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Indiana University announced on Wednesday it has chosen the Connect-ED communication service by NTI Group Inc. to provide an alert system capable of reaching faculty, students and staff on all eight IU campuses within minutes, according to an IU press release.

The system is essentially a way to keep students informed about anything from administrative news to weather delays, according to the press release. More importantly, however, it is a way to notify students in emergency situations.

"After (Virginia Tech), former President Adam Herbert and Former Provost Michael McRobbie decided to do an immediate campus service review," said Larry MacIntyre, assistant vice president in the Office of University Communications. "McRobbie said we should find a firm as quickly as possible. There was a realization that we needed to move (promptly)."

Students will be able to register for the program through Onestart in the next couple of weeks, MacIntyre said. The service is part of a broader "IU-Notify" initiative, which should be fully operative by the end of the calendar year, according to the press release.

A university-wide notification system has been in consideration since the end of 2006, said Mark Bruhn, associate vice president of information and infrastructure insurance. After the Virginia Tech shootings, however, MacIntyre said the need to find a communication firm seemed more urgent.
Following the release of a report by the Virginia Tech Review Panel, MacIntyre said the university was following suit with what the report called for.

Guidelines from the Virginia Tech Panel's findings included how to successfully choose an alert system, according to the press release. These guidelines state that a successful system should provide multimodal communications, flexibility in registry of users, distributed data centers, dispersed messaging and flexibility in terms of contracting.

Bruhn, who helped head the search for a company to act as IU's service provider, said he feels like NTI's Connect-ED communication system fulfills the requirements that IU has need for.
"We sent proposals to about 20 different companies that had products," Bruhn said. "We analyzed what the companies did and compared that to what we needed them to do."

Bruhn said there were three main reasons for selecting NTI as IU's communication service provider, including the company's extensive higher education experience, its ability to support a high number and wide variety of people, and all of the different kinds of communications that are included in the package.

Students and faculty will be reached via cell phones, e-mail, text messages and PDAs, according to NTI's Connect-ED website. Messages are sent within minutes after the recipients of that message are selected.
In a time-sensitive situation, multimodal communication is a smarter way to contact people because the communication is sent simultaneously to all available contact points, according to the press release.
"I am very optimistic," Bruhn said. "I'm very enthusiastic about the company we picked."

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