MessageNet Connections unifies safety, security, and communications systems where so many other products provide just one of these. Why is the unification of these systems so important?
Users only have to log in to one system to control and send messages to any connected device, whether it’s for safety, security, or every day communications. In addition, as a unified system, three user interfaces are replaced by just one, reducing training and increasing user confidence with the system.
Because they’re connected, devices don’t have to compete to be heard. With Connections, an emergency message will pause any other messages so it’s guaranteed to reach people in a timely fashion.
Too often, an emergency system goes un-needed for so long that people forget how to use it. Connections is used for both emergency and every day communications, so when an emergency situation arises, users are already familiar with the system from using it every day, so they can respond more quickly.
Because the unification of safety, security, and communication facilitates daily use, it improves the return on investment (ROI) and combines multiple capabilities provided by MessageNet Systems and the spectrum of systems it connects to. Daily use continuously verifies that the systems are always maintained to a state of verified readiness without incurring the expense of periodic formal systems testing that is necessary with systems not subjected to daily use.
Unifications of safety, security, and commmunications also shares hardware and software resources across these technology platforms, increasing synergies while reducing cost.
This capability is important because it gives organizations the ability to provide everyone with the specific instructions that they need rather than general information that is not specific enough to be actionable or may not apply to everyone. These messages can be created and saved in advance, so different types of emergencies can be planned for.buy sumo suits For example, if there is a severe weather emergency, the national weather service webpage can be displayed on LCD screens, while specific relevant sections of an online emergency preparedness manual can pop up on the computers of the emergency response or security team.
Displaying a webpage on an LCD screen can be easily set up in advance as a media message with web page selected as the media type, this can be set up in the Hyperlink section of the message editor. To pop a web page up on a computer, PC Alert has to be resident on computers receiving the message. If you elect, the MessageNet support staff can manage this process for you or instruct your staff in its application.
With a daughter about to leave for college, I began to look into the Jeanne Clery Act. Professionally, I was surprised, and as a parent extremely concerned, that even after almost 25 years since its enactment, compliance to the Clery Act remains a problem across many U.S. campuses. A safe learning environment should be a right for any college student or employee. Why is compliance such an issue when there are solutions easily available?
Issuing “timely” warnings of crimes that represent a serious or ongoing threat to the safety of all students and campus employees.
Publish and distribute an Annual Campus Security Report to all current and prospective students and employees.
Devise emergency response, notification, testing policies and publish these policies in their Annual Campus Security Report.
Compile and report fire data and publish annual fire safety reports.
Maintain a public crime log of the most recent 8 years, disclosing crime statistics for eight major categories (Criminal Homicide, Sexual Offenses, Robbery, Aggravated Assault, Burglary, Arson, Motor Vehicle theft, and Arrests and/or disciplinary referrals for Liquor-law; Drug-law; and illegal weapons possession violations)
Enact policies and procedures to handle reports of missing students.
Many emergency communication systems have proven ineffective for mass notification of ‘timely’ warnings during an emergency as these systems are reliant on mass dial to cell phones, which depends on the capacity of the cellular towers servicing the area. These towers are designed to meet the needs of normal daily communications, far less than the volume required during an emergency. When tower capacity is exceeded, messages are delayed and even discarded by the cellular service due to the ‘bottleneck’ of outgoing bandwidth.
MessageNet Connections is an on-site, network-based, emergency communications systems; it doesn’t have the capacity limitations of mass dialing and texting systems and can deliver thousands of messages simultaneously. Additionally, Connections can provide location-specific messages instead of a ‘blanket’ message as well as specific instructions in relation to the event or emergency. Location-specific messaging can save lives by providing unique directions to individuals to seek safety with respect to the location of the danger at hand.
MessageNet Connections also provides detailed logs of all messages, including both emergency notifications and daily communications. This information trail is very helpful in meeting Clery Act requirements for compiling and publishing annual security reports.
Lastly, MessageNet Connections integrates both a daily communication system with an emergency notification system. Staff become very comfortable sending and receiving messages since it’s part of day-to-day operations. In the event of an emergency, staff members will react and respond quicker because they are very familiar with operating the system as part of their daily work. Minutes saved at a critical time can minimize dangers and save lives.
In the MessageNet Connections video found on our home page (and on the right side of this post) we try to provide the viewer with a concise introduction to the features and benefits of our product and describe how Connections addresses the safety, security and communication challenges facing organizations today. What follows is the complete text of what I said in the video with an explanation of what I said and its importance to you, interleaved on a point by point basis.
Many emergency communication and mass-notification systems deployed now and in the past have relied heavily on mass dialing phones and text messaging as the primary or exclusive way to notify people. For all of the significant incidences mentioned above, the internet is full of documentation that these methods have failed to effectively direct or even notify the affected people.
“These methods of notification fail because they don’t notify the majority of people fast enough to protect them from danger.”
Many emergencies evolve rapidly, often requiring life saving decisions to be made within a few minutes or even just a few seconds. For example, the shooter at Virginia Tech killed over 30 people in less than 10 minutes. A simple Google search of the incident reveals that many people received the warning as late as hours after the events occurred or didn’t receive it at all.
“On-site, network based emergency communication systems are needed to deliver information and instructions fast enough and specific enough to save lives.”
Mass dialing and text messaging are essentially completely dependent on the capacity of the cell phone towers servicing the area. These towers are designed to meet the needs of normal daily communications, far less than the volume that would be required to notify everyone in an affected area during an emergency. Though these systems advertise that they can send a large number of text or calls very quickly, the cell phone towers are limited and the delivery of the phones calls and text messages can be delayed and messages can be thrown away by the towers entirely. On-site, network based emergency communication systems like MessageNet Connections, which uses the high speed enterprise communication backbone, do not have these capacity limitations and can deliver many thousands of messages in a few seconds. Additionally, because Connections communicates to both mobile and fixed-location devices, it can provide instructions unique to the needs of people in specific areas during an emergency so they have the information to make better decisions that can save their lives.
“MessageNet Connections combines your emergency communication systems, with your everyday communications forming one, unified system.”
Connections, as the name implies, communicates across the spectrum of communication systems and devices, such as PA systems, fire and life safety systems, and security systems, integrating them with your PC network and phone systems to form a very cost-effective system that presents a unified functional capability to your staff.
“By having everything integrated, your emergency communications are given immediate priority delivery, with the ability to override daily communications, ensuring that your emergency messages won’t be drowned out by daily communications.”
As people become aware of impending danger, their stress levels quickly rise. This effect greatly reduces people’s ability to process information effectively and make decisions that can save their lives. By using the same communication equipment for emergencies that’s used for daily purposes means that Connections will suppress normal communications during the delivery of high priority messages reducing the stress and confusion.
“And, because your staff is using Connections daily, you know the system works and you can be confident that your staff will know how to operate it in an emergency.”
Study after study has shown that people under stress fail at executing procedures that they are not used to doing. By unifying emergency and daily communications under the same functional system, your staff can use the same skills and behavior when communicating and responding to emergencies that they use daily.
“MessageNet Connections is a multi-user system that allows your staff to send important messages from almost any device through a central system to virtually any combination of other devices.”
MessageNet Connections integrates your existing phone systems, cell phones, PA systems, fire and life safety systems, security systems, camera surveillance systems, and e-mail systems with panic buttons, sensors and your network of PCs.
“In addition to emergency communications, Connections is a great tool for everyday communications as well. It lets you get the most out of your investment in existing communications systems and appliances.”
Because Connections allows you to integrate your disparate communication, safety and security systems into one unified system you derive new synergies between these systems and deliver a real return on investment.
A time & labor saving way to call for overtime staffing or emergencies
Hospitals and health care facilities are often challenged to meet daily staffing needs. Staff members can spend up to four hours dialing coworkers to fill open shifts each day. This process is both costly for the hospital and wasteful of the time that staff could be using to care for patients.
MessageNet Systems has found a solution to this problem that involves a simple click of a button. Staff can even accept shifts with a keypad selection – no need to dial a phone number.
A number of hospitals are already using MessageNet Connections for this purpose, as MessageNet far exceeds other automated dialing systems in many areas. MessageNet Connections allows users to set up multiple lists based on availability, department, or any other criteria. The message sender can then de-select anyone they know to be unavailable due to illness, vacation or any other reason. The message that is sent can be pre-programmed or customized each time and recipients can respond directly, with no need to dial back in. These messages can be sent to staff via phone, text, e-mail, or any combination thereof depending on the needs of the individual with a simple button click, saving healthcare facilities over 4300 nursing hours a year.
We’re often asked if we can automate weather alerts from the National Weather Service. While this is possible with MessageNet Connections, it’s not recommended. Weather alerts are often broadcast to a very large area and aren’t always relevant to specific buildings or locations. Automating weather alert messages also precludes any customization from the message, so all incoming weather alerts are treated the exact same way, regardless of severity of the alert and thus can be inconvenient to message recipients when the alert isn’t an emergency. Weather alerts are better sent automatically to one or two users, who can then determine whether the alert should be broadcast to a larger audience.
The same considerations also pertain to other types of automated alerts that come from an external source, such as emergency tests and Amber alerts. Any emergency information origination from outside the organization may have a different agenda and a larger constituency, resulting in the need to edit the information or recipients to make the content relevant to your organization.
Below is an example of the misplaced intrusion of an automated weather alert.
Most people think of PA as being a simple audio tool. Pick up a phone and speak and your voice will be transmitted to speakers all over the building. While MessageNet does have the capability to transmit to any combination of speakers, our PA system has a lot more to offer.
Reply to a PA message via the two-way intercom feature.
Record and store thousands of recorded message for later play. Most systems limit you to a handful of recorded messages.
Schedule recorded messages to automatically play once or repeatedly.
Speak live and automatically record what was said for future use and for documentation.
Have a typed message spoken aloud through text-to-speech software that supports multiple languages.
Flash high-intensity lights to get attention.
Have a text message scroll across the PA device.
These additional capabilities make for a far more versatile and useful system that can meet the needs of many different situations. As an audio and visual PA system, it can be used in environments with deaf and blind people and is also ideal for emergencies, as people can be rendered deaf or blind in an instant by an explosion or other type of disaster.
MessageNet already offers one of the most versatile and comprehensive PA systems on the market. We’ve recently added the ability to automatically record any announcement that is spoken live over a PA. This is useful because that same message can be replayed later if its intended recipient didn’t hear all of it, or if it needs to be repeated later East Inflatable Rentals. This allows for more complicated spoken announcements, because users no longer have to worry that the message will be lost or not remembered if it’s too long, since it can always be replayed. This also provides an audit trail, so if there’s been a problem with unauthorized use of the PA, exactly what was said and who said it can easily be found out.
MessageNet Connections users with Microsoft PowerPoint (version 2012 or later) now have the option to save a PowerPoint presentation as a video file. This makes displaying a presentation on a MessageNet MediaPort a lot simpler. PowerPoint presentations have often had many specific settings that need to be correct in order to properly display (as explained in this earlier blog post: Make Power Point Presentations Compatible), so a video, which only needs to be saved in widescreen format, is a lot easier to successfully create and display. Another advantage of the video format is that all transitions and animations are compatible and display on MediaPorts, unlike the .ppt format, which is more restrictive.
To save a presentation as a video, follow these steps:
Click on the ‘file’ tab and select ‘save & send’
Under the ‘file types’ heading, select ‘save as video’
If you haven’t already set up transition timings, it will ask you to do so next
Save the file (it may take a few minutes for the file to be converted, depending on the speed of your computer)
Finally, upload it to a MessageNet Connections media message and enjoy a nicer presentation that was easier to create
Because MessageNet Connections can be used for both everyday and emergency communications, protocols for message prioritization need to be set up. Too often, users, not wanting their messages to be interrupted by others’, set theirs with higher priority levels, potentially blocking any other messages (even emergency messages) from being displayed or spoken. I recommend that an organization should establish priority standards for each type of message ahead of time so users know what priority to give their messages inflatable water slides.
The default priority for normal messages is 200. Other every day priority levels can be set around this base. While emergency messages should have higher priority levels, emergencies are not necessarily equal. This is where it’s vital to set priority standards before emergencies happen, so a message about a fire threatening the entire building isn’t blocked by a message about a water leak in the basement that may only damage equipment. Having different classifications for emergency messages can help make choosing a priority level easier. Also, within Connections’ User Database Manager, it is possible to restrict certain users from sending messages with higher than a certain priority, so only emergency personnel can send messages with emergency-level priority, making it easier to control how the priority levels of messages are set up.
I highly recommend these steps be taken to ensure that emergency communications are reliably delivered and are not lost in the crowd of common daily communications.
