Recently RedSky (News - Alert) sponsored a webinar titled "E911 Enterprise Compliance: How to Prepare Your Organization." It was presented by Samantha Kane, founder of Kane-MacKay, and Martha Sexauer, marketing manager for RedSky. 

The overall issue here, as the webinar outlined, is that states are adopting legislation for 911 service to cover Multi Line Telephone Systems or PBXs. The problem is that calls from MLTS lines don't usually pinpoint a caller's location for emergency services response. Your standard telephony does, whenever you cal 911 on a landline your location is pinpointed. But most people carry cell phones or use VoIP phones these days, and those don't automatically pinpoint location.

E911 is designed to deal with this problem. As the webinar noted, "complex communication systems that support multiple geographic locations, multi-story buildings and campus environments benefit the most from Enhanced 911 and are at the most risk without a proper system in place."

Because if a 911 call comes from a cell phone in from a college dorm, without E911 the emergency personnel aren't given the room where the emergency is.

So states are requiring E911. And there you have a host of compliance issues, as the webinar points out -- penalties for noncompliance, risk of discriminating among employees, lawsuits if the location of a caller in distress was not located in the organization, the headaches are endless -- a call from a business location might be just to a campus or group of buildings. E911 gives your employees much greater protection -- as well as visitors to your location, or when your employees are visiting a location.

And of course, it's simply the law in many places. Penalties can run in the thousands per day for noncompliance, so as the webinar pointed out, it's impingent upon you to determine how the E911 regulations apply to you, develop a corporate strategy to provide locations for emergency personnel -- including granularity: Do you identify to floor, region, desktop what?

The webinar discussed the value of compliance studies to help determine your exposure, reducing the risk of E911 noncompliance both to your employees and your business. It discusses how to maintain compliance, what systems you can use, whether to use hosted or on-premise systems and pretty much all the basic issues you'll need covered to know you're doing the right thing by the law, your business and your employees.