The University of New Mexico would like to thank everyone who participated in the campus emergency drill on Thursday, Feb. 21. The university was able to notify more than 8,000 people via-text message that the drill was in progress.
The UNM emergency test message system is an opt-in system, and more than 70 people chose to opt in to the system between the first message announcing the drill, and the second message announcing the end of the drill. The initial indications are the text messages from the university took between one and seven minutes to reach individual subscribers, depending on the cell system involved. Ninety-six percent of the messages were delivered to individual subscribers. Anyone with a UNM NetID can opt into the system by visiting myUNM.
More than 66,000 people received the UNM Emergency Alert e-mail messages. This includes everyone who has an active UNM e-mail address. People who were on more than one emergency message list may have received more than one emergency alert message.
If you have a comment on the notification system, please enter it in the comments section below. Emergency operations planners will use the feedback to improve the system.
I did not receive the text message for 20 minutes.
I received the emails almost instantly.
The text messages I received via my cell phones were incomplete. Comparing them to the text in the email messages, I saw that the majority of the last sentence of each was missing. In the first message, this told you what action to take, so it was an important piece. I checked with several other colleagues and they had the same experience.
Posted by: Jean Russell at February 22, 2008 09:35 AMI never did get a message on my cell phone.
Posted by: Yolanda Nieto at February 22, 2008 01:20 PMThere is a big problem with the cell phone messages. You can send only 160 characters. Included in the 160 characters is all the FROM,SUBJECT and other header garabge.
For TEXT-ME to be usuefull for most cell phone, you either have to shorten the messages or break the message up into multiple messages. (the latter perfered)
I also did not receive the message on my cell until over 10 mintues after the e-mail.