"One of the primary things was how do we tell people to stay inside [in an emergency]?" Paquet said. The school looked at several emergency notification systems before choosing AlertFind, he said. "E-mail's just not it [alone]. It's not going to work. It's not fast enough" to get the information out quickly when people are not in front of their computers.

The AlertFind system, which has not yet been used on the campus in an emergency, will allow the school to send out alerts via cell phones and, even more importantly, via text messages, which students are very comfortable using, he said. "Sending a text message is essentially an instant way to tell people there's a problem."

At Virginia Tech, that could have been an important communications option, Paquet said.

A key to using such systems is having current student phone numbers in the system's database, he said. Students can't opt out of the emergency system, but they can opt out of receiving non-emergency messages from the school, he said. The school is collecting cell phone numbers of parents to add them to the system so that they can also receive calls and text messages in the event of a campus emergency, he said.

Robert Noyed, director of communications for the Wayzata Public School District in Wayzata, Minn., said his school system has been using the CityWide Alert Notification System from Minneapolis-based Avtex for more than two years. "It's a fairly efficient system to notify groups of families, a group of parents, about those emergency types of notices where you can get information out fairly quickly," Noyed said.

Typically used for bad weather when schools might close early or if there is a specific problem in a particular school, the system sends messages to multiple phone numbers that parents can put into the database, he said. The installation and use of the system wasn't tied specifically to any school violence concerns, Noyed said. "It was an opportunity to better connect with our families."

Don Denman, an Avtex spokesman, said the CityWide system has GIS capabilities built in to allow users to send alerts to specific areas or even buildings in an emergency. At least one university that already uses CityWide contacted the company to find out about enhancing its use of the product in light of the Virginia Tech shootings, he said.

Paul Darcy, a vice president of marketing for Austin-based MessageOne, said AlertFind is used in school districts in California to help notify families in the event of earthquakes and other natural disasters, as well as in coastal areas where flooding and severe storms are prevalent. For 40,000 users, a typical deployment costs about $40,000 a year, he said. The system is managed and set up offsite in remote data centers operated by partner companies.