The Prairie Island Indian Community is turning to VoIP to strengthen communications and enhance the safety of its environment. The federally recognized Indian nation, located in Welch, MN, has teamed up with IPcelerate, a provider of advanced communications-based software applications. The company will install and deploy a community-impacting VoIP solution for the Prairie Island Indian Community Tribal Government. The new communications solution leverages IPsession, IPcelerate's VoIP applications platform, for outdialing in emergency situations, as well as IPstudio for session call recording.

 

Prairie Island Indian Community participated in an Application Discovery Workshop with IPcelerate in order to identify and solve critical communications needs within its community. The recently installed VoIP system now allows for rapid emergency notification to all 150 community member households in the community, as well as direct communication between residents and the Prairie Island Police Department, and on-demand call recording and voicemail preservation within governmental facilities.

 

"We needed a way to immediately and easily notify our residents of emergency situations," stated Diane Przybelski, IS Manager for Prairie Island Indian Community. "We can now reach every single household in a matter of minutes and form a task team of first responders just as efficiently. We have successfully used this technology when we recently needed to locate a missing person. Because of our outdialing capabilities, we were able to quickly reach out to key community members and locate the person -- who was safe and unharmed."

 

Offering customers security is nothing new to IPcelerate. Just last month, the company launched IP Video Surveillance, a solution for recording and monitoring video sessions in an organization’s IP network. IP Video Surveillance is an add-on application server to IPsession.

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Cindy Waxer is a Toronto-based freelance journalist specializing in business and technology. She has written for publications including TIME, Fortune Small Business, Business 2.0, Computerworld, Canadian Business, and Workforce Management. To see more of her articles, please visit Cindy Waxer’s columnist page.