Podcast - Preview of InformaCast 8.1

  

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Learn more about the upcoming release of InformaCast version 8.1 from Singlewire, including new message confirmation and mobility.

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below.

Transcript

Ken, can you tell us what's new with InformaCast 8.1?

Yeah, Brad, I think the total feature count going into eight one is around 30 new features. Some aren't all that visible, you know, we've improved the activation time and improved performance on some things. We now vibrate the wireless phones, the 7925 and 26, and those were important things, but there are really two features that are coming in 8.1 that I think will overshadow all of the other ones.

And the first one of those is a message confirmation. Message confirmation is something that's actually been on our list for quite a while, but we wanted to do it in such a way that it's very scalable, so we're not causing a burden to the system if, you know, some of our customers that have tens of thousands of phones ask for response back we don't want to burden the network.

Then what we built and they wanted the very flexible and robust very scalable confirmation system so not only can you ask for responses, but you can take action based on what responses you get. So you may say, let's take health care as an example. Send a message out to everyone on a particular, on a particular floor saying room 2:13

is ready to turn. Let me know when it's done. So you send that out, and you can send a message, you can configure whatever responses you want and ask for as many responses as you want. But if you just say, can you go to room 213, everyone will get a response on the phone for a soft key saying yes or no, well you can configure it so that once you get the first yes.

It automatically send a message out to everyone in that group saying, don't worry, it's already been taken care of. In addition, you can also do an escalation process. So if you've not received a response within 10 minutes or say, you send an other message out reminding people second time and go on and on and on. So it's a nice way something simple like to do a poll or survey but it's also a nice way to do a, you know active response, an escalation process, and more complicated things like that.

On the InformaCast side, we have a full reporting infrastructure so you can watch in real-time as people respond so you watch the number of responses for everything you've asked for as well as go back and look more deeply to see who responded at what time, so you can look at it more closely. The second feature in 8.1, which I think will be very, very popular is that of mobility.

We're adding mobility into InformaCast which has traditionally been on-network system to go to phones, desktops, speakers but we're adding a mobility component so you can send SMS or voice calls, to cellular phones, is the most common thing. But any phone that's not on your network and the way it works is, you buy a calling plan, so you say how many recipients, how many users need to cover.

It's an annual cost. And each recipient can have a couple of phone numbers associated with them. You can upload the data in either in a the common separated file, in a spread sheet, or keep your data in LDAP or active directory. Both, those data sources we'll update is configurable, but by default we update daily.

So if you've got spread sheets, or all your users are in LDAP] or active directory, we update that information each day, by default, and then it can appear in your groups, just like Cisco phones or anything else. So, as a good example is, I'm gonna send an emergency message out to all of our Austin locations.

And in addition, you know, I see all my phones for Austin and desktops whatever. We'll have also built groups that say SMS phone call for Austin, and I include my group, and then it goes out to all the phones in Austin on the network, but also calls everyone in Austin that's in their database and plays that message for them.

So this is a great way for people to add that mobility piece in. We do a very good job of talking to devices on network, but for people that wanna extend that to people out and about carrying their cell phone or at home or whatever, this is a very clean an easy way to do that.

So this mobile notification, this is going to be really baked right inside of InformaCast. To turn this on they'll have to sign up for a service to make this work?

Yeah, through us. I mean, it is baked right into InformaCast that's the only thing they need to do is, is buy a calling plan from us for so many users. You know, you need a thousand users, you just get an annual subscription from us, and then it'll appear in your product and then you can load your data and keep it current automatically.

And then off it goes. It's actually a very simple process. You don't need to go sign up for a different system, or manage a different interface or go to anything else. It's all contained within InformaCast itself. Now, for people who want to do that, or already have an existing system. We can certainly talk to those.

Just like we all have, you can plug whatever in that you want. But you can also build it right inside InformaCast.

Well that sounds like some really great improvements, and this is coming here before the end of the year, this year 2011.

That's correct, we expect it in December.

Okay, great. Well we'll be putting more and posting more information on the website like some tutorials short video get the people familiar with it and raising the flag on this as we get closer to the launch date.

Sounds great Brad.

All right Ken, thanks for your time today.

Yeah, thank you.