Why it exists
A school keeps a bell that works in a blackout.
That is the whole argument. The reason a building has its own alarm rather than renting one is that the moment you need it is the moment everything else is also going wrong.
The shape, not the feature list
Some districts want the arrangement where the server sits in their own rack, the configuration is theirs, and the thing works or fails on equipment somebody can walk up to. Not because a subscription is wrong — for plenty of districts it is exactly right — but because the building has to be able to speak for itself.
Subscription software is easier to support, easier to update and easier to sell, and those are real advantages that Halyard gives up on purpose. What it buys back is that nothing a building hears depends on reaching anything outside it.
That is the gap Halyard is built for. Not a missing feature: a missing shape.
What we believe about the interface
An emergency notification system has a property most software does not: the people who use it under pressure are the people who use it least. A school secretary may go six months between lockdowns, and the lockdown is not the moment to remember where anything is.
So the design is measured by re-entry rather than by learnability. Not “can somebody learn this” but “can somebody who last touched it in September do the right thing in February, first try, with adrenaline.” Five of the rules that follow from it:
Nothing before the thing
Sending an announcement must not require creating an object first. Anything a person must assemble before they can act is a step that will be skipped or got wrong at the worst time.
Practice is free of consequence
A rehearsal reaches one speaker on the real path and texts nobody. A system that punishes practice is a system nobody practices on.
Say who heard it
“Dispatched to one group” is not an answer. Which speakers played it is the question somebody is actually asking.
A refusal says what it is
In the words of the person reading it, not the words of the system. “Opted out of texts”, not an error code.
No state told apart by color alone
Every state that matters is distinguishable without seeing hue. The person this rule was written for is color blind, and so are roughly one in twelve men who might have to read the screen during an emergency.
What we will not do
Machine-translate an emergency
A second language is typed by the district. A machine-written sentence in a lockdown is a building sent the wrong way, and it is not something to find out about afterwards.
Put a cloud service in the speaker path
Reaching people by text and email is a cloud service and degrades like one. Reaching the building is not, and never will be.
Claim something that has not been run
Including on this website. Where a thing is designed rather than built, or built rather than proven, the page says so — see the product page.
Where this is
Halyard is in development and is not yet for sale. It is proven against real speakers on a bench rather than against a specification, and the list of what has and has not been proven is kept on the product page rather than in a drawer.