Security·4,789 discussions

Employee warning system

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This is somewhat security related. My organization wants to be able to notify logged-in users of a safety issue (fire, intruder, etc.). The text messaging is a piece of cake (this is a Novell based Network). What they also want is an audible warning to sound at the user station to get the users attention.

Is there a way to impliment this without a bunch of custom programming? Is there a commercial or shareware product that already exists?

I’m open to suggestions.

Dick

Topic

Users Control their Sound Space

In reply to Employee warning system

Every PC & NC Work Station that I have worked on has had some kind of volume control where the end user can set the volume levels to their personal tastes & every messaging service I have ever worked with came with some kind of standard

“Ding …You just got a message”
But if user has volume turned down, they will not hear that.

On the AS/400 the standard messages come with two additional features, which I call “Priority” and “Extremely Rude.”

The first “Priority” deal puts the message at the top of the user Message Queue & makes it a required reply … the user cannot delete it from their Queue … they have to do some kind of “Yes I see that” reply & this is time stamped, so the receiver of the confirmation sees the time the confirmation was given.

The second “Extremely Rude” basically goes out coded “I do not care what the end user is doing right now … INTERRUPT THEIR SCREEN with my message.”

Extremely Rude can be combined with Priority, so that user cannot just click ignore – I will read this message later – they have to respond to it.

WE ARE DOING THIS

In reply to Employee warning system

I built a monitoring cell in the Crisis Action Center that monitors computer networks for attacks, intrusions, and WAN status. We are all Microsoft and Unix.

Anyhow we had a need for alerts and tones but not at the user stations. It is on 50″ overhead plasma screens. There is commercial software that provides those kinds of features but is weak in other ways. You may need to code your solution to meet your needs. Its very basic coding.

I would not send alerts to the users other than a firealarm but they will here that anyhow. You may need to integrate the alarm to automatically shutdown the computers gracefully. Depending on how your fire alarm is designed you may need to use relays and an IO board in a computer then code the triggers.

Go to http://www.smarthome.com you may find a interface kit. There are numerous other sites too.

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