Linn County Sheriff’s Office — Multi-Channel Alerting
One alerting layer across pager, SMS, email, and app, with browser-based access when dispatch terminals go down.
Overview
Linn County Sheriff’s Office supports 911 dispatch across 21 fire departments, 4 law enforcement agencies, and 5 ambulance services.
The county replaced a difficult-to-manage legacy paging environment with HipLink, giving dispatchers one place to send alerts across radio pagers, SMS, email, and mobile app. Today, the deployment supports 310 active devices across 65 operational groups.
The value became especially clear during a major software outage. When Windows dispatch terminals went offline, dispatchers accessed HipLink through an iPad and iPhone and continued delivering pages.
The Challenge
Linn County’s legacy PageGate environment had become difficult to manage at the scale of a multi-agency dispatch operation.
Receiver lists and broadcast groups required ongoing maintenance, while SMS delivery depended on email-to-SMS gateways that worked inconsistently across carriers. The county also needed to support frequently changing groups across fire, EMS, patrol, special teams, Search & Rescue, crisis negotiation, school administration, and other county functions.
The replacement needed to simplify management, support multiple delivery channels, provide reliable SMS, and remain accessible even when normal dispatch infrastructure was unavailable.
The Solution
HipLink became Linn County’s primary alerting layer for dispatch communications.
Dispatchers can send one message across radio pagers, direct SMS, email, and the HipLink mobile app. HipLink also sends alerts to IamResponding, allowing the county to support existing responder workflows from the same alerting environment.
Each receiver is configured with two independent communication paths where appropriate, helping reduce dependence on any single device or channel. Browser-based access also gives dispatchers another way to reach HipLink when normal workstations are unavailable.
Results
Linn County now supports 310 active devices across 65 groups, covering fire, EMS, patrol, special teams, Search & Rescue, crisis negotiators, school administrators, and other county operations.
The deployment also proved its value during a major software outage. When Windows dispatch terminals went offline, dispatchers accessed HipLink from mobile devices and continued delivering pages.
Direct SMS replaced the carrier-dependent email-to-SMS path used in the legacy environment, while delivery reporting gives dispatch supervisors better visibility when a message is missed or sent to the wrong group.
As Sgt. Shawn Ireland put it:
“When a major software outage took Windows dispatch terminals offline, browser-based access kept paging alive. As long as we could get to the Internet, get to HipLink, we were back in business.”