Schools seek 'easy-button' approach to mass notification systems

After the 2007 Virginia Tech incident, colleges and universities in the United States and Canada rushed to implement more robust mass notification systems to better communicate with students and staff in times of emergency.

Initially, those systems sent text messages, emails and automated phone calls. But they were often slow and clunky, susceptible to failure or reliant on unreliable platforms, such as an over-burdened local cellular network, according to experts who spoke to Security Director News for this story.