Singlewire Resource Blog » Deployment

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.

Learn More about Singlewire Software Solutions – Video

Brad Parkel — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 15:44:10 +0000

Singlewire Software’s Unified Communication-based applications work together to detect incidents on your network, notify you of such incidents, and activate the necessary response to resolve the situation.

Watch the video below to learn more about what InformaCast is and how it works to send mass notification and emergency communication to protect people and assets.

Welcome to an overview and demonstration of singlewire informacast. We develop inovative and ip based voice applications centered around secure, fast, and reliable mass notification capabilities.
- The challenge of Notification today
- Components of a solution
- The Singlewire InformaCast Solution
- Extended benefits of a Singlewire solution
- Implementation from an IT perspective
- The value of a Singlewire solution
- Taking the next steps

As individuals and members of society we all have a new expectation. We expect to be notified of information that will affect us. The message we receive should have instructions on what our next actions should be.

It doesn't matter how we receive this message we just expect to get it. Organizations understand this challenge. Public safety officials and administrators need the means of communicating especially in the event of a crisis. IT staff need the means of implementing a system on their network that will also work with other systems and other networks outside of their control. Organizational leaders need to know that their employees, communication systems, networks, and policies all need to work as a single system in the event of an emergency.

Today we receive information through a variety of devices or end points. Some of these end point devices are managed directly by the facility or organization. In many cases it's easier to send a message over the internal network because the capacity of the network is known and the systems connected to it are already a part of normal business operations. Other devices belong to networks that are outside the organization. Sending messages to these devices like cell phones or social media sites on these outside networks can be a challenge.

The singlewire solution enables and organization to send text and audio messages to virtually any endpoint device both on and off network from a single secure web interface. Here's how it works. The weather service releases a weather statement. An organization receives this alert and logs onto the Singlewire Informacast system. Selecting from a prerecorded and prewritten message the alert is sent.

Video Case Study
The University of Louisville utilizes a Singlewire Informacast Solution to alert students and staff of an emergency on campus involving a firearm. We got call to our mental health section of our student health services. And instead of just helping a student get a ride to the hospital for treatment, it became a situation where a student allegedly had a gun trained on one of the counselors and was taking that person hostage. As we as we were notified of the situation occurring we sent a message out to the university community saying this building has a situation going on leave that building, stay away from that building, we'll tell you when everything is cleared and everything is okay. So that morning when that hostage situation occurred one of the dispatchers made an emergency notification on informacast and that went out to every dormatory, every office, every laboratory, anywhere there's a phone they are going to get an emergency messge. When that system is done running we have the next system and hopefully percent we missed in the informacast will get into text messaging, will get into our email system, will get into our web page. But the first one that we fall back on has been the informacast because we have guaranteed results for the first 10,000 phones that we're going to hit.

Organizational leaders and public safety officials can extend the policies protocols and messages that may already be written directly into the Singlewire solution. Customized messages both audio and text can be branded to the organizations emergency notification system for easy identification by and end user.

The Singlewire solution employees a robust api. This allows the handoff of messages to external systems and networks outside of your network including cellphone based sms text messaging, auto dialing mailing services, and internet based services including web pages and social media sites like Twitter.

The Singlewire solution provides additional benefits for your organization. Implementing a Singlewire solution will allow you to send general overhead pages to your organization.

Users can send a message by using any handset by logging onto their phone, entering a simple code, and talking into the handset. Attention this is a broadcast from Singlewire Informacast. This Singlewire solution represents the next generation in network communications. In addition to traditional audio and text messages today messages can be sent in the form of electronic triggers allowing communications between devices and systems. In practical terms this means that devices on your network can be enabled and engaged to remotely or automatically to protect people and or assets in your organization.

In a health care setting equipment is configured with an rfid tag. With a wireless enabled network, when the equipment leaves the area, the network can be triggered to take a picture with a camera and have it emailed to a security guard.

By providing this open soap based api we enable you to customize a solution specific to your environment. This is one of the most powerful features of our system. It enables your staff to implement creative and innovative solutions to address specific needs and challenges within your organization.

From an IT perspective the Singlewire solution is implement and managed by an IT staff just like any other system. It can be deployed in one of several ways within an organization. Centrally in a data center with a physical or virtual server or on the perimeter of an organization via an axp blade.

Singlewire leverages industry standards for systems integration including snmp, ldap, and multicast to deliver a platform that is secure, scaleable, and flexible.

Roll based security is used to assure that each user has access to the exact features and functions that are required given their level of responsibility.

Zones and end user groups can be easily established to target different audiances within an organization.

Over 2000 customers in 35 countries worldwide have implemented the Singlewire solution because it is proven and reliable.

We offer you true flexibility with the peace of mind that you have an enterprise class notification fully backed by Cisco. As a Cisco partner delivering solutions for nearly a decade our software is deployed on over one million Cisco IP phones. We offer true flexibility in an enterprise class solution that is backed by Cisco.

We invite you to take the next step with us by following this link: www.singlewire.com/keyword/learnmore. Sign up to receive a free needs anlysis of your organization. You can also try out our solution for yourselfby downloading a 30 day full functioning free trial of our software.

Design Zone for Education – A Singlewire InformaCast Resource from Cisco for Deploying Emergency and Mass Notification

Brad Parkel — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:43:06 +0000

Cisco Notifi-Ed Solution Deployment Design Guide

Cisco has created a design guide resource for deploying emergency and mass notification systems for education as part of the Cisco Notifi-Ed solution.

The Cisco Notifi-Ed solution for School Safety and Security is a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) that provides school districts with an integrated communications system for rapid mass and audience-specific message broadcasting. The solution demonstrates how the Cisco Unified Communications can be used by Reliance Communication’s SchoolMessenger system and Singlewire’s InformaCast product to deliver rapid communications to school administrators, teachers, students, and parents through audio, Register for Text Messages (SMS) text, and email and to receive and log acknowledgements from message recipients, a critical function in emergency situations where school districts must be sure that parents have received announcements about the well-being of their children. The Cisco Notifi-Ed can be used to send emergency communication as well as daily operational announcements to the broader community that consists of parents, school district administrators, school faculty, students, and law enforcement.

Click to learn more about this resource

Webinar – Improving School Communications with Singlewire, Cisco & SchoolMessenger

Brad Parkel — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:44:56 +0000

Date: Thursday, Jan 28, 2010
Time: 2:00 pm ET / 11:00 pm PT
Duration: One hour (15 mins for Q&A)

We invite you to join a free live webcast on Improving School Communications, featuring experts from the award-winning Los Alamitos Unified School District in California.

In today’s 21st century learning environment, the ability to communicate the right information to the right people at the right time is essential. Schools have to be able to reach every student, parent and staff member in the district, efficiently and economically, and often at short notice. Yet many schools are using costly mass notification services, or still relying on aging auto-dialers, labor-intensive manual calls, and expensive printed communications, with little or no standardization within the district.

Los Alamitos USD has been recognized multiple times for academic achievement, including the National Blue Ribbon Schools of Excellence award and the California Distinguished Schools award. In this webcast, you’ll learn how they addressed the challenges of school communication with a centralized district-wide notification system, featuring:

Automatic calls for absentee notification, general announcements, emergency situations, homework and test information
Instant translation to more than 30 languages
Integrated paging, bells, alarms, and text alerts/messages
Simultaneous broadcast of audio streams and text messages to IP phones, IP speakers, desktops, and overhead paging systems
Surveys and interactive messages to obtain parent feedback and build community support

Panelist(s) Info:

John Spiratos, Director of Information Technology, Los Alamitos Unified School District
Nate Brogan, VP Marketing, SchoolMessenger
Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President, Product Management, Singlewire
John Speicher, Education Solutions Manager, Cisco Systems, Inc.

https://ciscosales.webex.com/ciscosales/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=207951097

Read Case Study to learn more: http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/gov/LosAlamitos_cStudy.pdf

IP Broadcast with AXP for Improved Organizational Communications

admin — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:23:12 +0000

Learn more about Cisco’s AXP platform and how you can leverage this technology within your organization to deploy Singlewire InformaCast.

Additional information can be found in the downloadable PDF document on the right hand side of the page.

Learn More at Cisco.com

To learn more about the deploying Singlewire InformaCast on AXP and when this option will be available, please read more here.