In an exclusive interview on the Emergency Communications spotlight, John Caswell, sales director, and Adam Bailey, senior strategic technical account manager, Carousel Digital Signage, explain how the platform enhances campus safety by integrating with existing emergency notification systems. Together, they go into detail on how the solution acts as a force multiplier for technologies already in place at higher education and corporate facilities.
Caswell emphasizes that Carousel is not a replacement for emergency-alerting platforms but a complement to them. The system integrates with any provider that can send a Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) push. “It’s really a force multiplier to take a solution that you have and yoke it to a signage solution to basically garner the most value out of both of those solutions as you can,” Caswell states.
Carousel Digital Signage on CAP Integration
According to Caswell and Bailey, the integration allows emergency alerts to take over thousands of screens across multiple campuses nearly instantaneously. Key features and technical details include:
- Standardized Protocol: CAP is a global emergency-alert standard used by government authorities to issue trusted alerts to various systems.
- Technical Process: Carousel can receive CAP messages from external systems on the network via an HTTP post. If another system, like an emergency alert system, sends Carousel a message through the unique URL, then it can automatically trigger alerts and other content
- Targeted Messaging: The system supports targeting alerts to specific locations. For instance, the weather warning can go to all screens, while a fire alert can be isolated to a single building.
- Unique Features: Carousel’s “AirPlay Interrupt” feature can trigger alerts on Apple TV devices managed by Jamf.
This capability thus ensures that relevant information reaches the right audience at the right time, whether it’s a campus-wide emergency or a building-specific notification. As Bailey notes, this is managed through preconfigured bulletins that “…take over the screen with that emergency information.”
To learn more about how Carousel Digital Signage leverages CAP configuration and other tools for campus safety, watch the full video interview below.
