Announcing: D4H™ v9.2 Tybee Island Release

While there is so much in this release across all our products, it's very much a utility release. Lots of new and enhanced utilities to permission, access, connect, and consume your readiness & response data.

What’s New Overview

D4H™ Personnel & Training

1. Privacy By Design
2. Just Observing
3. Attendance Spreadsheets
4. World Text SMS Integration
5. Export Historic Qualifications

D4H™ Live Response

1. Import Personnel from Personnel & Training
2. Map Export as KML or GeoJSON
3. Selective Channel Export
4. Default Incident Timezone
5. Scroll PDF Pages In Document Viewer
6. Snapshot Forms
7. Duplicate Forms
8. Situation End Date

D4H™ Incident Reporting & Analytics

1. Owner Only Tag & Resource Editing
2. Documents In Activity Workflow
3. Custom Paperwork Templates

All Products

1. Better Account Membership Listings
2. Performance Optimizations
3. API Updates

D4H™ Personnel & Training

Privacy By Design

Privacy is important to us, and we follow a ‘Privacy By Design’ approach to our software. As part of this approach, along with giving privacy options to members, an account owner can now disable fields about a member which they do not want to hold the data for. While everyone’s privacy rights are equally important, this is a small piece of our work towards our support for our EU customers going through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) changeover. Owners can

Just Observing

Plenty of teams add members from other organizations or from their management to allow them to observe the team. Previously we’d recommended they be added as “Non-Operational Members” but this involved them a little too much. We’ve now added a new built-in member status called an “Observer”. Observers can be given permission to sign-in to a team but will never appear in attendance lists, never get email alerts, and never get a weekly briefing. This is the perfect place to invite your management, headquarters, or a contemporary on another team who you have a data sharing agreement.

Attendance Spreadsheet

When it comes to the end of the year, everyone needs to report on their hours within specific tags and roles they’ve undertaken for log books, performance reviews, and compliance. Our member attendance screen has always been perfect for this but was always missing a spreadsheet download option so members could use their own data better. We’ve enhanced this, and members can now download a spreadsheet of all their own attendance.

World Text SMS Integration

UK & Ireland teams have been asking us for years to add World Text to our Communications Module as they already have accounts through SARCall. Now you can target your members and groups from D4H with your World Text account in our Communications Module. World Text provides high deliverability on UK & Ireland networks compared to some international providers. To enable, an account owner should go to Settings > Communications > Add Provider > World Text.

Export Historic Qualifications

We’ve added a new spreadsheet export which contains all the historic awarding of qualifications of members, not just their latest one. This is useful if you want the entire record for an archive or need to show a trail of awards over multiple years.

D4H™ Live Response

Import Personnel from Personnel & Training

We’ve integrated Live Response with your D4H Personnel & Training databases to ensure your member data is always in sync when you are on an incident. To configure in Live, go to Admin Area > Settings > D4H Integration within Live Response.

Map Export as KML or GeoJSON

The map in Live Response can now be exported. You’ll see a new icon on the map, which contains the options to export the current view (preserving module visibility selection and archived/unarchived flag) to GeoJson or KML format. The exported map is also included in the channel export. It will contain all annotations and the location data of all the other modules selected for export.

Selective Channel Export

At the end of an incident, we generate PDF files for every single form, item, and list in Live Response during the Channel Shutdown & Export. It’s now possible to choose to include into the channel export only the items list vs each item form individually. This reduces the amount of data saved so only the important or custom modules get included. This is achieved in Admin Area > Settings > Channel Export.

Default Incident Timezone

Live Response has always used the timezone information provided by the client browser, however, for some backend operations, such as generating a channel export rather than use the timezone of the person who requested the operation, we now use a default timezone for the organization.

Scroll PDF Pages In Document Viewer

You are now able to scroll through the pages of the document as in a desktop viewer without needing the old-style arrows to go to the next/previous page once at the time.

Snapshot Forms

It’s now possible to save a read-only version of a form to “freeze” its contents (Snapshot). The snapshot is a generated PDF of the form at that point in time which is saved in the Forms module in the same folder of the original form. Forms could be snapshot to save a point in time or to generate uneditable folders of forms for an Incident Action Plan.

Duplicate Forms

Create different versions of the same form or use a form as a template.

Situation End Date

The Situation form now has a new built-in field called ‘End Date’. This has been introduced so that we can match both the start date and end date fields of an incident when it is export over to Incident Reporting & Analytics. The start date field of the situation will now be auto-populated with the start date of the channel but remains editable, while the end date will be automatically set to the channel shutdown date. The user will be prompted to confirm the situation end date when the channel is shut down.

D4H™ Incident Reporting & Analytics

Owner Only Tag & Resource Editing

We’re trialing a new user interface for adding, editing, merging, and deleting tags & resource within our Parent Organization accounts with the objective to move it to teams accounts if well adopted. The big change here is that Tags & Resources will only be editable by an Account Owner in Settings > Tags and Settings > Resources. What we’re trying to do is put more focus on pre-selecting a set of measurable tags and resources that matter rather than editors adding on-the-fly. Organizations will see this change within their accounts now, but we expect it to roll-out to teams based on feedback. As part of this update, the Intelligence > Tags, and Intelligence > Resources views were upgraded within organizations to simplify and modernize. New interface functionality also includes the ability to import Tags & Resources from a spreadsheet for quick adding.

If you’re not familiar with our organization accounts, they allow multiple teams from the same association or organization to be connected together to share and centrally control common tags, resources, qualifications, and more for regional reporting purposes.

Documents In Activity Workflow

We’ve added ‘Documents’ as a step within the activity workflow so you do not have to remember to separately upload them to the activity. Drag & drop multiple files to the drop zone area and we’ll attach them to the incident. Remember we now support native display and previews of KML, GPX, PDF, JPG, and PNG.

Custom Paperwork Templates

Enterprise customers can now have custom paperwork templates output for each activity, pulling from any field within the incident, attendance, or other data. Templates are entirely customizable to match existing paperwork and will automatically generate for each activity. Templates may be loaded at team level or organization-wide. The example below shows a sample Emergency Management British Columbia ‘Task Report’ being output from a mock incident in D4H.

All Products

Better Account Membership Listings

As our customers have grown D4H out within their organizations, they added more teams and more organizations. This has caused the memberships listings page for swapping between teams to become a mess. We’ve done some small pieces of work here to reorganize all your teams to within their specific organization. Multi-team, multi-organization, users will love this small update.

Performance Optimizations

Hundreds of small performance optimizations were carried out, including nicer loading spinners, fewer file resources per page, and faster routing.

API Updates

The API continues to grow to add more functionality for 3rd Party integrations and mobile apps.

Why ‘Tybee Island’ Release?

We’ve always named our software releases after different lighthouses because our HQ is based in an 1814 lighthouse and light-keeper training college in Ireland! Tybee Island Light is a lighthouse next to the Savannah River Entrance which some of our crew visited while the feature set of release was being finalized.