At 8 a.m. Thursday morning, the Department of Public Safety pushed a button that

started a test of the new Orange Alert system.

In the second Orange Alert test this semester, DPS was able to send out 31,184 e-mails and 11,228 SMS text messages to members of the university community within five minutes, said Kevin Morrow, director of news services.

‘This was a test to test the capability of the system, to send out mass e-mail and text messages in a very short amount of time,’ Morrow said. ‘In that sense, it was quite successful.’

During the first test of this system, which took place in early February, DPS sent out 26,000 messages, but only 20,000 were received. Syracuse University and MIR3, the company that makes the product which is used during the tests, was able to use the information to make adjustments, Morrow said.

Morrow said Thursday’s test was a remarkable improvement over the first one.

‘We have confidence now that should we need to use the system, it would work well to reach a critical mass of individuals within the university community,’ he said.

DPS will continue to analyze the data from the test, specifically the time in which the e-mails were received. The university does not have the capability to measure the time of receipt of text messages and e-mails sent to non-Syracuse University accounts, Morrow said.

Approximately 5,000 of the 31,184 e-mails were sent to home e-mail accounts such as Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL.

Oleksiy Fedorov, a freshman economics major, received his notification through a text message, but he said more needs to be done for the Orange Alert to be a complete success.

‘They need to incorporate more than just messages and make people aware of it in other ways,’ Fedorov said.

David McIsaac, a junior sport management major, was notified via both e-mail and text message. The multiple means of alerting students of a crisis, he said, makes the system effective.

‘Anything you can do to protect the students should be the number-one priority,’ McIsaac said. He added that the university should run more tests before the semester is over.

Another test will take place during the summer, which will involve only faculty and staff. All modalities of the system will be tested, including e-mail, text messages and mobile and landline phone calls, Morrow said.

Although the complete results of the test have not yet been analyzed, Morrow is optimistic about the progress.

‘The preliminary data from the tests is very encouraging,’ he said.

azmeola@syr.edu

Published on April 17, 2008 at 12:00 pm