How it Works – AlertFind®
Crisis Communication and Collaboration Guaranteed
AlertFind and the Incident Collaboration Center™ together form the most complete and dependable emergency notification and collaboration system available. AlertFind harnesses all available communication channels to find people, deliver messages, and collect information. AlertFind’s Incident Collaboration Center provides additional collaboration tools to manage through crisis events and accelerate recovery times.
AlertFind’s Crisis Notification
The most immediate task in any crisis situation is to ascertain the safety of employees and the status of the organization to respond to events. By leveraging email, outbound and inbound voice calls, text messages, pagers, BlackBerry® devices, and the Internet, AlertFind provides an automated method to find people, deliver messages, and gather information in real-time with industry leading features including:
- Automated message delivery & escalation more
Reach hundreds of thousands of users anywhere and at anytime via voice or text-enabled devices. Contact people on over a dozen different devices ranging from home phones, cell phones, pagers, wireless devices, SMS, personal email accounts, and more. Easily specify device-to-device escalation rules as well as user-to-user escalations.
Notifications can be initiated by using a web-based user interface, by calling Dell MessageOne™ for assistance, by calling IVR lines to trigger predefined notification templates, and by direct integration with corporate systems.
- Web based browser - Authorized personnel log on and complete an easy to use form including recipients and message. Recipients can be predefined user groups, escalation groups or the message can be broadcast to the entire user database.
- 24/7 support – Authorized personnel can call Dell MessageOne and dictate the message and select recipient groups and Dell MessageOne will initiate the notification.
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR) lines – Predefined templates for notifications can be created with quick launch codes and distribution lists. Authorized personnel call in on the IVR line, enter the launch code, and the notification is sent.
- Application Programming Interface (API) – Automated notifications can be integrated with other enterprise applications. For example, a call to a help desk automatically sends a service order to repair personnel.
- Full global support more
AlertFind is hosted in top-tier disaster recovery data centers worldwide, to ensure organizations receive the highest level of availability.
Hide… - In-bound communication lines for hard-to-reach contacts more
Multiple Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) lines are available for contacts that for whatever reason cannot receive a notification. Employees call in to receive personal notices and log responses to critical questions. Templates can be preset or easily instantiated and managed in real-time by designated team members.
Hide… - Enterprise data security & access control more
Designed to meet the most stringent requirements of large enterprises for data privacy and access control, AlertFind allows delegation of permissions to control who initiates notifications, who can be contacted, and what they can view. Teams can be created around business units, departments, crisis response teams, geographies, and roles to control the data and functionality each user can access.
Hide… - Real-time auditing & reporting more
AlertFind features a real-time audit trail with a detailed transactional log of pending and sent notifications.
Hide… - Integration capabilities with web services API more
Using the web services API, AlertFind can be integrated with enterprise systems such as DR planning tools, systems management applications and other custom business applications to maintain current contact information for users. The API can also be used to automate notifications triggered by other solutions. For example, a call to the help desk could trigger a service order for repair personnel.
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AlertFind’s Incident Collaboration Center
The AlertFind Incident Collaboration Center (ICC) provides the tools to efficiently coordinate a crisis response and recovery operation for organizations whose normal operations are disrupted and whose employees may be displaced. The ICC becomes the central location for organizations to share information and track the progress of events and responses. Managers can post task lists, employees can post ongoing status information, and teams, departments and individuals can share critical data appropriate to their roles and needs. For times when the organization’s website is unavailable or not the best channel for information related to a crisis, the ICC also provides a hosted external website for outbound communications to customers, vendors, partners and the world.
- Collaborative Incident Logs - Keep everyone working from the same page during a crisis
- Formal Task Management - Manage and track your way through a crisis
- Secure Document Sharing - Keep business processes working by sharing critical documents
- Publicly Share Information - Not only employees need to know your organization’s status
- Collaborative Incident Logs
Traditional notification systems are designed to locate people and deliver messages, not to coordinate crisis response teams. AlertFind’s Incident Collaboration Center (ICC) includes a continuous, time-stamped log that allows team members to update status in real-time and report on progress against recovery tasks. An even broader set of users can log in and follow the developing situation or search the log for specific information. These incident logs are especially helpful post-incident, enabling managers to analyze the organizations response time and actions to improve future performance. - Formal Task Management
Managing through a crisis and the subsequent recovery process requires a series of informed decisions executed in an event driven sequence of steps. People need direction on how to respond. The ICC provides the formal task assignment and tracking capabilities needed to manage this process. Employees can remotely post task checklists and monitor progress in compartmentalized task streams. Business units, departments, or teams can use pre-built checklists or add tasks as events develop to manage through difficult situations. - Secure Document Sharing
Many types of documents may need to be available and shared during a crisis event such as continuity plans, recovery plans, contact lists, contracts, flowcharts and spreadsheets. AlertFind’s ICC includes a secure document library for documents associated with an incident. Folders and sub folders are used to organize documents. Employees can upload documents of any file type as needed and these documents can be searched using title, description or file contents. - Publicly Share Information
In times of crisis, the corporate website may be unavailable, yet suppliers, customers, the press and your community may all need to follow your company’s progress. The ICC provides a website for keeping external constituents up-to-date and can be used to communicate to more focused audiences than the corporate site.
As an on-demand service AlertFind, Dell MessageOne is always available to help
AlertFind is an on-demand service and Dell MessageOne is available 24/7 to assist in times of crisis. Dell MessageOne is proactive during the provisioning of AlertFind to make sure that contacts are imported and the service is functioning properly. Once provisioned, notifications are under your control, but if your infrastructure becomes impaired, Dell MessageOne can provide “the hands on the keyboard” to implement any notification scenario with a simple authenticated phone call from authorized personnel.
AlertFind as a managed service provides many additional benefits:
- Dell MessageOne services have inherent disaster recovery and high availability. Hosted at top-tier disaster recovery centers, AlertFind will be available when you need it.
- AlertFind is quick and easy to implement. Deployment time is measured in hours – not weeks or months.
- Maintaining current contact information can be automated. AlertFind is designed to directly import information from a wide variety of directory, HR, and administrative systems. Users can be automatically polled to update contact and escalation preferences.
- The burden of maintaining the operational status of the system is shifted to Dell MessageOne, removing the time, cost, and resources needed to manage patches, servers, licenses, storage capacity, and complex high-availability solutions and backups.
- Dell MessageOne provides enterprise-class scalability, security, data encryption, authentication, and integration with a wide variety of enterprise applications.
- The cost to deploy and maintain the Dell MessageOne on-demand services are fully known upfront, requiring little or no initial investment, and have predictable monthly costs. The burden of expanding the system as your needs grow is shifted to Dell MessageOne.
