Where Email Saved Lives

I thought this near horrific story of yet another campus security issue was a way to show email in a different light. Some excerpts:

...students on campus were alerted over campus public address systems and by e-mail. He (potential shooter) was locked down with other students in the campus' student union.

The lockdown came just hours after school officials sent a campus-wide e-mail to students updating them about plans for an emergency messaging service. Many universities are deploying such systems in a response to last year's shootings at Virginia Tech, where a student gunman killed 32 people and himself last April.

Schools have had to become proactive very quickly in terms of how they will communicate to their students, parents and staff since this seems to be an all too common occurrence. Why I hate to see anything like this happen, it is good to see schools ,which are traditonally slow to embrace technology, utilize smart messaging strategy for crisis situations like this. Sobering usage of email for sure.