Bryant University Completes New Emergency Notification System

The enhanced notification system allows Bryant's public safety personnel to broadcast to the university's 4,000 students, faculty, and staff in the event of a fire, chemical spill, gas leak, criminal activity, or cancellation of classes due to severe weather. The online lives of college students make the university network an extremely effective tool for reaching users across a wide range of physical locations. Bryant's emergency notification system also includes voicemail and email messages.

Bryant University originally deployed Campus Manager in 2004 to control access to its wired student residence network and expanded to include wireless networks in 2006. This year Bryant leveraged the messaging capability of Bradford's persistent agent software, which checks the security status of PCs before granting them network access, for emergency message delivery.

Through Campus Manager's web-based administration console, Bryant's Safety Office can send a text message to a group of users or all users, who see the message on their computer screen in a special pop-up box. The persistent agent displays the message on top of everything else on the screen on all computers connected to the network when the message is sent, as well as those that connect within a specified time window (i.e. 4 hours).

"Public safety is of paramount concern for the university, and our integrated emergency notification system takes advantage of every available channel of communication," said Rich Siedzik, director of networking, Bryant University, Smithfield, RI. "Our comprehensive approach prepares us to be effective in a wide range of circumstances, from weather closings to more catastrophic circumstances."

Bryant University will present a case study on Campus Manager and its role in their emergency notification system in a Webcast on Wednesday, November 28 at 1 pm ET. To register, go to http://www.bradfordnetworks.com/news/webcast.html.

"For Bryant University and other institutions, Campus Manager delivers effective network access control while also providing the broadcast messaging capabilities required by an emergency notification system," said Mike Gadoury, Bradford Networks founder and CEO. "This is an example of how Bradford's focus on understanding customer's pressing problems lets us deliver pragmatic products that solve real-world problems."