Alert System for Mass. Public Higher Education

Introduction
Soon after the Virginia Tech tragedy, David Gray (UMass CIO) formed an Emergency Communications Subcommittee to identify a solution that would provide emergency notifications in an expedient, widespread and cost-effective manner.

Recognizing the importance of this initiative, the committee expanded its partnerships to involve the entire public higher education system in Massachusetts, including all state and community colleges and the Board of Higher Education.  

While some of the UMass campuses, state colleges and community colleges have some degree of familiarity with emergency communication systems, many have not implemented any kind of solution that involves broadcasting text or voicemail messages to a large population.  Although UMass Lowell has had a solution in place since November 2006 that provides emergency alerts via text message and email, we are fully participating in the vendor selection process with the other public higher education institutions. 

Vendor Selection Process   
The subcommittee will be interviewing a minimum of 5 vendors and participating in demonstrations of the available products.  The selection criteria include:

• the scalability of the application
• the level of redundancy the vendor can provide and their disaster recovery plans
• the reliability and throughput of the application
• evaluating the vendors' policies and procedures on data security
• recommendations from current customers

The first interest and highest priority is securing a reliable solution using SMS text messaging, but this will not rule out vendors or products which can provide multiple channels of communication.

The group plans to make a recommendation to the Governor by May 31.