- A: Where Will You Meet After a Disaster?
- B: Make Your Phone Numbers Follow You
- C: Recognize the Benefits and Pitfalls of Wireless Phones
- D: Consider Two-Way Radios
- E: Carry Pagers
- F: Large Campus? Consider a Low-Power AM Broadcast Station
- G: Who Will Clean Up the Mess?
- H: Who Rewires the Building?
- I: Consult a Commercial Disaster-Recovery Center
- J: Are Your People Willing to Leave Town in a Disaster?
- K: What If Some People Dont Show Up?
- L: Does Everyone Know How to Get to the Recovery Center?
- M: Test Your Recovery Center
- N: Do You Know How to Use the Recovery Center Phones?
- O: Whos in Charge of the Recovery?
- P: Keeping the EMT Apprised
- Q: Who Will Retrieve Data Stored Offsite?
- R: Consider Online Vaulting
- S: Where Is Your Voice Mail System?
- T: Look Carefully at Automated Call Distribution Units
- U: Dont Expect Anything to Work the First Time After a Disaster
- V: Where Will You Get Telecommunications Test Equipment?
- W: For Want of a Nail
- X: Seen Any Good Books Lately?
- Y: Could You Work at the Recovery Center for a Long Time?
- Z: What Did You Learn From Your Last Test?
- Summary: What Did You Learn from This Series?
U: Don’t Expect Anything to Work the First Time After a Disaster
Issue: Anyone who’s been involved in any type of a recovery center test knows that getting replacement software up and running is a very common problem. Small subtleties in operating systems, or even minute differences in components such as tape drives, can create lasting and severe headaches for people attempting to uninstall software from one system and reinstall it on another.
Action: Expect problems with the installation or restoration of your software. Get your technical team together and plot strategies for solving at least the most common installation problems that are likely to come up. Your plan should list who needs what software immediately and where the original software media are located. (Offsite in a secure location? Good!) You should also have sources for purchasing replacement software if some is destroyed. Note that forcing replacement software on users may mean unintentionally upgrading to the latest version (with unwanted attendant usage problems), loss of customizations that are essential to the workforce, etc. All of these potential problems should be addressed in your plan.