911 Services

Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, has five academic colleges (business, liberal education, international communication, hospitality and education), a Conservatory of Music, School of Aeronautics and the Institute for Achievement and Learning, enrolling 2,224 students.

The college needed to implement an E911 product that would provide distressed callers with access to emergency assistance as quickly as possible, obviously - but faced three challenges:

The first was ensuring that emergency responders knew precisely where to locate 911 callers. The campus is spread out, and when 911 was dialed from a phone anywhere on the central campus or at the School of Aeronautics, the location information displayed at the Public Safety Answering Point was always LU's main address. Not helpful for emergency responders.

Also, LU needed to provide E911 support for its hybrid, multi-vendor deployment. It's migrating many of its phones to a Cisco Unified Communications Manager system, but plans to maintain its legacy Siemens PBX (News - Alert) for its on-campus dormitory, which contains over 500 dorm rooms across five buildings.

And it needed to ensure on-site security personnel were promptly notified of all 911 calls, instead of just when emergency responders arrived on-scene - "Oh hi, um, what are you guys doing here?"

So they picked 911 Enable's enterprise E911, comprised of the Emergency Routing Service and the Emergency Gateway (News - Alert) to address their E911 challenges.

The ERS is a monthly subscription service that delivers 911 calls and location information to PSAPs across the US. And the EGW is an on-site appliance that automates and simplifies E911 management, which includes automatic IP phone discovery, support for extension mobility/shared line appearance, and on-site security notification and call routing features.

The 911 Enable (News - Alert) people also developed Desk Alert for LU, an application that causes a pop-up screen to appear on the security desk workstation monitor. The pop- up notification contains the caller's name, phone number, location information, and a URL link to additional location-specific information, such as a map or emergency contact list.

LU plans to implement Desk Alert in Q3/10. This will further enhance the notification capabilities LU currently has in place, and will help ensure distressed callers get the help they need, as quickly as possible.