InformaCast

Mass Notifications Multimodal Communication Location Based Alerts Mobile Accessibility Ease of Use

Resource Intensity Limited Customization

InformaCast has helped us in emergency communication. Due to multimodal communicaiton and mobile accesibility, we could use various communication channels and people could stay connected wherever they were.

Multiple ways to get notifications... text, voice call, push, Windows alert, iOS alert, IP speakers. Very thorough setup options. Easy to install and get going.

The menu structure could be improved. The setup could use better documentation/checklist. Integration with speakers is not perfect (works, but can be improved).

Emergency Notifications, School Bells, Live Audio/Paging

It is very helpful when I cam at my desk, or at home to know what is happening at my site location for my company. I also like that as an admin, I can alert others to a possible emergency.

I don't like when we do drills. Our security team sends an Informacast notification and my phone rigns, I get a text and an alert on my desktop while working....it's all great if there is an actual emergency, but when it's just a drill, it's a little annoying :/

The biggest benefit is that my teachers will hear the alert on their phones, so if they are with the children in a situation where they would not hear the announcement over the phone system, they will get it via their cell phone(s) and they will know what is happening.

It sends alerts, that's very helpful and useful.

I used to not like the webpage appearance so much, but since we upgraded to latest version, that's not a problem with me anymore.

Setting up CallAware.

When we changed phone systems to Cisco's platform, we lost the ability to know what extension dialed 911. With InformaCast Fusion we are now able to follow in real-time a 911 call. This was the first use case we had for InformaCast. Now we are tying Fusion into our fire alarm and door security systems. We have also integrated Fusion into our overhead paging allow us to have paging in areas our old analog system did not cover.

The lack of ability to copy and paste repetitive tasks. An example was needing to create many message templates with small variations. Would be nice to copy and paste a finished template and make the minor changes.

My recommendations would be the following: 1. When integrating to older systems, make sure to talk to the very knowledgeable InformaCast engineers. They can tell you if an interface is available. We have a very old fire alarm system and InformaCast has been helping us with the integration. 2. Make sure you take the time and use the preplanning tools and spreadsheets InformaCast support provides. 3. Their installation videos are a great resource. 4. Develop a team to help with the planning. This team will be very beneficial when it comes to creating message templates, distribution lists, device groups and scenarios. 5. Take your time. Make sure you have thought through the scenarios and have programmed your message templates to convey to your users exactly what they are to do when responding to an alert.

Alerting our administration team when a 911 call has been made. We have a two stage fire evacuation plan. InformaCast allows us to trigger two scenarios alerting our users. We also are using the conference calling feature to connect teams together as they facilitate an evacuation. With the ability for users to let our administration know whether a user is safe or needs help during an emergency is greatly beneficial.

The end-user interface is nice and simple which is what we really needed for our users. Since we use the product for emergency notifications, we need it to be simple to use without too much knowledge. This is for sure what Informacast excels at because we can set everything up and make it simple for the end user to just fill out a couple fields or check a few boxes and get the proper notifications out to the proper groups.

The setup for InformaCast is a bit complicated and I can see why self-deployed folks may have trouble getting utilization of the product. We thankfully had a VAR install and deploy for us and their knowledge in getting everything setup was excellent in handling what we would not have been able to.

Emergency Notifications (to email, SMS, and overhead paging systems) within our buildings. It's nice to be able to kickoff a notification template and have it do all the work for us in terms of letting mobile devices know, getting a proper recording over the PA system and having the expandability into IP based speakers/displays available.

Easy to set up granular security to limit who can send to different distribution lists. Support is very quick to respond and knowledgeable about the product. The interface is easy enough to navigate and send broadcasts, even for people who are not overly technical. Easy to manage distribution lists, with several options for uploading data (both manually and automatically)

Online documentation has not caught up with all the product features and a few times I needed to get in touch with support for clarification of different settings, especially around the security settings. Also, it would be nice if the primary ID of the distribution list members were not email as it adds an extra data-gathering requirement that people aren't always willing to give.

Plan out things like security and how you want to break down and identify your distribution list ahead of time. The planning workbook provided by InformaCast was very useful to help keep things like DL names, security group names, and tags consistent during setup.

We have significantly cut the time and resources required to notify employees of business impacting events, such as covid-19 related closures.

I liked the user friendly end user side. and the multiple alert you can customize.

Nothing was disliked about the application.

Informacast is a great application for all alerts especially emergency.

emergency alerts, and customizations

I love that it is easy to use and navigate. I do not work on InformaCast that often, but when I do I find that it is super simple to get in and accomplish what I needed to without spending time familiarizing myself with the application again. I can get in, do what I need to do, then get out and on with the list of other tasks on my plate.

There is nothing I dislike about InformaCast

I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for this type of system mainly for the ease of use which is a huge time saver. Time can be a precious commodity and if you do not have a lot of it to get ramped up on how to use this application, you do not need it. The application is very intuitive and easy to use. It was designed in a Common Sense manner.

I haven't encountered many issues at all. Usually, there is a paging issue to a particular zone and the cause is most likely on the network side and not on the InformaCast side. Being able to get into InformaCast and easily navigate around, make some tests pages and trace them is paramount in being able to pinpoint the cause. Or at least eliminate InformaCast as being the cause.

The functionality and broad connectivity options

Other than the issue with recording 911 calls, I have no dislikes.

Try a Proof-of-Concept to assure that it meets your needs.

To quickly communicate emergency situations and general notifications and to track them. Also provide an easy interface that non-technical staff can use.