Decisions For Heroes Blog

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Remember I hinted at a hidden feature? Did you find it? Well, if you had tried ‘Decisions For Heroes’ on your mobile last week, you would have found ‘D4H mobile’. It will work on any mobile phone with a web/internet/WAP browser (nothing modern required), in any country. Just visit your normal D4H address (e.g. http://yourteamname.d4h.org) on your phone - you’ll be asked to sign-in as usual.

‘D4H mobile’ is a stripped down version of the app, with just the right amount of information you need.

• Check your on-call status.
• Mark yourself off-call.
• Mark yourself back on-call in real-time.
• Check your team status, find out how many are available.
• Get alerted if any requirements have been broken.
• See who is away, and when they’re back.
• See how many of each qualification or group you have available.
• Find out what activities are happening ‘now’ or ‘next’.
• See what you missed, which activities were you absent for?
• Read your whiteboard.
• Write notes on the whiteboard.
• Confirm your attendance for an activity.

Wow!

Feedback from different phones greatly appreciated!

DUBLIN, IRELAND - The ‘Improve It’ section of the site asked for some whiteboard enhancements. They’re here!

No complex date fields! When we write notices, our minds work in ‘days from now’, not end dates. Solved!

You can now permanently delete ‘cleared’ notes, and the ability to duplicate a used note with the ‘use as template’ button. Sorted!

Every week we make this simplier!

DUBLIN, IRELAND - The best ideas come from you! While demoing the new ‘confirm attendance‘ feature to a rescue team, they asked why the dashboard didn’t prompt them if they hadn’t confirmed yet. It seemed obvious!

So from today, if you have not yet confirmed your attendance, and the activity is this week, or next, you’ll get a nice message reminding you. Excellent suggestion!

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Not sure who’s going to show for your training session? From today, when you request someone to attend an event, their attendance is put as ‘unconfirmed’. We show it as a question mark ‘ ? ‘ rather than a tick.

If the member wishes to confirm, they can click [Yes] or [No] on the activity page. This will give you an idea of who is coming on the day.

Note: Once the activity has started the list is locked, and any changes to attendance by an editor will be taken as ‘confirmed’ changes rather than ‘unconfirmed’. This is because once the activity has started we expect you to know who turned up or who didn’t.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Everyone’s an individual, or at least their attendance now is! A new ‘durations’ column has arrived on the [Update Attendance] page. Red text means it’s hours they were absent, green text is hours added to their logs for that activity, blank suggests they were not expected anyway.

When might you use this?

• An incident lasts 5 days but half the searchers only did 2 hours a day each. That’s 5×2hrs not 5×24hrs.
• You go away for a weekend as a team, but someone only turns up for one day, they get 8hrs instead of 48hrs.
• A team member is absent from a 5hrs training exercise. You only needed them there at the start anyway so you reduce the absent duration to 2hrs.

To treat everyone as an individual just roll over their duration hours and [click!], now their hours are editable… when you’re done, just [Save Changes] at the bottom as normal.

Note 1: If you go back and [update details] of the activity and adjust the start-end times, we’ll update all the attendance hours automatically, but only for those who’s hours were already the same as the duration of the activity. If you’ve already manually entered hours and you were wrong, you’ll need to update them all individually.

Note 2: If you’ve got dogs or horses on your team, currently they inherit the full event hours start-end like us humans used to. Once we’ve enough momentum in this area, we’ll make them individuals too!

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Release #364 (8th December 2009) has lots and lots of updates we’ve been working hard away on. If anything doesn’t work on your system, drop a note in the ‘improve it’ section.

New Flash Charts

All the charts on the site are now powered by Open Flash Chart 2. This update allows us to begin to move over to SSL security for your data as we’re generating them on our server - not on Google’s. All charts now have roll-over legends too.

Menu Tidy Up

We’ve begun to consolidate menus into simpler to understand layouts. Part of this was to merge [Comms] in under members as [Messages]. [Analytics] [Maps] is now under [Analytics] [Charts] -> ‘Heatmaps’. [Analytics] [Casualties] is now under [Activities] [Incidents] -> ‘All Casualties’. [Activities] [Agenda] is now under [Activities] [Calendar] -> ‘Agenda’. More menu changes will happen in the near future, it’s part of the plan to make the site more intuative as we add new features. Our mantra is “if you can’t control this site with an iPod dial, we’re too complicated”. We’re trying!

PDF Printing/Exports

We have a swish new printing option that allows you to create PDF reports from your data. This is ultra cool. Print calendars, phone lists (note: you only see the personal details shared with you), pocket mobile number guides, the whiteboard, etc. You can print off individual exercise/incident/event reports too. If you want a custom form replicated for your organisation, email me (robin at bytesurgery dot com).

Team Monthly and Annual Reports

A new menu option in [Analytics] is [Reports]. In here you’ll find the annual and monthly reports we’ve written for your team. We trend all your data to give you a nice report you can print out and hang on your base wall. We’re all about getting your data out of D4H again but with some magic value added.

More Numbers for Admins

Previously, we kept all personal charts ‘relative’. We never told you the exact number of activities someone had been on when comparing them to one another - we felt it might drive too much inter-team competition. Well, we’re sticking with that ethos for ‘Members’ but still giving all the information to ‘Member+’, ‘Editors’, and ‘Owner’ levels. Those guys now see the numbers too - enjoy the data!

Right Click Calendar

Jump into [Activities] [Calendar] and you can now right-click the blank area beneath a day number to quick-add an activity, or off-call period, to that date!

Forward & Back Calendar

Sick of picking dates from drop down fields? So were we! You can now jump forward or back a day, month or year in the calendar views.

Hidden Feature

If all has gone to plan, we’ll announce this killer feature this week. It’s already there - the question is, can you find it!? Hint - you’ll need small fingers.

Others

Whiteboard now has no end time, just a date. It ends at 23:59 in your timezone on the day you choose.

Export sidebars are neater, you should only see the export types you’re permissioned to.

We’ve added an enhancement to the calendar on request of a team. When you select a start date for an activity, the end date will automatically jump to that page of the calendar! We’ve also made it impossible to select a end date ahead of the start date.

-Robin.

You can now send emails to your team. Just pick the member group, qualification, availability level or individual from the drop-down menu. Type your email, we’ll do the rest to deliver it to your team.

We protect your teams email addresses - unless you have permission to see private fields (Member+, Editor, Owner) a member must first set the sharing of their email address to ’share with team’ before receiving any mail from other members.

You can opt to receive a copy of every mail you send to your own address, or use our ‘Sent Mail’ box feature which will list them all for you, linked directly into user profiles.

Benefits:

• You can now choose recipients by group e.g. send to ‘Boat Coxswains’ only, ‘VHF Holders’ only etc. This will allow the team to send more targeted mail rather than have everyone get hit with everything on a single list.
• You can revert to ‘make private’ your email address at any time to stop the emails, note that Member+, Editors, Owners can still contact you in this mode.
• You don’t have to update someone’s email in your address book when they change address. We will just send mail to their newest one automatically.

As always - please submit improvement and feedback and we’ll do our best to adapt!

Six teams asked for it, and they got it! Our new team whiteboard allows teams to leave messages for each other on the dashboard. We took the following properties of a whiteboard…

• Anybody can write on it.
• Anybody can clear messages.
• Everything is in full view of everyone.
• You can use different colour pens.

And with your help, we looked at how we can improve it digitally!

• We added a ‘valid-until’ date so notes get erased automatically on a date without you having to do it manually.
• Added permission levels so only you or someone with higher permission can only delete your own notes.
• Automatically sign and timestamp everything, so you know who wrote it and when.
• No limit of space (but we’ve limited notes to 140 characters to keep people short & sharp!).
• Added a history, so you can see everything ever written if you want. It’s not lost when cleared.
• Tell you what’s new. We highlight what’s changed since your last login.
• Allow you to colour urgent messages with a red pen!
• Decide who see’s what. Writing a message about using a vehicle? Then only display it on the dashboards of your licensed drivers.

You end up with a place to post messages to all your members!

Make sure to continue to leave feedback.

SMS is live! But not enabled in your accounts yet. We’re currently testing with a selection of Irish teams.

Exciting Times!

-Robin.