About the Stevens Campus Alerts system
John Koch
Issue date: 4/25/08 Section: Campus News
In order to alert students to the events of this past Wednesday, Stevens Institute of Technology used its recently-implemented "Campus Alerting" system. I had an opportunity to interview Eric Rosenberg, Associate Vice President of Technology and Information Services, about this system.
Three messages were sent yesterday to all the subscribers, which totaled almost 1800 subscribers to about 2500 devices. The first text message sent stated, "An advisory is being issued. Please check your Stevens e-mail. There is no immediate danger." The short length was due to the character limit of text messages.
The first message was sent about half an hour after the e-mail was sent at about 10:25 a.m. The second campus-wide e-mail was sent at about 2:51 p.m. with the follow-up alert message being sent ten minutes later. The delay was because there was no immediate problem; if there was a greater emergency, the messages would be sent out immediately.
The alerts system is hosted externally because it will allow alerts to be sent out even if there is a campus network outage during an emergency. There is also redundancy due to a primary and a backup server. The performance of this system has been improved since its initial deployment, with the longest message delay being approximately ten minutes. Originally, the system had some lag due to the cell phone carriers' spam filters. Associate Vice President Rosenberg contacted several major cell phone carriers and their suggestion was to add an aggregator, which has successfully improved performance. The aggregator also provides a log so that subscribers who had a failed message can be notified and have an opportunity to fix the problem.
For those not on campus this summer, you can go to www.stevens.edu/alerts and "opt-out" your listed devices so that you will not receive the alerts if you do not want to receive them and "opt-in" when returning in the fall. Associate Vice President Rosenberg commented that while "no system is perfect, people need to sign up." People not being signed up for the service is its major weakness.
Three messages were sent yesterday to all the subscribers, which totaled almost 1800 subscribers to about 2500 devices. The first text message sent stated, "An advisory is being issued. Please check your Stevens e-mail. There is no immediate danger." The short length was due to the character limit of text messages.
The first message was sent about half an hour after the e-mail was sent at about 10:25 a.m. The second campus-wide e-mail was sent at about 2:51 p.m. with the follow-up alert message being sent ten minutes later. The delay was because there was no immediate problem; if there was a greater emergency, the messages would be sent out immediately.
The alerts system is hosted externally because it will allow alerts to be sent out even if there is a campus network outage during an emergency. There is also redundancy due to a primary and a backup server. The performance of this system has been improved since its initial deployment, with the longest message delay being approximately ten minutes. Originally, the system had some lag due to the cell phone carriers' spam filters. Associate Vice President Rosenberg contacted several major cell phone carriers and their suggestion was to add an aggregator, which has successfully improved performance. The aggregator also provides a log so that subscribers who had a failed message can be notified and have an opportunity to fix the problem.
For those not on campus this summer, you can go to www.stevens.edu/alerts and "opt-out" your listed devices so that you will not receive the alerts if you do not want to receive them and "opt-in" when returning in the fall. Associate Vice President Rosenberg commented that while "no system is perfect, people need to sign up." People not being signed up for the service is its major weakness.