Louisiana State Uni's text system failure was 'misunderstanding'

I had my head in my hands reading this story — ‘geez, not another emergency text service failing to deliver’ — particularly after the news from November that the Connecticut State University text notification system didn’t work.

Here’s the story I caught:

Link: The Independent Florida Alligator: News – UF to test texting alerts after LSU glitch

The emergency text-messaging system at Louisiana State University, similar to UF’s system, was less effective than the school had hoped following a double homicide on its campus.

LSU officials sent an emergency text message to students, faculty and staff members who had registered their cell phones with the university’s system after two students, Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma and Kiran Kumar Allam, were found dead in Allam’s apartment on Dec. 13 with gunshot wounds to their heads.

However, many of those registered did not receive the message, although the university and its text message provider, clearTXT, have yet to determine the number of failed messages.

Ah hah, a supplier has been mentioned! Gosh, how embarrassing to be a provider of emergency text message services — and to have them apparently fail on the first real-world try out.

Well, I visited the clearTXT website and they’ve cleverly been ultra clear about what happened:

With respect to the events that occurred on the LSU campus on 12/14/07, following is a statement from clearTXT regarding mobile message delivery:

clearTXT and LSU have investigated why some members of the LSU community did not receive their emergency text message. The issue resulted from a misunderstanding between LSU and clearTXT about how enrollment data was to be collected from subscribers in the LSU Personal Access Web Services (PAWS), not a malfunction of the text messaging system. This situation has been resolved and all those who previously subscribed and all those who subscribe in the future will be opted-in to receive text notifications in the event of an emergency. Additional information is available on the LSU website.

So I’m pleased, very pleased, that it wasn’t the supplier at fault and it was just a misunderstanding. I look forward to reading more news in the future about the effectiveness of emergency text. I’m a big fan of the service and I’m pretty sure, someday soon, we’re going to read about just how useful a service it is.

I still don’t know if any UK Universities have implemented an emergency text service. I’ll contact UCL, my alma matter, and see if they’ve got one in place.

Does your Uni have one?