Managing Content in Emergencies - University Alert Systems with Cascade

Cascade Server has provided many solutions for our clients. Most recently, Hannon Hill clients in higher education have been using Cascade to solve a very important issue: to manage and publicize content in emergency situations on campus.

Here we've outlined just a few of the ways that Cascade Server could be used to assist a college or university in an emergency setting:

• For minor emergencies or alerts, such as informing your end users about road closings or traffic accidents, Cascade Server can be used to create an “emergency alert “asset factory. Once created, this page could update an automated index page listing of the active alerts, and could also display the alerts on a region of a homepage that would otherwise be left blank. The system could also be set to automatically expire the announcements, based on predefined metadata, ensuring your content stays updated.  In addition, Cascade can be used to create emergency RSS feeds, allowing end users to subscribe to the announcements.

• For major emergencies that require the immediate attention of site users, Cascade Server could be used to manage an alternate version of emergency content, which would overwrite a default region of the normal page, displaying the emergency information on a much larger scale than in the event of minor emergencies.  RSS feeds can automatically be generated in this case, as well.

• In both of the cases provided above, if the university wanted to send immediate messages to subscribers, Cascade offers the ability to send announcements via SMS message by publishing RSS data from the school's emergency RSS feed to a third-party SMS provider that would then send any updates from that feed directly to the subscribers' cell phones.

• In the event that a major emergency leads to national attention, and therefore a spike in web traffic, Cascade Server can publish alternate versions of content, which would require less load time. The system would manage an alternate low bandwidth version of the homepage, which could be published out at the time of the emergency, overwriting the default home page. This alternate page could be replaced with the default homepage once the emergency is over, and the spike in attention has subsided.

• If the campus was inaccessible for web updates during an emergency, traffic could be re-routed from the main domain to an announcement type page that could be updated remotely. Alternate domains can be hosted with partner universities, or through 3^rd party hosting providers.

In any emergency event, regardless of the magnitude, Cascade Server offers numerous ways in which to inform and alert your end-users. Whether in the form of content on your institution’s website, SMS messaging, or RSS feeds, these alerts provide added benefits including an increased sense of awareness and security among students, parents, faculty, staff, and administration.

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• News