Overview

In an emergency, response officials need to provide the public with life-saving information quickly. The Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), a modern version of the national alert and warning infrastructure, helps organizations collaborate and alert the public in order to save lives and property.

The Open Platform for Emergency Networks (OPEN) enables the sharing of emergency alerts and incident-related data between different standards-compliant incident management systems. IPAWS OPEN serves as the IPAWS Alerts Aggregator, collecting and routing IPAWS emergency alerts to and from emergency systems that serve the public. IPAWS OPEN integrates with the various alert dissemination methods of IPAWS.

IPAWS provides a process for emergency communities at the federal, state, territorial, tribal, and local levels to communicate with each other through alerts. IPAWS helps integrate alerting systems that use Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standards with the IPAWS infrastructure.

The 

BlackBerry AtHoc

 IPAWS plug-in provides support for sending alerts from one Collaborative Operating Group (COG) to other COGs and to public alerting systems such as the Emergency Alert System (EAM), and Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA).

Using the 

AtHoc

Notification Delivery Service (NDS)

 console, users first configure the plug-in and set up accounts. They then use 

BlackBerry AtHoc

 to set up the IPAWS gateways and configure the IPAWS device. In 

BlackBerry AtHoc

, they also create a mass device endpoint for each device as well as their own COG and other COGs with which they want to communicate. Operators can then send alerts through the 

BlackBerry AtHoc

 management system and can customize the content for the IPAWS devices. Additionally, users can use the out of the box IPAWS COG to COG Alert Template to notify operators that other COGS have sent alerts to their local system.