Epicom Snow Day & Alert System

February 4th, 2011 – Austin, TX – Around 1 AM a “massive snow storm” swept through Central Texas causing schools and government offices to shut down. The 1 to 1.25 inches of snow caused Austinites, including Epicom employees, to be locked indoors.

Around 7:30 AM, each Epicom employee received an email from President Bill Harrison advising everyone to work from home.

“We made the decision to keep Epicomers safe this morning by encouraging everyone to stay home.  However, their creative spirit could not be damped, as evidenced by the awesome Austin snowmen they built (as seen below).  Now that the weather is warming, the office is beginning to hum with its usual energy,” said Bill Harrison.

To help alert employees of the unsafe conditions, Engineering Manager Eric Wikman sent out an emergency SMS text message that Epicom built into the CRM system in the Calls module. To implement this alert system, Eric modified the Calls module and added a drop-down item called eSMS.  So if you go to the calls module and schedule a call that is classified as eSMS, the system will send out a text message to every employee (by grabbing all of the phone_mobile fields from the users module) and then sends out whatever text you put in the description field to everyone’s cell phones via the Twilio service.

The eSMS emergency alert system was an enhancement to a previous customization to schedule auto-conference calls, which calls everyone’s phone number at the meeting start time and bridges them together. We will have a follow-up blog post on auto-conference calls next week. For more information on how Epicom successfully utilized our emergency alert system in SugarCRM, contact us at info@epicom.com.