As many of you know, I’m the IT guy for a vacation rental company that manages 160+ homes in Sunriver (but if I can find a solution that works, I might implement this with 400 others as well). Anyway, on rare occasions, we need to send out a phone message to our homes (the only time I can remember having to do it is when a nearby forest fire was threatening evacuation of the area). While we’ve been using an outsourced provider for this, I’ve been told to try to find something cheaper (as our provider raised their rates).
Basically,
While I can find windows software that will dial-up via the modem and play a pre-recorded message (which is what I’m looking to do, and that’s it), I’d rather have something that will work on multiple platforms and won’t require me to dedicate a bunch of analog phone lines to the task (as each phone call would potentially take a minute or so, and with that many homes, it could take quite a while to get the message out). So that’s why I thought of VoIP.
Any thoughts on software/hardware for this? Can skype handle something like this? I just need basic notification service, and have an extra server I could throw at it, if need be (would prefer Linux as I have other Linux-based plans for that extra server, but I’m open to options). We so rarely have to do something like this (and technically, we do it as a service), but I just want it to work and not have to pay monthly fees to some other provider.
Comments
I know this isn’t quite what you’re asking for, but I have another suggestion. (That’s what friends are for!)
The county already has in place a bulk notification system. I know this from personal experience, because they recently used it to wake me up at one in the morning to tell me they had turned off the river.
If you have an actual emergency, I bet you could have the county notify people for you. If it’s just an advisory (“Beer’s on sale at the Country Store!”), I bet they would do that too for a fee. Our friendly organizer who just went to work for the county knows someone who knows someone in that department. Ya know what I mean?
When’s lunch?
You could have a look at http://www.clickatell.com/products/multimodal.php : not perfect, but it may be worth investigating.
Hi Jake, I came across your post and was interested because I work for an emergency notification company and we actually have a few customers in California who use our service for the same example that you mentioned — wildfires that might threaten homes around them. The benefit of having a professional service is that you can send messages over multiple modalities — so you just log into the site and can instantly send a voice message, text message, Instant Message, email, etc. to both cellphones and landlines. BlackBerry PIN blasting is also a good feature. So, of course a decision like this always depends on budgets and needs, but with the number of homes that you service and the amount of messages you tend to send (very few) I think you could probably find a happy medium as far as price goes if you look into emergency notification providers. Good luck! -Mike
You could do it with Asterisk but that would run on Linux or BSD and not Windows…
You could achieve the desired result with Asterisk, but that seems a bit overkill. Many moons ago I set up a system that called and left a quick message on a csv list of phone numbers using VOCP.
I would suggest you take a look at http://www.vocpsystem.com/ and see what the package can do.