Easy Mass Notification with Microsoft Teams and InformaCast® Fusion

Quick and Easy Mass Notification
InformaCastBlog
Subscribe to the Singlewire Software Newsletter to receive the latest safety tips and trends delivered regularly to your inbox.

Easy Mass Notification

If you’re a large organization looking to implement a mass notification solution, you may be overwhelmed by the process involved in getting a new tool up and running. You not only need to find a solution that is going to help enhance safety and communication; you also need to configure it and roll it out throughout your organization. This can be a time-consuming task, and when it comes to alerting people about emergency situations, you can’t afford to wait.

The good news is there is a simple solution to help large organizations deploy mass notifications to keep their people safe and informed. If you’re already running Microsoft Teams as part of Office 365, you can easily send mass notifications to your people via Teams using InformaCast Fusion. Devices in your organization already running the Microsoft Teams client can receive InformaCast broadcasts without the need for additional hardware or software. All that is required is downloading the InformaCast bot for Microsoft Teams from the Microsoft AppSource store. This can help large organizations secure a quick win towards fulfilling their duty of care. In this blog post, we’ll go over how to integrate Microsoft Teams and InformaCast and how organizations can use this as a basis to build a powerful mass notification ecosystem.

Microsoft Teams and InformaCast Fusion

One of the biggest benefits of the integration between Microsoft Teams and InformaCast Fusion is that it does not require an additional client on an end user’s device if they are already running Microsoft Teams. This means minimal configuration and your IT team doesn’t need to worry about bringing in something new into your data center. This allows organizations to then create groups of endpoints to receive mass notifications.

Microsoft Teams can also be used to activate mass notifications with help from InformaCast. When someone sees a situation occur that warrants a mass notification, they can activate InformaCast from within Microsoft Teams, which responds with an adaptive card. The user can fill out the card with details that provide additional information about the situation taking place. This can include the location of the incident, a description of a medical emergency, or characteristics of an intruder. Once the card is completed, the user will confirm the submission and the alert will be sent through Microsoft Teams.

Of course, alerting people is only half the battle. You also need to manage and respond to the situation once you know it is taking place. Following the alert distribution, key safety team members will receive a prompt to join a Microsoft Teams channel where they can collaborate and follow up on the situation. In the Teams channel, users can view summaries of responses directly from InformaCast to see the effectiveness of the alert that was sent out. Follow up messages can also be sent directly from Teams.

Building Your Ecosystem

Once you’ve secured a quick mass notification win by combining Microsoft Teams and InformaCast Fusion, you can begin to add to your mass notification ecosystem. InformaCast can connect with a wide range of devices and systems to trigger and deliver safety messages that help keep your people out of harm’s way. IP phones, IP speakers, mobile devices, digital signage, and more can all serve as endpoints for notifications activated within Microsoft Teams. Physical and virtual panic buttons, monitored email addresses, CAP and RSS feeds, contact closures and more can all serve as triggers for InformaCast mass notifications that can be delivered to Microsoft Teams. The goal is to create a solution that enhances the speed and reach of your notifications so you can quickly notify everyone in your organization about a dangerous event.