Delivering Superior Solutions
The safety and communication needs of organizations continue to evolve as new threats, new legislation and new opportunities offer new ways to keep people safe and informed. Singlewire Software has always put our listening to the needs of our customers at the forefront of our work when developing new solutions to add to our InformaCast software. In our latest update, we’re making InformaCast easier to use and adding more value to it through the addition of mobile panic buttons, merged environments, system health alarms, and UI improvements. These new features are available now to help our customers achieve their 2022 safety goals.
InformaCast Updates
InformaCast 14.4.1 includes several important updates that provide new functionality and enhancements to existing features, including:
- Mobile Panic Buttons: Within InformaCast Command Center, system administrators can now create a new scenario type, “mobile panic button.” This allows InformaCast app users to press a designated button within the app to signal that an emergency situation is taking place. Once triggered the user will receive instructions and be able to connect with safety teams via a phone call directly from the app to receive further assistance.
- On the administrative side, these users will be included in a new panic button tracking event, which records users’ locations through the InformaCast app on their mobile devices and displays them in a map along with the name of the event that started the tracking, its status, and several controls, such as the ability to send follow-up messages to all tracked users. Knowing users’ locations during an emergency can aid in assisting them to safety. First responders will know where to send assistance, how many people are involved, and what kind of situation they’re walking into.
- Merged Separate Environment Types: Past versions of InformaCast Fusion had separate environments, e.g. one for users of Cisco Unified Communications Manager and one for Hybrid Runtime Environments (or non-Cisco Unified CM users), and those environments dictated the user interface elements you were able to see. There were even separate user guides. InformaCast Fusion 14.4.1 merges these separate environments into one, and makes the following improvements:
- Organizations can now have Cisco IP phones for Unified CM and IP phones for cloud calling instead of only one or the other.
- Moving from an installation of InformaCast Fusion integrated with Cisco Unified Communications Manager to one without it no longer requires rebuilding InformaCast Fusion from scratch.
- And more!
- New System Health Alarms: Three new system health alarms were added. In installations of InformaCast Fusion integrated with Cisco Unified CM, two new alarms, AL-ICCTIPAUTH and AL-ICCTIPOOS, alert you if InformaCast Fusion’s CTI communication to Cisco Unified CM is misconfigured or missing. For all installations of InformaCast Fusion, the new AL-ICMSPACE alarm alerts you if InformaCast Fusion is running low on Java Virtual Machine (JVM) Metaspace memory, i.e. less than 1 percent left. If any of these alarms are RED, the Overall alarm will also show RED. RED alarms indicate that notification delivery is impacted. You should investigate and remediate them immediately.
- Improved User Interface for Several Features: Singlewire has begun rolling out InformaCast Fusion’s new user interface for select features. The new interface incorporates valuable user feedback and a new design system to encourage consistency across our application and make future improvements easier to implement. The following features were improved (with additional documentation forthcoming):
- Bells, including ring lists, schedules, and exceptions
- Triggers
- Quick URL
- Users
- Anonymous Users
- Applications
- Self Service
- New System Health Logs: A new menu choice for each system health alarm, More | View Logs, allows you to see the activities of a specific system health alarm, e.g. the date and time an alarm became active or was resolved, the cause tag for the alarm, the on-premises server on which the alarm occurred, etc.
- View the Number of On-premises Recipients: The Statistics tab of the Notification Details page has a new On-premises Devices channel that lists the number of on-premises devices that received a notification along with whether the notification failed to reach a channel’s recipient(s), and the amount of time it took to send the notification 50% through the channel, 95% through the channel, and 100% through the channel.
Read the full release notes for more information about what’s new in InformaCast 14.4.1.