Blog from February, 2018

February 26 2018


We are pleased to announce the release of Crisisworks 4.13, which simplifies the use of resources and improves performance.

Global resources

In this release we are introducing the concept of 'global' and 'on-the-fly' resources, to make the dealing with resources in events much easier.

Global resources are resources that are made available across all events without having to be explicitly added each time. This means your users can more easily search and use your key resources in new events without coordinators or administrators adding them into the current event. Like other global record types, global resources are made available across the system whenever the containing event is in an open state.

On-the-fly resources can be added into requests at the time the request is being created. They are only available to the event in which they were created, and are not available to other events.

To facilitate this change, a new event called 'Global Resources' has been implemented. Upon release of 4.13 to your site, we automatically convert all resources that were not created inline as part of a request to become global resources, and we place them into the 'Global Resources' event.

Updated documentation can be found in the Crisisworks Knowledge Base.

Additional improvements 

The following improvements have been made in this release.

  • Performance improvements to datagrid loading times.
  • Updated description to the postal type field on Persons Register to avoid confusion with the temporary address.
  • Updated the Information reports to add the extended fields from all its schemas, as well as filter for a given schema — the Information register includes the Situation Report and Briefing schema types.
  • Update activity feed for published message. It now shows when an item is queued to send and when its sent.
  • Fix for global counters on register data grids not being clickable.
  • Media files uploaded by the app are now allocated a more friendly file name rather than 'blob'.



This release contains a number of improvements and has been released to all customers.

Roster Updates

  • Updated Roster error message when adding an item to roster to ensure the user has selected a date range.
  • Fixed issue with formatting of the End Date in date range availability search.

Event Copy Updates

  • Fixed issue where by register items contained within the event where not copied to a new event when using the Event Copy feature ( from the event list screen).
  • General processing improvements

Other Improvements

  • Update to the Multi Options field so that it only displays active items.

Information Register Notifications

  • Make the email notification layout uniform across all schemas.
  • Add missing fields to the Situation Report notification email.
  • Add Briefing schema to notification email.

Weeds Register Updates

  • Refinements to the security policies of Weed related positions.
  • Created a new ‘Items I've Created’ counter.
  • Relaxing state change rules to allow for less restrictive workflow.
  • Added a new dynamic permission that they can accessAdminWorkflow.
  • Added new workflow status - Reopen. Allowing weed co-ordinators re-open closed items.

Asset Import

  • Add fix to asset import parser rules (parcel, property, road etc) to handle projection conversions to lat and long geo data.



Feb 7, 2018


With this release, the  "Penalty Infringement Notices Detail" and "Warning Notices Detail" reports have been updated to include details of the Offender's gender, and the origin and destination values recorded for the offence.

Crisisworks 4.12 released

2 February 2018

Today we are rolling out Crisisworks 4.12, which contains a range of performance improvements and new features. This will be progressively rolled out to all users over the next few days.

New features

Use templates to create training injects 

Now you can set up a series of template items (e.g. cases, requests, messages) that can be injected during training simulations. This is a great way to prepare a streamlined exercise, as well as re-use content across your exercises.

Read our practice note for more details. 

Automatic on-duty management

Crisisworks can now automatically place your on-call personnel on duty in their positions, whenever you add a position to an event.

To access this feature, check the checkbox labelled Automatically place on-call users on duty when creating or editing an event. 

Greater visibility on who received your published messages

Information items are a great way to capture and share intelligence such as situation reports, incident action plans, announcements and other messages during in incident 

They contain a publishing feature that will send a formatted email and/or SMS message to all specified recipients.

Now with Crisisworks 4.12, when publishing an item you can view the audit log to see the complete list of recipients, the delivery method used and the status of that delivery. This provides increased visibility and comfort that a message was delivered. 

Performance improvements

We've worked hard on this release to improve the performance of Crisisworks with two key areas:

  1. Whenever events are added or positions added, Crisisworks now processes this changes much faster than before
  2. Users go on or off duty faster than previously

Measured performance improvement varies site to site, but we've seen a 500% improvement in some cases.

Other Improvements

  • The Situation Report template within the Information record has been updated based on feedback from a user group, to contain more useful fields. 
  • Added a new Briefing Handover template within the Information record 
  • User profile notification settings are now more easy to understand
  • When reading logs, actions performed by Anonymous User have been renamed to System to avoid confusion — these are changes made by the system itself.
  • Added the ability to duplicate an event via the event datagrid
  • Improved asset importing speed and handled more edge cases (thanks to Corangamite for their feedback)
  • When creating a new event from an event template where that event template contains item templates, those items were previously ignored. Now those item template are copied into the new event. If you didn't understand that last sentence then don't worry, neither do I — our recommendation is to use global events for training injects rather than template events.
  • Fixed crash when a faulty record cascade rule was defined (Cardinia FPN)
  • Improved the audit log for changes affecting multiple items
  • Fixed audit log displaying image thumbnails in the log when they were deleted
  • Fixed the Infrastructure Assessment reports to show cost estimate and actual values for only the selected event
  • Fixed the Roster Reports which was crashing for a small number of users
  • Fixed some multiple edge cases where some items were not copied when creating a new event from a template event.
  • Some MEROs reported they could not view other people's logs.
  • Additional search filter options have been added across various registers to improve content visibility


As always, thank you for being a Crisisworks user, and please let us know how we're doing by dropping us an email to our service desk or via Twitter.