Gateway is, on the InformaCast side, considered a plugin. And the plugin architecture, as most of our customers will probably know, is new with Informacast 8.0.

So, the, on the Informacast side, we do require 8.0, because that's a, that's a plugin. As far as what the Paging Gateway is, let's kind of break that down.

At the top level, there's a Paging Gateway application, and this is a web-based application. So the application, this is code that software that we supply that connects to InformaCast at the headquarter's site.

Underneath the application is a Paging Gateway operating system. And in this release, this is Linux. And just to avoid confusion because some customers have said, "Oh, you're supporting Linux, so that must mean you're not supporting Windows for InformaCast." This is... All we're really talking about here is the Paging Gateway operating system. So, the Paging Gateway OS is Linux-based. We're going to continue supporting Windows for the InformaCast

So some customers could ask, "Why would you choose for an application like this?" And, two reasons. The first is stability. Because since this is part of your emergency broadcast infrastructure, we want to make sure that Paging Gateway at a remote site is as rock-solid as InformaCast is at your main site.

And the second is that it's good fit for the hardware that we've chosen. And it can scale up from very small environments with limited CPU resources up to very large environments with multiple machines and many more resources.

So, underneath the Paging Gateway operating system is sort of, the Paging Gateway server. And we're offering two options here, because we like to give customers choices depending on what their infrastructure looks like. That server can either be physical device or a virtual device.

The physical server is a, it's a very small box, it's about six inches by eight inches by one inch. It's a single board computer with ethernet port on it.

And we chose the single board computer, because it has low power consumption. It's going to be easy to install.

You don't have to have a 19-inch rack to install your Paging Gateway into. This is a really a first for us, as far as offering a physical device.

We hope that's for some customers, but we also recognize that some customers are really excited about virtualization because this allows them to choose what server platform they run the application on.

So we are also offering the Paging Gateway as virtual server, and what this will be distributed as is a VM Ware image. We're very excited to support VM Ware ESX and VM Ware ESXI in this release.

Customers who aren't familiar with VM Ware may know that VM Ware ESXI is free.

So the VM Ware is a no cost option for you, some customers may say well, we want to run, we want to test using VM Ware products like Player or VM Ware server to try the Paging Gateway in our lab.

And that's perfectly okay. But just to be clear, we're only supporting VM Ware ESX and ESXI for production loads. And that's in line with what VM Ware recommends, as well.

So a branch office, remote location is either going to see an appliance that they can purchase, or, if they have an option to put a virtual server in, they could put it right on there.

You bet.

And then be able to the web portal admin that you had mentioned, and be able to get into configuring the system with InformaCast.

You bet.

So really the, if the choice is physical or virtual, really the user experience is the same. The Paging Gateway works the same whether it's physical or virtual.

It configures the same whether it's physical or virtual. It's really just an administrative choice, in terms of what makes sense for that particular customer.

Very good. What impact does this having, you know, running Paging Gateway on a network have on, on a customer's network?

So this, this can get into some network sizing issues and, and I don't want to get too far off in the weeds, but I do want to mention that we do have options for how that voice stream gets sent over the network.

That can either be done as a G.711 stream or a "speaks"
So G.711 consumes about 80K per second and Speaks consumes somewhere around 24K per second. So, depending on the customer's infrastructure between these multicast islands, the customer can determine, which will give them the results that they want given their amount of bandwith that's available and latency.

Basically, the trade off there is G.711, its higher bandwidth, its lower CPU consumption for us. Whereas, for Speaks, Speaks requires more for us to do that job because what we're doing under the covers is translating G.711 into Speaks to send that out.

So the trade-off there is lower bandwidth consumption over the WAN, higher CPU utilization on the Paging Gateway, and on the InformaCast server. So there's some trade offs there, but we feel what's important to provide choices for our customers, because it allows our customers to deploy InformaCast in more diverse environments.

Very good. So just to play this back, what this Paging Gateway is giving us is the ability to pass multicast or put it into a unicast stream, pass it over the WAN, to a remote location.

And there we essentially unpack it with the Paging Gateway on the other side. A virtual machine or an appliance that can then reach Cisco phones over at paging systems in that remote location.

That's absolutely right. I do want to add one more tag to that. And that is to say that the Paging Gateway also allows, you mentioned Cisco phones specifically, the Paging Gateway also allows to deploy IP speakers at remote locations.

Historically, we required multicast over the WAN to make those work. The Paging Gateway allows you to register IP speakers at remote sites, to InformaCast at the main site.

So, again, another choice for deployment in diverse environments.

Very good. Jerry, this is coming out in next few weeks, so...

Yes, indeed. You know, watch singlewire.com for updates there, we're really excited about this.

We'll be putting more information on the website at singlewire.com/ paging-gateway.

And so, stop by there to see what 's going on. Jerry, thanks again.

Thanks, Brad.

Podcast – Advanced Network Devices IP Speakers with Singlewire InformaCast

Brad Parkel — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Learn more about IP speakers from Advanced Network Devices (www.anetd.com) and how you can integrate them with Singlewire InformaCast.

Today, I'm talking with Will Schmidt from Advance Network Devices, or AND.

Welcome, Will.

Thank you.

AND is in partnership with Singlewire to provide IT speaker end points for notification with Informacast.

Will can you tell us about what types of IT enabled speakers and devices AND offers?

Yeah, AND offers a full line of indoor and outdoor speakers, as well as zone controllers for controlling analog speakers and other features of playing audio across the network.

Many of our models come with displays as well. It 's just not a speaker.

We have a very high resolution advanced LED display on the product. They come in a stainless steel finish along with a white powder coat.

There are so many features that we pack in to the end point that the customer should really go to our website, to the product page of our website and they can download the data sheet on all the different models both indoor and outdoor.

And that website is www.AnetD .com. Our main number is 847-463-2236 and you can can also call me direct at number 847-463-2251 and I can answer all the questions on all the features that we offer.

Okay, and you mentioned you have indoor and outdoor speakers, is there much of a difference between the two?

Yes, the outdoor speaker is a more robust casing. It's a horn style speaker. Many of the customers are not even aware that there is a difference in the physical speaker that is in the unit, and its something that they'll definitely want to take a look at for many applications both inside and outside, because it has a lot of use also as well in very large areas.

We want to project sounds far out.

Okay and this is IP speakers we're talking about, so just the speaker getting plugged in to the network and from that they're able to have enough to push out to these wider areas.

Yes, all our devices are POE compliant. We are even are already working on our next generation of board, which will be compliant up to the new 30 watt standard of POE.

Advanced Network Devices offer the most features on the end point with the best looking end point of anyone in our space. In fact, we have been providing IP speakers and end points in general to Informacast longer than anyone else in the marketplace.

Okay, and do you want to talk a bit more about what types of questions you typically get from customers. If someone is looking to deploy IP speakers for the first time, you know, what are the questions that you get, and where can people turn if they have questions in designing their organization.

First and foremost they could always to call us again and you know and to and call me directly at 847-463-2251. They can go to our website and contact us through sales on the website, and I can help them with the full design.

There are many, many different questions, a lot of them have to do with the integrations of the different systems that they have. A lot of them have to do with all the features that we provide on the endpoint.

They want to see what it's gonna look like. By all means, we love to provide demo equipment to people.

I want people to actually get our product and hold it in their hand and use it in the facility.

Time and time again the end user, the customer using the product, is very, very pleased, with the way our product looks and all the features and high technology that we pack in to the end point.

It's something that definitely I like them to hold on to and see, so the best thing to do is just start by contacting us. okay and now assuming too the same process they can learn more about what the costs are and where to buy.

Yes, we are currently in the process of putting up our MSRP on our website, they can contact me for an MSRP price list. Again, either over the phone or via our website.

And I can provide them with all the pricing options on every single product we offer.

Ok great, now once a customer would purchase speakers, if they have questions or an issue, you guys do have a warranty with your speakers is that correct?

That's correct. Everything comes with a one year warranty. You'll find that, Advanced Network Devices being truly the highest tech player in the end point industry.

We support end users very well on the tech side. They can get all the firmware upgrades through us. They can get all their questions answered and the offers so many features that a lot of customers, they may come in just looking for a speaker, but after talking with us, and of course you're seeing a product, getting a demo, they realize they can do so much through the end point. We are offering a microphone on all our display models, and all our indoor speakers in general. Something a lot of is an expensive add-on through other, and it's something too that maybe the customer thinks that they're not going to even use a lot of. But eventually, I think they'll use it for many other options, and they'll be very glad that it's on there as the years go by and they're using our product over time.

But by all means, for all the technical questions and explanations on every one of our features. And again, to start with a demo, contact me at, or just contact the store website through the sales at www.anetd.com. It's on the contact page of our website. And one of the things, too, I want to make sure people understand, and we're not opposed to even bringing them to schools where we have our devices deployed.

The people are very proud of it once they get it in and it's something that I think someone if they are willing to take the time to do that, we can put them on a walk through of a school or a facility actually using our product and they will be very impress with what they see.

Okay, very good and likewise, too if there are any questions at any point or if there is a firmware update or something like that just go to your website and get information there.

Hit us through the contact page on our website or just call in and tell them what you're looking for, and we'll direct you right there and get you the software right away.

Okay, that sounds great. Now you wanted to tell us a little bit more about AND, and the history of your company, what you've been doing, and where you're going?

AND has been doing POE technology since 2004. We may be the newest to be on the website, but we've been actually doing it longer than anyone else out there, and I feel that we have the expertise and the relationship with single wire to really take care of customers and provide the best endpoint for them.

Our parent company, Digital Design Corporation, is a very high tech board manufacturer. And again, I just want to point that out.

There's really no one in this phase with as much technology knowledge as Advanced Network Devices, and the parent company Digital Design Corporation.

Digital Design Corporation is involved in a lot of video analytic, high end designed boards for that industry, both through the military and others.

And , you'll see a lot of that technology trickling down into the Advanced Network Device endpoint, both now what we have available immediately, but then also going forward in the future.

We plan on being the innovator in the marketplace. We are definitely the highest tech provider in the marketplace, and we plan on innovating for years to come.

Very good. And a U.S. company based in Illinois?

Exactly. It's important to point that out, that everything, everything of our product is built in the United States of America.

I'm talking from the design, to the electronic board on down to the speaker and the housing of the speaker. Everything is made in America, and you know, so it's fully compliant with any requirements of the government for the Buy American Act .

It's fully compliant and made in the USA. A matter of fact, even our LED, our high resolution LED board, is made in the United States.

And again, this is not just a simple, you know, bar LED clock display we put on it. We have a very high resolution.

The customer can even build their own graphics that they can display on the signboard if they like as well, and it's a truly revolutionary product and something people need to see before they make a purchasing decision

Okay. Very good. Now, if you're interested in learning more about both AND IP speakers and how they work with InformaCast you can visit us at www.singlewire.com, and we have links and contact information and more information to get you started.

And of course you can also visit the website that we talked about here, AND directly and that's www.anetd.com.

That's www.anetd.com

Well, thank you for your time today.

Thank you very much for having me.

Podcast – Singlewire InformaCast 8.0 and Compatibility with Singlewire Solutions

Brad Parkel — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Learn more about how Singlewire InformaCast 8.0 works with other Singlewire solutions by listing to this short podcast.

Can you just talk real, real briefly bout some of the other products will work with InformaCast 8.
And I am thinking about Call Aware and the Legacy Paging Interface and InformaCast Director.

Those products don't change with 8.0 so, there's no changes needed there if you've already got those installed. 8.0 works with them just like 7.1 did or any previous versions.

I think in the future, Call Aware and LPI may well become plug-ins themselves and just have it easier to manage under one interface. But for right now, those remain separate products and work just like they always have.

Learn more about Singlewire InformaCast 8.0.

Podcast – Singlewire InformaCast 8.0 New User Interface

Brad Parkel — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Learn more about the new user interface planned for InformaCast 8.0 by listening to the following podcast.

Do you want to just talk about the new interface a bit more? How this will be different for someone logging in for the first time and how it will be easier for them to find messages and sending notification.

Yeah, there are several things about it. One, you know, our interface had not changed since 2002. I mean, we'd added to it but we hadn't changed any of the structure. We had never really made use of images or anything and, a couple things about that.

One, you know it was built by engineers, used by engineers, and initially used in the United States. But honestly that's changed quite a bit. Now, that we are in 39 different countries. We have people using all over. A lot of different uses, security personnel facilities.

And so we decided it was really time to make the look more appealing but also more, more image based.

So, for our non-English speaking customers it was more easier to, it was easier to navigate through the product.

So what you will notice is instead of the navigation being on the left hand side, it's up top and it's all image driven.

And then when you're on a certain page, we've put a line of breadcrumbs up at the top of the page.

So you can easily jump from one place to another.

I think it will be well received.

The people we've shown it to so far found it much easier to use, much easier to navigate, much cleaner look.

Then you were talking about plug-ins there is a spot then on the navigation to tie right into the plug-ins and, and to access them there.

Right.

And just, like, you know, there are products, Microsoft Outlook.

You can manage your plug-ins any of those things. If you can. Google apps. InformaCast is the same way. There's a plug-in management section. You can see what plug-ins are installed, what their current status is. You can go into each one, and configure it however you like.

Each plug-in has its own little icon with it. So, it's very easy to move around and use.

Learn more about InformaCast 8.0 by visiting http://www.singlewire.com/8

Podcast – New Features of InformaCast 8.0

Brad Parkel — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Learn more about the new features of InformaCast 8.0.

You want to talk about some of these other features that, that will be coming along with 8.0?

Yeah, there's some other things that a lot of our customers requested.

Tagging groups so you can better organize things.

We have customers with thousands of groups.

And once you have that many, it's, it's kind of hard to keep track of them.

So, just like in the some of the photo-sharing sites or anything like that, that have used the tags, we're putting that into 8.0 so that you can have a free format text field associated with any group and then group those accordingly.

We also made some changes to it under the covers to conform with Cisco changes to their 8.0 and 8.5 releases of communications manager.

We also added, for schools, the ability to create a sub-minute bell schedule.

You know, when I was in school.

I already had that tardy bell down to the minute.

But some schools want it even more granular than that.

So they ring bells at 9:01 and thirty seconds.

So that ability is contained in there as well.

Learn more by visiting us at http://www.singlewire.com/8

Podcast – How will Relicast work with InformaCast 8.0?

Brad Parkel — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Learn more about how Relicast will work with the new upcoming release of InformaCast 8.0.

Well, it's similar functionality in that 8.0 allows you just like Relacast allows you to dial in and initiate a page. But like we talked about earlier, the main difference is this is integrated into the product so you have a lot more control over what you want the voice prompts to say. What key sequences mean what to the user, things like that.

And also, there are a couple of new things in it. One is the authentication piece if you want to require a user name or password pin, before sending. And the second is a short cut to send the pages to individual extensions.

So, I may set my system up to note, to say that pound followed by a DN followed by an extension number means page that phone directly. Now you don't have set that up in InformaCast, you set up in the IVR.

So, Brad your extension is 1154.

If I hit pound 11-54 I would immediately page your phone without having to set anything up in InformaCast.

So those were requests we got back from customers directly from our users' group meetings.

That's in 8.0

If you're using InformaCast and ReliCast today.

Once you move over to 8.0 you will not need ReliCast anymore.

Learn more by visiting www.singlewire.com/informacast

Podcast – InformaCast 8.0 Overview

Brad Parkel — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Learn more about the new features coming in the upcoming release of InformaCast 8.0. This week’s podcast interview is with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Development at Singlewire Software.

Today I'm talking with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Development at Singlewire, about the upcoming release of Informacast 8.0. We're a couple of months away from release, but Ken, can you give us a quick overview of what we can expect?

Yeah, 8.0 has, I think it's likely our largest release to date. It has a lot of new and interesting features in it. The most noticeable thing is a brand new user interface. A lot of changes there, much, much easier to use, much easier to look at. And that really kinda oversees all of the new features we're putting into it.

Now, as far as the feature list, how do you come about bringing a list into a product like this? Are you listening to customers on this? Or are you looking at what the trends are in the industry? How does that get put together?

Well, really three main things.

The first and foremost is customer input.

We have regular users group meetings.

Which, those are invitation only, and we bring people in that are very vocal, to the features, to the products.

A lot of different industries, they give us feedback on what they like, and what they don't like and from that we add to our road map.

We also work with our partners such as Cisco, and Valcom, Cyberdata and Atlas Sound, and AeroScout and others and accommodate things that they are doing.

And then lastly we look at industry trends, specifically if someone is using it for emergency notification as notification.

So, from those three sources, we come out with a definitive road map that we prioritize and then build things into the product, it solves as many of those problems at once as we can.

And things are always changing so we always have work to do.

Okay, we'll be, we're going in to each one of these different areas that we're bringing enhancements in the future podcasts.

But can you just kind of go over kind of the list of things that will be major upgrades or improvements from from the previous version?

Sure, there are... on top of the user interface there are two other major feature changes.

I believe there are 27 new features in 8.0.

But the two most noticeable ones and the two most popular ones I think are going to be, first, the inclusion of an IVR into InformaCast itself.

To this point people needed an add on product called ReliCast to do dial access through InformaCast.

While 8.0 has that built directly in with some additional features built into it.

So you can configure your dial plan and everything you need to access InformaCast from within the product.

A lot of different choices on voice prompts and behavior that happens with the user on the other end of the phone. allowing you to authenticate. For instance, if you want to have a person enter a pin and or password before sending a page. Different voice processes you can change. The ability to dial in from an external phone, a cellphone or things like that.

So, that really rounds out the dial access portion of InformaCast. I expect that to be very popular. Much easier for our customers so they don't have get a separate product, separate license key.

I was going to say the second major change is a plug-in architecture. It ships with inbound email, outbound email, SchoolMessenger outbound, Twitter and a generic scripting interface. So people still may want to have complete power over that and and that's.

We have a generic plug-in that you can attach any script and that is certainly somewhere third parties can expand upon.

Is this is something that a technology partner or an organization is, is looking to do integration, that they can sit down and, begin writing a plug-in or do they need to work through up for that. How does that work?

Well for now they need to work through us, to do that. We think in the future, we built it in such a way that we could allow third parties to write plug-ins. But that's not included in the 8.0 release. So, for now, we'd need to work together on that.

Yeah, what's been your reaction as you've talked about this with existing clients or with people about the plug-in architecture?

You know, we've shown 8.0 to a few people already because it's in QA and the reaction has been overwhelming positive.

In fact, that first question people ask us, when can I get this? The second question is, can we write a plug-in for this other system I have sitting over here. So, extremely positive.

We're all anxious to just to get this out there in wide distribution.

Who do you think is going to be the most interested in this release?

Is it going to be one industry, specifically, or do you think across the board?

Well, of course, well of course I think it's going to be across the board but maybe for different reasons.

You know, our number one input of features is from our customer base.

So we don't just look at and say we're adding this for K 12 or we're adding this for health care or manufacturing or transportation or whatever.

We put in things that are applicable to everybody.

I think that people will, that will get the most use out of this is an ever-growing part of our customer base though which is the customers who want to integrate with other systems.

The people that might be, you know, turning on lights or locking doors when they're sending messages or having email figure a broadcast or other systems triggering a broadcast.

People that use RFID tags to generate broadcast, things like that. I think they will get a lot more benefit because they're gonna want to integrate with other things. And this makes it much more easy, much easier to attach notification to events that happen outside of Informacast.

From your stand point, what are you the most excited about, with this product release?

The plug-ins. I think the UI will be the most noticeable, and I'm very happy with that. But the plug-in architecture is to me, what's most exiting about it because I think that is, over the coming years, is gonna give a big benefit to our customers in ways that we have not even thought of yet.

Podcast – Singlewire Solutions for Government

Brad Parkel — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Regional Notification Solutions for Emergency Communication

Our solution provides your agency the means to comprehensive paging and handle emergency communications from one central, secure and easy to use interface. We integrate with your existing IT infrastructure allowing you to consolidate to one network for cost savings and improve access to paging end points such as phones, desktops, IP speakers, digital sign age, clocks, and also provide the means of sending overhead pages to legacy intercom systems if you already have them in place.

So Pat, what types of issues do you hear from government customers about their needs in regards to notification?

We see them thinking about a lot of the same things that the private sector thinks about. So, physical safety and security, notification in the event of an emergency, be that , weather-related or man-made.

And we also see them thinking about cross department communication and communication over large geographic areas as well.
communication and communication over large geographic areas as well.
So a lot more than just notifying the building that there might be a fire or an incident, it's saying the word out maybe county-wide or to a region.

Yeah. So certainly state, local and federal agencies are often thinking about, mass notification on a regional scale. So, they're thinking about it beyond the building or the immediate campus area.

Many of these organizations are geographically spread out and many of them are responsible for the care or custody of parts of the population that are widely distributed as well. One of the ways that we address that is through InformaCast Director. So we have clients at the state, local, and federal agency level, many, many clients that have deployed InformaCast.

And InformaCast Directors is a way for us to federate all of those together and to send out one notification, either live or prerecorded. And send that out to many different InformaCast instances at once. Really tying them altogether in a mass notification scenario.

So an example might be a local community and maybe even a community as small as, like, or as large as, like, 8 to 10 thousand people. They might have one or two schools or a school district with InformaCast.

They may have a hospital or a clinic. They may have a couple businesses that all have InformaCast. InformaCast Director can tie those together. Sure. Sure. Exactly. So you can even look at a typical city, they're going to have city hall, they're going to have the police and fire departments, water, parks and rec, etc., so they have buildings out there. The hospitals have buildings and clinics located in different areas. School districts certainly has that, probably a community college or a number of colleges depending on the size of the metro area.

And when they decide that they want to notify the population, they have a limited number of methods that they can use. You know they have the emergency warning system, they have text messaging if they have had people sign up for that but, we all know the limitations on that in terms of the carriers being overloaded and so forth.

So using on- network notification on an IP network to get this message out, en masse, through phone endpoints using text or text and audio messaging to the phones, using overhead paging can be very effective if you want to hit large populations at once, and the Director lets you do that.

So, for a public safety director who may be listening to this, it gives that person the ability to pick up a phone if there's an emergency in the county and with Director record an overhead page that could then be sent out to the schools, the hospitals, anyone that is connected with this InformaCast Director.

That's exactly right. It can hit everybody at once with that message. We also have the ability, should they choose to do so, that each of those individual InformaCast instances can have pre-staged content, a pre-staged message that can be triggered by the Director.

So if you have something set up, say, for a chemical spill and you want different instructions going to the schools and different instructions going to the hospitals and not have it just be one message that goes to everybody, let's say.

You can then trigger that pre-staged content centrally. And this is something that is... the ability to do this is here today? It is here today. This is working shipping software, you know. Okay. So if an organization is interested in learning more about this, they could definitely contact us and learn about the ways that this could be plugged into all the different instances within their community.

Absolutely. Okay. Well. to learn more about this solution and InformaCast director, we invite you to visit us at singlewire.com /government.