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When Emergencies Occur, Faculty and Students Receive Emergency Alerts through Computers, Cell Phones and PDAs
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Burlingame, CA. (June 4, 2007) – AtHoc, Inc. today announced the U.S. Air Force Air University and Air
War College has deployed AtHoc IWSAlerts™ for use on campus at Maxwell Air Force Base for emergency
alerting. The university and college are part of the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command.
Air University provides the full spectrum of Air Force education, from pre-commissioning to the highest
levels of professional military education, including granting degrees and professional continuing
education for officers, enlisted and civilian personnel throughout their careers. As part of Air
University, Air War College is the senior professional school of the U.S. Air Force. The program is
open to lieutenant colonels and colonels or equivalent in Navy rank or civil service grade.
In addition to educating, the Air University and Air War College are responsible for protecting faculty
and students, and to that end, they have deployed AtHoc IWSAlerts to quickly reach everyone if there
is an emergency that impacts the entire facility or a smaller group within the campus. The educational
facilities can quickly alert staff and students via the network to desktops and laptops with a pop up
alert and an accompanying audio alarm.
AtHoc IWSAlerts is a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software product that fully leverages a campus’
existing network infrastructure, including wireless hotspots and computer kiosks in rooms and buildings,
to achieve mass reach about threats and account for personnel safety. IWSAlerts turns existing connected
devices into personal alarm systems. Audio/visual desktop alerts will instantly appear on all PCs, and
every handheld device will receive text messages. IWSAlerts can also integrate with existing telephony
alerting systems and public address systems to provide a single point of activation to all alerting
channels.
In addition to the speed, ease of use and the ability to trigger any network-connected device,
IWSAlerts helps keep people informed about all types of emergencies, including: accidents, weather
warnings, violence or attacks, hazardous conditions, fire warnings and contaminations.
“In the past couple of months, there has been an increased emphasis on campus security for obvious
reasons,” commented Guy Miasnik, president and CEO for AtHoc. “The DoD has been actively pioneering
the use of AtHoc’s system to transform network-connected devices into effective alerting platforms.
All campuses and facilities can learn from the best practices derived from the Defense Department’s
experiences.”
Based on work performed throughout the Department of Defense, AtHoc published a thought leadership
piece that further outlines the capabilities facilities should consider when evaluating an emergency
alerting system. These practices are compiled based on an aggregate of AtHoc’s experience working
with clients. The paper can be accessed on AtHoc’s Web site at http://www.athoc.com. Some of these best
practices highlighted in this paper include:
- Network-based Alerts for Assured Mass Notifications: Transform the existing network infrastructure
into an instantaneous, pervasive and cost-efficient mass warning system, reaching each individual’s laptop,
desktop or PDA via desktop popup alerts. Leverage the network’s capability for assured, prompt delivery with
acknowledgement of receipt. Use email only for non-emergency communications.
- Shared “Kiosk” Computers as Warning Stations: Leverage existing kiosk computers, lab workstations
and other shared computers, as a network-based computerized warning station. This provides both audio alerts
and instructions for action (i.e. evacuation map) for people in its vicinity.
- Text-Messaging for Outside Mass Personal Notifications: Use text messaging/SMS alerting to reach
people on their mobile phone while they are outside of their normal work or study space.
- Phone Notification for Targeted Personnel: Use phone alerts for small subset of population such as
first responders and campus leadership. Phone alerts take more time to deliver, require more communication
resources and may get congested if used for mass communication.
- Track Recipient Feedback: For some alerts, emergency managers need to know the intended recipient
received the message. Incorporate a delivery and user response acknowledgement mechanism that tracks who has
received the alert and their response.
- Special Needs Community Alerts: Make sure your system supports alerting to people with disabilities.
This is a legal requirement under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, the American Disability Act and related
presidential directives.
- Single Activation through Integration of All Notification Systems: Create a single interface for all
alerting systems, including network alerting (“NAS”), telephony alerting (“TAS”), public address and sirens.
Such integration reduces response time, assures consistency of message, creates redundancy between delivery
media and reduces training and management resources required.
- Reliable Recipient Contact Information: Focus attention on gathering and maintaining updated user
information for all people in the facility. Select systems that provide robust tools to manage users, integrate
with existing user directories and support organizational hierarchy and group management.
- Automatic Tie-In to Emergency Information Sources for Real Time Situational Awareness: Integrate
with and capture sources of emergency information from the National Weather Service (NWS), DHS, etc., and be
able to automatically trigger alerts to emergency managers and leadership.
- Interoperable Alerting with Other Organizations: Because emergencies regularly require alerting other
organizations (fire, rescue, police, sister organizations, federal agencies, etc.), it’s important to be able to
“forward” alerts to other facilities as appropriate. It’s also important to have the ability to capture such
alerts as needed. To make this possible, it is important to use an alerting offering that supports standards
for emergency communications including CAP (Common Alerting Protocol), XSDL and others.
- Launch Alerts through the Web: When emergencies happen, a communications center may be down, or the
person who uncovers the situation may be in a different location. An alerting system should provide the ability
to launch an alert from anywhere a Web browser can be accessed.
- Delegated and Distributed Management and Activation: Beyond control via a centralized emergency
operations center or crisis management team, enable subunit and local security officers (in a specific building
or department) to access the system, activate alerts related to their domain and manage their users. This will
shorten response time and assure that the people who can immediately respond can do so in a “short-loop” process.
- Establish Standard Operating Procedures for Emergency Notifications: Emergency notifications should
be an inherent part of any emergency response plans. Incident scenarios should be planned in advance – who to
notify, what is the message, how to deliver the message and what response to expect. Defining who is allowed to
approve and/or activate the emergency notification procedure is just as important. That may differ per type of
incidents (i.e. security threat may differ from fire), by location of affected building or even the personnel
notified (i.e. should everyone be able to alert leadership).
- Secure Access: Assure that access to the system is well secured through appropriate authentication
means and security permissions tools.
- Offsite Backup System: Always have available an offsite backup capability in case the internal
notification system is down.
About AtHoc, Inc.
AtHoc, Inc. is a recognized leader in providing enterprise-class, network-centric emergency
notification systems used for force protection, installation alerting, public safety and critical
enterprise communications. Millions of end users worldwide, in organizations such as the U.S. Army,
U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, Boeing, PwC and eBay rely on AtHoc's alert delivery and management systems
for their critical communication and alerting needs.
AtHoc has partnered with market leaders including Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Siemens, Unisys and others to bring these notifications solutions to the public and commercial markets.
For more information on AtHoc, please visit http://www.athoc.com.
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