Ready to Issue Alerts
The WVU Administration and WVU Police Department are responsible for determining when an alert needs to be issued.
Alert types, says Graham, are either EMERGENCY, indicated with a red screen, or WEATHER, with a green screen. “Weather alerts are for conditions that make the university plan to shut down, which has only happened once or twice since I started working at WVU,” says Graham.
Based on the Information Stations Emergency protocol defined by the university, to issue an alert, the WVU Police Department sends a text message from its account with the cloud-based e2Campus alerting service.
“When X2OMedia Xpresenter gets the alert through its RSS feed, it switches all the digital signs into emergency notification mode,” says Graham. “This includes overriding the current info-loop with the alert message, along with having one of the speakers associated with the sign issue an audio alert to get people to look at the digital sign.”
To help ensure the emergency notification system will function in the event of power or network problems, “We have a fail-over server, located on a separate campus, on a different power grid and a different network switch,” notes Graham. “So if our main digital signage CMS server has a problem, the other server takes over within a few minutes, to maintain full Emergency Messaging capability.”
Additionally, WVU uses e2Campus to send alert email and SMS text messages to WVU students, faculty and employees who have signed up for them — currently, about 11,000 people.
The alert is also pushed to the WVU Today web page, as well as to the WVU channel on its campus cable feed, which any television set connected to the WVU campus cable television network, currently over in 5,000 rooms and in residence hall common areas, can get.
“The alert text (the WVU Police have a set of templates, and coordinate each message’s content with Administration) includes a brief identification about the current situation, and actions the viewer, and recipients of SMS and email messages, should take until further notice,” says Graham.
Once the alert situation has been taken care of, the WVU Police Department uses the alert notification system to issue a follow-up message — essentially an ‘all clear’ message — and the digital signage content management system then returns to its regular loops of info.
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