Singlewire Resource Blog » CallAware

Joy Global Uses Singlewire Software to Send Emergency Notification

Brad Parkel — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Emergency Communications with Singlewire Software

Brad Parkel — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:30:00 +0000

With InformaCast, notifications can be triggered in a variety of ways depending on the needs of your organization; By systems or devices that require immediate action, by pushing a panic button located in a room or at a workstation, or by the simple action of someone dialing 911. When an event takes place, the appropriate message can be sent automatically to the right people or groups within your organization so that action can be taken.

In the event of an emergency, send communications quickly with Singlewire InformaCast. Here are three examples: When someone dials an emergency number in your organization, immediately detect and trigger a notification to security and first responders on the premises.

Emergency call was made from Greg Sliwicki Appleton Office at 12:14 and :15.

As notification is being made, the call continues unimpeded to local emergency officials.

When there's a weather emergency, a notification can be automatically sent throughout the entire organization. This can include detailed text information and options for repeating the message multiple times.

A winter weather advisory has been reported. If there's a need to lock down a building, a recognizable tone can be sent. Managers upon hearing the tone, can then refer to the text message for details and instructions. This provides information to the people who need to know the information, while not causing undo panic.

InformaCast gives you the ability to respond quickly and efficiently to these three scenarios and many more. Learn how InformaCast can be customized to the needs of your organization. Visit us at www.singlewire.com.

Additional Resources: Emergency Communications on www.singlewire.com | How Do You Know When a 911 Call is Dialed in Your Organization? | Laguna Honda Hospital Implements InformaCast for Patient Safety

911 Call Monitoring and Emergency Notification

Brad Parkel — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:00:00 +0000

If someone dials 911 in your organization, how do you know? Do you find out when the emergency vehicles pull-up outside your building? How do you alert first responders in your organization about an incident taking place?

Singlewire CallAware can help by monitoring when someone dials 911 in your organization and then send immediate notification to the people that need to know.

Click to watch the video and see how this solution works.

A coworker on the fifth floor of your building is having difficulty breathing. And someone in the office has just dialed 911. Building security and individual individuals trained in first aid need to be notified to provide first responder assistance and handle the arrival of the emergency personnel.

When someone dials 911 building security and office first responders are on a notification distribution list and immediately receive notification of the extension and location of the 911 call.

"Emergency Call was made from Grents Limanky Appleton's office at 12:14 and 15 seconds PM on December 13th, 2010."

This functionality is done through an application called Singlewire Callware, a free add-on to Informacast.

UPDATED – Flexible and Scalable Design Considerations for Singlewire CallAware – White Paper

Brad Parkel — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 20:00:15 +0000

New White Paper from Singlewire Software

Click to Download White Paper – Flexible and Scalable Design Considerations for CallAware – PDF

With the release of Singlewire Software’s CallAware™ application, it is now possible to alert people to a specific number being dialed. CallAware works in conjunction with Singlewire’s InformaCast application to broadcast a message to groups of devices when a particular number or numbers are dialed. For example, if a user dials an emergency number, such as 911, CallAware can send an InformaCast broadcast to alert onsite security personnel and first responder teams.

This document is for reference only. Use your best judgment on how CallAware will fit into your organization. The examples in this document provide ideas on how CallAware might fit into your existing or upcoming deployment of Cisco Communications Manager.

Intended Audience

Because the configuration of CallAware is primarily done within the Cisco Unified Communications Manager, the intended audience for this document is a Cisco Voice Engineer. Advanced knowledge of Communications Manager, call routing, and dial plan design are a must. The actual configurations for InformaCast and CallAware are minimal.

Click to Download White Paper – Flexible and Scalable Design Considerations for CallAware – PDF

Learn about Singlewire CallAware in One Minute – Watch Our Video

Brad Parkel — Fri, 14 May 2010 16:01:39 +0000

Take one minute and watch this video to learn more about CallAware. Interested and want to learn more? Click here or visit www.singlewire.com/talkwithus.

"911, what is your emergency?" With InformaCast CallAware, you can monitor the numbers dialed within your organization. For example, 911.

Here's how it works:

When 911 is dialed, CallAware recognizes the number and triggers an InformaCast message. This notification can be sent to the building manager or safety officer for immediate action. It can also include a short description of the phone location. Meanwhile, the 911 call to local fire, police or EMS continues without delay or interruption. Learn how CallAware can benefit your organization. Visit www.singlewire.com/callaware.

Whiteboard – Design Considerations for a Scalable Implementation of Singlewire CallAware

Brad Parkel — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:18:33 +0000

Singlewire CallAware can monitor numbers dialed within your organization and then send an InformaCast notification. Learn about how to design and configure your Singlewire InformaCast CallAware implementation so that it can scale across multiple locations.

Hello, I’m Peter Lord, part of the Professional Services division here at Singlewire software. Today, it’s my pleasure to talk about our Call Aware application and how it can fit in and add value to your existing Cisco unified communications environment. Our Call Aware application will monitor for dialed digits and that works in conjunction with our Informacast application to send text and audio broadcast to groups of Cisco IP phones, IP speakers, analog paging systems as well as desktops. Call Aware was really designed to work with emergency situations of dialed numbers, such as 911 in the United States. Because we’re working with these emergency telephone numbers, it’s really important that you have a firm grasp of call metric fundamentals dial play design and call routing in the call manager before undertaking[unintelligible] deployment. If you need assistance with this, type “skill set”, you can contact one of the many Cisco partners who are skilled in this area.
What we’re gonna show you today is one way to create a flexible, scalable, and easy to administer deployment of our Call Aware application. The goal behind this is to set up your call manager in such a way that this can scale from one, two to hundreds to a thousand locations and thousands of IP phones across the enterprise.
[00:01:39The process starts when a user at a particular site picks up the phone and use it to make an emergency call, they dial the phone to 911, the phone that the user is at will have a device called search base the search base will have a site specific 911 partition. ] Within that partition will be a translation pattern for 911. That translation pattern will turn the 911 call the dial string into a unique number for the site. We’re gonna do this based on the DID range. So our site has the country code 1, the area code 608 and the prefix 555. The 911 at the end is to represent the strength that was dialed, and the 0 is a representation of a alert number, a logical alert number. So actually to change this number from 911 into this new number, we need to route the call to a CTI route point. Call Aware uses the CTI route point within call manager, communications manager to monitor when the 911 call is made and then take action based on that. So your Call Aware has been alerted that a unique number has been dialed for our site 1. Call Aware then will contact Singlewire Informacast to send out a broadcast to alert the onsite security and first responders that the emergency call has been dialed. Informacast , then sends a text and audio broadcast out to all of the pre-chosen devices to alert that security and first responder group. At the same time though, that 911 call needs to make it out to the telephone network to get to the 911 PSAP. Call Aware forwards the call and resend it to a route pattern. The route pattern then will be set up to strip all of the preceding digits before the 911. Now, when the route pattern is gonna forward, it forwards to the site specific route list or the local route group continuing the gateway for that site. Now the calls at the gateway, makes it to the PSTM and the rials at the local PSAP and speaks to the 911 operator. So what we just described happens instantaneously where the 911 number is dialed, the Informacast broadcast is made and the first responders are alerted and the 911 operator gets the call instantaneously. This isn’t much different from normal call routing for other types of calls from the same call manager. The only difference really being the CTI route points specific to Call Aware. For more information about our Call Aware patterns or other Singlewire products, please visit our website at www.singlewire.com.

Whiteboard – Design Considerations for a Scalable Implementation of Singlewire CallAware

Transcript

Hello, I’m Peter Lord, part of the Professional Services division here at Singlewire software.

Today, it’s my pleasure to talk about our CallAware application and how it can fit in and add value to your existing Cisco unified communications environment.

Our CallAware application will monitor for dialed digits and that works in conjunction with our InformaCast application to send text and audio broadcast to groups of Cisco IP phones, IP speakers, analog paging systems as well as desktops.

CallAware was really designed to work with emergency situations of dialed numbers, such as 911 in the United States.

Because we’re working with these emergency telephone numbers, it’s really important that you have a firm grasp of call metric fundamentals dial play design and call routing in the call manager before undertaking this sort of deployment.

If you need assistance with this type “skill set” you can contact one of the many Cisco partners who are skilled in this area.

What we’re gonna show you today is one way to create a flexible, scalable, and easy to administer deployment of our CallAware application.

The goal behind this is to set up your CallManager in such a way that this can scale from one, two to hundreds to a thousand locations and thousands of IP phones across the enterprise.

The process starts when a user at a particular site picks up the phone and use it to make an emergency call, they dial the phone to 911, the phone that the user is at will have a device called search base the search base will have a site specific 911 partition.

Within that partition will be a translation pattern for 911.

That translation pattern will turn the 911 call the dial string into a unique number for the site.

We’re gonna do this based on the DID range.

So our site has the country code 1, the area code 608 and the prefix 555. The 911 at the end is to represent the string that was dialed, and the 0 is a representation of a alert number, a logical alert number.

So actually to change this number from 911 into this new number, we need to route the call to a CTI route point.

CallAware uses the CTI route point within CallManager-Communications Manager to monitor when the 911 call is made and then take action based on that. So your CallAware has been alerted that a unique number has been dialed for our site 1. CallAware then will contact Singlewire InformaCast to send out a broadcast to alert the onsite security and first responders that the emergency call has been dialed. InformaCast then sends a text and audio broadcast out to all of the pre-chosen devices to alert that security and first responder group. At the same time though, that 911 call needs to make it out to the telephone network to get to the 911 PSAP. CallAware forwards the call and resends it to a route pattern. The route pattern then will be set up to strip all of the preceding digits before the 911. Now, when the route pattern is going to forward, it forwards to the site specific route list or the local route group containing the gateway for that site. Now the calls at the gateway, makes it to the PSTN and the rials at the local PSAP and speaks to the 911 operator.

So what we just described happens instantaneously. When the 911 number is dialed, the InformaCast broadcast is made and the first responders are alerted and the 911 operator gets the call instantaneously. This isn’t much different from normal call routing for other types of calls from the same CallManager. The only difference really being the CTI route points specific to CallAware. For more information about our CallAware products or other Singlewire products, please visit our website at www.singlewire.com.

InformaCast CallAware Podcast

Brad Parkel — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:00:10 +0000

Learn more about InformaCast^® CallAware™ by listening to this interview with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Development with Singlewire Software.

Transcript from Interview

We’re talking with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Management at Singlewire. Welcome Ken.

Thank you, Good to be here.

Hoping you can talk a little bit about CallAware a new — something that’s new to InformaCast. Do you want to just explain what that is.

Yeah we’ve had a lot of requests from customers in the past about having the ability to monitor some type of out bound call, most commonly it’s 911 but in other countries it might be a different dial-string and do something with it. Frequently people even don’t know that 911 is being dialed in their organization until maybe the next month when the police or fire gives them the list of erroneous 911 calls.

So what Call Alert does is it sits passively and watches the CallManager system to see 911 or whatever phone number you want to watch is dialed and when that happens it can send a message out to whatever group of devices that you want. Any device on the network that is a CISCO phone, IP speaker, desktop, analog paging system can receive this notification in text and audio just like you would any other InformaCast broadcast.

Can you put that to an example if your in a large building and lets say something happens on a floor and someone dials 911 what would what could be a typical scenario for that playing out then?

Actually a good example is we have a we are working with an organization in Europe that has eight thousand phones deployed on a very large campus, hundreds of buildings separate locations they have no idea if someone’s dialing an emergency number or not. With this is a very scalable product so they can have CallAware we can watch all eight thousand phones to see if 911 is dialed with minimal load to the voice system and when that happens the security office elsewhere on campus is notified this phone, this user at this phone dialed 911 at this time.

So much more efficient they don’t have to wait see what happened maybe they want to do something else as a result of that call and since InformaCast can trigger other systems it they now have the ability as does everybody now to trigger other systems and be notified when 911 is called.

So today someone would dial 911 and that’s going to the police or fire the dispatch is bringing trucks to the building and the security staff internally might not know that anythings going on at all.

Yeah I worked with another customer who said that the only way they know 911 is called is every month they get a report from the city saying here are the number erroneous 911 calls you’ve made here’s you fine so they had people accidentally dialing 911 police come help they never even know what happens because it’s a large organization spread across majority of the state. So they don’t even know that’s happening until they have to pay the fine. So they look at this as not only an improved communication but actually saves them money very directly.

Do you want to talk about the impact to the network and is this a solution that will scale across large organizations you mentioned this one organization is that typical?

Yes in fact we waited until there is a good method to build this so that we can scale to very large organizations. We do have customers that have tens and thousands of phones and we didn’t want to introduce something that could only be used on five hundred phones lets say. So it is very scalable we do it in such a way that we don’t have to actually watch each phone and that allows us to scale very very well.

I see do you want to talk a about when this will be available and how people can get this if they are interested or learn more?

It’s available in February 2010 and you can just contact your local sales rep if you’re interested in using this or you can always send an email to http://www.singlewire.com/talkwithus

OK easy enough.

InformaCast CallAware from Singlewire Software

Jennifer DeNicolo — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:39:22 +0000

InformaCast^® CallAware™ is Singlewire’s newest software offering. It allows you to monitor your Cisco Unified Communications Manager for specific calls and send out an InformaCast broadcast when the monitored call occurs. Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Management, explains, “We’ve had a lot of requests from customers about having the ability to monitor some type of outbound call, most commonly it’s 911, and do something with that. Frequently, people don’t even know if 911 has been dialed in their organization until the next month when the police or fire department gives them the list of erroneous 911 calls.” 911 hangups can be costly to your organization, and many companies want to know immediately if a legitimate 911 call has occurred, where it occurred, and when. No one wants to be surprised by the police or fire trucks showing up at their place of business.

CallAware was designed with these needs in mind. It sits passively on your network, monitoring the calls that come into your Communications Manager, with minimal load on your network. When a call occurs that CallAware has been configured to monitor, it will trigger an InformaCast broadcast. Any supported InformaCast device: IP phones, speakers (both analog and IP), desktops, etc. can receive a text and/or audio message whenever a monitored call is dialed. And, with InformaCast’s integration with other Singlewire applications, follow-up events can occur through devices equipped with contact closures. As an example, Mr. Bywaters says, “We’re working with an organization in Europe that has 8,000 phones deployed on a very large campus–hundreds of buildings, separate locations–and they have no idea if someone is dialing an emergency number. With [CallAware], it’s a very scalable product, so they can have [it] watch all 8,000 phones to see if 911 is dialed with minimal load to the voice system. And, when that happens, the security office, which is elsewhere on campus, is notified, “This user at this phone dialed 911 at this time.” It’s much more efficient. They don’t have to wait to see what happened. Maybe they want to do something else as a result of that call. Since InformaCast can trigger other systems, they now have that ability.”

Singlewire’s CallAware takes notification to the next level: monitor call occurrences, notify staff that a call has occurred (who dialed it, where, and when), and trigger follow-up events such as locked doors, photo evidence, or intercom sessions.

CallAware is coming in February, 2010. Contact your Singlewire salesperson now for more information.