Text Messaging – Your communication contingency plan

June 24, 1:51 PMLong Island Business Technology ExaminerChaz Popovich

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Here it comes again: hurricane season on Long Island. The forecasters are guessing that it will be mild this year. That would be convenient. However, let’s plan for severe weather anyway.

If you have been at your Long Island location any length of time, you’ve either identified or been introduced to the bad weather hazards at your particular location: power outages, flooding, leaking roof, mudslides, inaccessible parking lot. Certainly you’ve taken the time to define what IT services are critical to your business, what your employees are to do in the event of various weather emergencies and you may even have a backup location planned.

One item that is sometimes missed in this planning is how you will communicate with your key staff during a severe weather emergency. Consider that the cellular phone network may become damaged or over loaded during the emergency, resulting in those "Network Busy" messages when you try to place a call.

If that happens, use text messaging. Text messages, require very little bandwidth and are accepted and stored by the local cellular transceivers and forwarded instantly when bandwidth becomes available. Often, when a cellular network is too overloaded for voice calls, you will still be able to text each other.

But you will need to practice texting now. If you are not sure how to text, you can ask any teenager for a demo. You should also make your business staff aware that you will be texting them in case of cellular network overload and make sure that they too know how to text.