Mass Notification System for Employees

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is a mass notification system?

  A mass notification system is a system that is used to send hundreds or thousands of messages to many people simultaneously.

• What does a mass notification to employees look like?

  Suppose the warehouse management system goes down at 2 p.m. and orders have to be handled on paper until 4. The operations manager’s alert goes out to the affected sites as a pop-up on office computers, a push notification in the mobile app for the field team, and an SMS to pickers on the floor. The analyst, the driver, and the picker are all sent the same two-line message instead of a version relayed by a supervisor. Our emergency communication system for business page sets out, scenario by scenario, which channels to use for a fire, a lockdown, a cyber incident, and the all-clear.

• Which organizations need a mass notification system for employees?

  Hospitals and plants that run shifts, logistics and retail companies with frontline staff, and companies spread across several sites or time zones – anywhere an email reaches the office but not the loading dock, the night shift, or the contractor on site. Public warnings such as Wireless Emergency Alerts cover a geographic area, not a staff list; the staff list is the job of an employee emergency notification system.

• What should you check before choosing a mass notification tool for employees away from their desks?

  First, list the employees who have no company computer or email account and name the channel each of them will get: the mobile app if they install it, otherwise SMS or a voice call. Second, ask who holds the SMS contract. In DeskAlerts, SMS and voice calls run through your own account with a gateway provider; Twilio is the provider covered in our documentation, and live sending through Twilio requires a paid account. Third, switch one computer off before the demo alert goes out: when it comes back on, the alert should still appear, as long as the period set in the Keep Active setting has not ended. If procurement is treating phone-first and screen-first alerting as two separate purchases, our mass notification system for business page explains why one system covers both.

• How do you send one alert to employees on several channels at once?

  The sender writes the alert once, chooses the audience and selects the channels for that send. The audience can be groups synchronized from Active Directory or Microsoft Entra ID, organizational units from Active Directory, individual users, or recipients added manually in the console, such as contractors. SMS and voice calls go to the mobile number held in each employee’s Active Directory account or entered for the recipient in the console. There is no automatic switch from one channel to another: when the alert report lists recipients as Not received, the sender resends the alert to them or picks another channel. A siren or a PA tone signals that something is wrong, but not what to do; our emergency alert system for businesses page explains how the alert delivers that instruction.