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Colleges Continue Adding Emergency Notification Service

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 08/26/10

A lengthy list of institutions has signed on for emergency notification services from Omnilert this summer, among them, Central Texas College in Killeen, TX; Hanover College in Indiana; Augsburg College in Minneapolis, MN; and Palo Alto University in California. All have signed onto the e2Campus service, which delivers alerts to subscribers by e-mail, text, phone, public address systems, digital signage, and other mechanisms.

"We have four branch campuses and were having problems getting urgent information to the community for things like power outages, e-mail outages, road closures, campus closures, and things like that," said David Leavitt, director of IT for Palo Alto U. "We implemented e2Campus because it is easy to use, was the most affordable, and came highly recommended to us by another school."

Leavitt said what he likes best about e2Campus is its ease of use for both administrative duties and end users. "Within an hour we had most of the groups predefined and ready to go," he explained. On the end user side, he said, he doesn't expect to have to train users. "The ease of use and out-of-the-box system defaults basically makes the system manage itself, and I really enjoy that. It takes a lot of overhead out of the IT department."

Almost all of the 1,000 students and a third of the faculty and staff at rural Hanover College reside on campus, said Rhonda Burch, director of communications and marketing. "With a close-knit community such as ours, it is imperative that we are able to alert our constituents as soon as possible in the event of a crisis. The technology and service of e2Campus allows us to do that."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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