The world is a more dangerous place than it was 15 years ago, leading organizations to develop emergency procedures that tackle a range of crisis scenarios. Emergency plans are particularly hard for higher education institutions, where creating a safe campus is challenged by universities having large and open campuses, a transient population and a young but legal student body.
Delivering emergency communication in a university environment is especially hard, given the dispersed nature of the constituents and the range of desktop and personal mobile devices used.
One solution for helping to create a safe campus is the OpenTouch Suite from Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert), which can help with emergency communication.
The OpenTouch Suite is a converged session initiation protocol (SIP) software suite that helps create collaborative conversations that span across device and infrastructure platform, letting users communicate with each other no matter where they are or what device they have in front of them.
There are four layers to the OpenTouch Suite, according to an application note by Alcatel-Lucent.
First, there’s a customer and business applications layer that extends real-time communications to end users. The applications provide collaboration capabilities enabled by Alcatel-Lucent telephony and mobility expertise, blended user interactions, and an ecosystem for university practices, according to the application note.
The second layer of the OpenTouch Suite is the conversation layer, which provides a multi-party, multimedia and multi-device unified communications experience through support for desk phones, smartphones, tablets and PCs, the ability to switch between devices at any time, the ability to enrich a simple text or voice session easily with video and document sharing, and an easy-to-use, multi-party scheduling and ad-hoc sessions system.
The SIP layer of the OpenTouch Suite makes voice communications simple by offering endpoints and trunks for off-net conversations, support for voice and video sessions and software media resources.
Finally, the fourth layer in the solution is any infrastructure. The OpenTouch Suite works with any infrastructure currently used by the university to provide a safe campus, including appliances, blade or virtual machines, distributed or centralized architecture, SIP, IP, digital or analog endpoints, SIP, IP or digital off-net trunks, and use of any LAN, WAN or WLAN.
These four layers combine to deliver a forward-looking communications experience that works with a university’s emergency challenges, reducing IT technology transformation costs and optimizing infrastructure while unifying management, according to the application note.
It also is a solution that will grow into the future, since the OpenTouch Suite tackles some of the biggest trends in communication: working on any device, with multi-vendor systems, including context-integration, giving immersive visual interactions, including social media integration, and taking SIP to the cloud.
All this adds up to a solution that helps make a safe campus a little bit easier for IT administrators to ensure.
Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.
Edited by
Braden Becker
