Re: Emergency Alert System

[David Boyer <David () BVU EDU>]

I think you're right. Off-campus hosting with multiple delivery options.


Thanks to everyone for their responses.

> > > Ken Connelly <Ken.Connelly () UNI EDU> 7:25 PM 9/9/2009 >>>
I have not heard of anyone actually trying to do this in house.  We
considered it *very* briefly, but quickly realized that you may reach
a
relatively small handful of people within a few minutes with e-mail or
(heaven forbid) a desktop pop-up.  You will reach *far* more with SMS
and voice calls to cell and home/office phones.  Any reputable hosted
solution will be able to offer parallel delivery to e-mail, SMS, and
voice in rapid succession, so much so that you'll need to artificially
slow them down so that your resource (trunk lines to campus, campus
(or
city) phone switch, cell service) is not overwhelmed.

- ken

David Boyer wrote:
> That's actually what worries me about a hosted solution. Since every
> student has a notebook, our campus is relying on email and desktop
> popups in the event of an incident. An incident that impacts our
> internet pipe would result in hosted alerts not reaching campus. We
> have plenty of redundancy with our LAN and servers, but not the type
> of immediate failover we'd need for a WAN interuption.
>
> > > > Charlie Prothero <Charlie.Prothero () KEYSTONE EDU> 5:59 PM 9/9/2009
>
> Hi, David.  We thought about that briefly and then opted for WENS, a
> hosted service.  WENS works well, and there are obviously lots of
> other players.  A key point in favor of that approach is that it
will
> still work in the event of a local incident that disrupts your
> on-campus systems…
>
> - Charlie
------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv
> [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] *On Behalf Of *David Boyer
> *Sent:* Wednesday, September 09, 2009 4:49 PM
> *To:* SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
> *Subject:* [SECURITY] Emergency Alert System
>
>
>
> Are there any decent free/open source systems that will allow us to
> send out both SMS, email, and desktop popup alerts in the event of a
> campus lockdown or similar emergency event?
>
>
>
> Sorry if this has been covered already. Thanks in advance!!!

--
- Ken
=================================================================
Ken Connelly             Associate Director, Security and Systems
ITS Network Services                  University of Northern Iowa
email: Ken.Connelly () uni edu   p: (319) 273-5850 f: (319) 273-7373