King's College and ASU Add e2Campus for Improved Emergency Notifications

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 08/28/08

King's College and Arizona State University have switched to Omnilert's e2Campus for emergency notification. Omnilert also has introduced a new program called the ENS Conversion Service that allows schools to bulk upload data from their previous emergency notification system into e2Campus at no charge.

"We upgraded to e2Campus because it gives us a centralized interface to broadcast emergency alerts to our campus PA system, our Web page, and as SMS text messages, voice calls, RSS feeds, and e-mails," said Paul Moran, executive director of IITS at King's College in Wilkes-Barre, PA. "It helps us cover all our bases because e2Campus automatically broadcasts to everyone's e-mail address and the PA system whether people have opted-in or not."

The college previously used WENS, the Wireless Emergency Notification System from Inspiron Logistics.

Arizona State has moved to e2Campus to provide both emergency notifications to the ASU community as well as other messages for a variety of campus services. "This kind of flexibility becomes increasingly important as the population of college communities like ASU become progressively mobile," said Adrian Sannier, VP and university technology officer.

The university has been part of the Maricopa County Community Emergency Notification System (CENS), which can be used to notify large groups of people via phone land lines in specified geographic areas. In September 2007, the school added a text message notification service as part of a cellular/wireless partnership with Verizon Wireless.

The new ENS Conversion Service allows schools to upload vetted data from their existing emergency notification system into e2Campus at no extra charge. Under the new program, e2Campus will waive the requirement for subscriber opt-in and waive the fee for an e2Campus technical engineer to manage the database uploads.