Following up on recommendations made from an audit earlier this year, a method to enhance communications to the Brock University community will proceed.
Campus Security Services took the lead and looked at a variety of different communication and notification platforms and tools to put recommendations from the audit into action.
The result is AppArmor Alert, a mass notification tool that unifies the most popular digital mass notification alerting mechanism in a single, easy to use dashboard, including:
- Mass SMS notifications
- Mass email notifications
- Desktop notifications
- Social media broadcasting
- RSS feed
- Push notifications
- Alert status
- Outbound voice calling
Since the fall of 2019, Campus Security Services has been working with Information Technology Services, University Marketing and Communications, and the AppArmor Alert development team to ensure all alerting mechanisms are compatible and work with existing Brock infrastructure.
The biggest change that all members of Brock community will see once they return to the campus is the desktop notification. All Brock owned and managed PC’s, Mac’s and computer-controlled television screens around the University will have a desktop notification widget installed.
If the alerting mechanism is activated, the user of that device will see an alert that provides information on the incident and where to find more information. These alerts require the user to acknowledge in order to remove the alert from their screen, allowing them to return to work. The alert will clear from the screen without any user interaction once the alert has been deactivated.
Any member of the Brock community can also opt in and download the widget for their own personal computer.
A full functionality gap analysis test will be conducted Monday, June 15. An update closer to the date will provide specific details on what the Brock community can expect to see, with more information to follow once the testing is completed and the system is live.
