Campus Cards, College and University Identification and Security
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Emergency alerts good idea if they are timely and accurate

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Text messaging to alert students about emergency events are great, provided they are delivered in a timely manner and aren’t truncated so much as to render the original message worthless. Or, as in the case recently at Florida State University, encompasses more than was originally intended.

Recently, a text message sent out about a suspicious package in a particular parking garage on campus ended up listing just a parking garage, not a specific garage. This could have covered any of the school’s parking facilities. The other problem was that the messages weren’t received by many students until a couple hours after the incident was first reported.

Read more here from the school’s student newspaper. [end] 

Widener University, in Chester, Pa. has implemented a new student emergency notification system with the aid of ActiveCrawl RSS.

Using ActiveCrawl RSS, deployed through e2Campus, Widener campus can send emergency notifications that appear as text crawls on the computer desktops of all students, faculty and staff. The ActiveCrawl RSS enables Widener to incorporate its other emergency notification platforms into one automatic, synchronized alert.

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Florida State College at Jacksonville has partnered with technology and payment services provider Higher One to help electronically distribute Financial Aid and other refund disbursements to students.

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The idea of Bangalore University students being issued smart cards doesn’t seem to be going over too well with many university officials, according to an industry news report.

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RockWest Technology, a business unit of Identive Group Inc., announced the implementation of a credentialing and identity management system for the City of Colorado Springs, the El Paso County Department of Health and Environment and the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.

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Western Michigan University has launched the registration for a new emergency communication system, WMU Alert, which is designed to place thousands of phone calls to students, faculty and staff in the event of an extreme campus emergency.

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East Coast Diversified, Atlanta, Ga., announced that its RFID and GPS division, EarthSearch Communications, has received a $90,000 purchase order from IT service provider AHCC for 200 TrailerSeals.

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