What is InformaCast?

One of my current responsibilities at work is managing a system called InformaCast which is an IP paging system created and sold by Singlewire Software and ties into Cisco Unified Communications Manager. InformaCast is engineered with being the foundation of an Emergency Notification System or Mass Notification System. It uses Cisco IP Phones, IP speakers and Desktop computers as an endpoint to deliver text and/or audio messages to. It can also be used by schools or manufacturing plants to control bells and such.

When I was getting to know DPM and researching the best practices for moving it from one server to another, I found that while official documentation and resources like TechNet were more or less good, it really helped reading the lessons learned from a real person. Another admin like myself. Whether it's forum posts or someone's blog, it's safe to assume that someone has gone before you into the world of the unknown and figured some of this stuff out. However, with InformaCast, for reasons I haven't yet figured out, there's Nada; Nothing; Zilch; The only information I've been able to find is that from Singlewire directly (which is often more of an overview/sales pitch rather than real-world  information) or from Cisco (moreover, how it specifically connects/interacts with UCM). For any fellow InformaCast administrators, present or future, I'm going to write down everything I learn about this so when you're asked for a report of the last alert or you're having to comb through the 20k lines of log information to find failed devices, you'll have at least one other resource written by a regular, every-day IT guy. 

I'm assuming that you, much like myself, have InformaCast in your environment, are responsible for it but have no idea how it works and was given to you with virtually no documentation specific to your environment. For those reasons, I just wanted to go over a basic overview of what InformaCast is and what it does and we can get into more specific information in the future. 

Firstly, it's a paging system. It can be entirely stand-alone or it can integrate with Unified Communications Manager (aka UCM, Cisco's IP phone system) but regardless, it's still just a paging system. By that, I mean it's the system that's used to give an audio alert like "Steven, please dial 102" or a text alert such as "Active shooter on campus. Please stay indoors until you receive the all-clear." It's things like the latter of the two why Singlewire developed InformaCast in the first place. If you want it to send alerts to or from the phones, you have to a relatively recent version of Cisco UCM and Cisco IP phones.

InformaCast also has a "bells" feature which allows it to be used in K-12 environments or manufacturing plants. We personally don't use this in our environment but the feature is still there.

TERMS

Much like any computer program, learning the jargon can really help it all sink in. You can't really know the system without knowing what each part is. Let's look at some basic terms in InformaCast.

• Devices - This can be IP phones or IP speakers. 
• Plugins - With various Plugins, InformaCast can send out email alerts, SMS alerts, post a status on Facebook, a tweet on Twitter.... the possibilities are endless with Javascript/XML/SOAP.
• Endpoints - These are devices or plugins. An endpoint is what InformaCast is sending it's alert/message to.
• Recipient Group - This is a logical grouping of endpoints. Need to send an audio alert to the speakers in the Sales office? You can have the IP speakers and IP phones in that office be a part of a Sales recipient group. 
• Messages - These are the audio alerts or text alerts InformaCast sends to a recipient group or set of recipient groups. 
• Broadcast - This is the sending of the message to a recipient group or set of recipient groups.