University Business - April 2008 - (Page 43)

Officials at Connecticut College are able to send emergency messages to telephones and cell phones, and via e-mail and text messaging. Members of the college’s emergency response team conduct regularly scheduled tests of the emergency communication system. munication between campus public safety, campus management, and its residential life oﬃce. After Virginia Tech, they recognized the system’s ability to connect campus safety oﬃcials to each other as well as to oﬀ-campus oﬃcials in a crisis. By pushing a button, a Bryant oﬃcial can share information directly by landline, cell phone, computer, or handheld radio. “If a situation arises, I don’t have to worry about what that individual communicates with,” says Rich Siedzik, director of Computer and Telecommunication Services. Working with two area ﬁre departments, Bryant extended IPICS ﬁrst to a number of public safety agencies in its town, Smithﬁeld, and then to neighboring Rhode Island communities including North Smithﬁeld, Glocester, and Woonsocket, and Connecticut’s Quinebaug Valley Regional Dispatch Center. It’s also connected with Rhode Island’s E-911 system (which allows dispatchers to know a caller’s exact location), an American Red Cross chapter, and emergency response contacts in both Rhode Island and Massachusetts. IPICS allows a campus oﬃcial to share information with as few or as many of these groups as needed. Bryant also uses Campus Manager, by Bradford Networks, a network access solution that reaches out to every laptop and desktop on campus. Through the solution’s web-based administration console, a member of Bryant’s Safety Oﬃce team can send a message to a group of users or all users, who see the message on their computer screen in a special pop-up box. Since Bryant has a student laptop universitybusiness.com program, Campus Manager helps with deploying information to the student body. “We took this route because this was a way to reach the most people,” says Jon Domen, IT support analyst. North of Bryant, Brandeis University (Mass.) oﬃcials concluded after Virginia Tech that a public address system was best for emergency notiﬁcation. As a Cisco Voice over IP shop, Brandeis University has about 5,000 phones already in operation in classrooms, dorm rooms, and all staﬀ areas. John Turner, director of networks and systems, and his colleagues settled on InformaCast, a server-based system from CDW Berbee, as the best method for delivering emergency messages through Voice over IP. The system enables users to simultaneously push an audio stream and/or a text message to multiple IP phones, along with the system’s IP speakers, desktop agent, and overhead paging systems. A user could select a prerecorded message or send a live broadcast through a password-protected webpage or the IP phone services menu. Georgia Perimeter College, which also already had a Ciscobased IP telephony system in place (with nearly 2,000 IP handsets, including 300 classroom phones), adopted a notiﬁcation system from Cistera Networks last fall. It involves two IP applications— Event and Alerting Notiﬁcation (EAN) and Quality Assurance and Compliance (QAC)—which will be used for improving safety communications at its four main campuses in Clarkston, Decatur, Dunwoody, and Newton. The applications serve as a lifeline to buildings: EAN allows for the delivery of information to any communication device, while the QAC records and archives April 2008 | 43 http://universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - April 2008

University Business - April 2008
Contents
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Editor's Note
Stats Watch
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Future Shock
On The Hill
Facilities Focus
Independent Outlook
Ready, Set, Respond
Small Steps to Safety
Admissions
Lecture Capture: A Fresh Look
Internet Technology
What's New
Calendar of Events
End Note

University Business - April 2008