This release note covers 4.9.0 (early access) to 4.9.5 (production release).

As part of our continuing efforts to bring our customers the best emergency management system with the most value, I am pleased to announce the release of Crisisworks 4.9, which brings with some big new features as well as improvements all round.

For our long-term customers, thanks for your continued support.

We are continuing to improve Crisisworks and want to make it the best incident management platform available, and if you have any feedback, problems or suggestions for improvement then please reach out and let us know via our service desk. We want to make your experience as fluid and as good as possible.

Major new features

•  A fully-featured rostering system can help roster your officers and volunteers across your events
•  A new help and support portal with documentation and videos covers the entire system to help with training
•  The financial reconciliation module is now licensed for all customers — thanks for your ongoing support!
•  An asset import facility is now available for self-importing assets into Crisisworks
•  The user profile, event selectors and joining events have been streamlined to handle users with lots of responsibilities
•  Access to global documentation has been improved — it is now automatically enabled for all users, and documentation can be accessed even when no events are active via a new policy-based event security mode.
•  Working across events (via All Participating Events mode) is better supported with numerous fixes and improvements made 

Rostering & Financial Reconciliation

The new rostering feature enables full-featured rostering of users across multiple positions and teams, as well as tracking user availability based on shifts and user preference. This has been battle hardened over the past 18 months in use at UnitingCare Recovery in Queensland for their volunteer management, and is now offered as part of Crisisworks' standard feature-set.

And the financial reconciliation module, which was once added only with an extra licence fee, is now also free for all customers. This has also been battle tested and has processed millions of dollars of recovery spend.

Asset Import

You can now Import Assets into Crisisworks via the Crisisworks Import feature. You can either update existing assets or create new assets simply by uploading either a CSV or ZIP file of assets to be imported.  

Changes to navigation

 As part of our continuing improvement, we've made a few changes to the user navigation that will affect coordinators and administrators.

Events is now located under Administration

As of Crisisworks 4.9, the "Events" menu, the "Finance" menu and the "Settings" menu are now all located under a new menu option "Administration".

Streamlined Event Selector

The event selector has had a make-over and now includes quick access to switch events, as well as access to key information about the current event — View Currently On Duty and View Roster.  Administrators can also View All Events and Create New Event.

Streamlined user profile menu

For busy people with lots of responsibilities, the revised user profile menu now lists your duties only once, even if you're on duty across multiple events.

You can click the position to see the breakdown across all events, and as a quick visual indicator, red means off duty across all events, green means on duty in at least one event, and green with a checked circle means on duty across all events.

You can also access your roster availability records from this menu.

Other Improvements

There were literally hundreds of commits in this release, and here are the highlights.

•  The documentation library could not sort by title
•  Full text searching for documents was not including the text within uploaded PDF and DOCX attachments
•  Tag counters were not appearing when in All Participating Events
•  When editing global items containing assignments (e.g. templates), the assignment was sometimes lost on re-editing the item
•  When creating events based on template events, sometimes this would not copy the template items correctly
•  Tags are now shown on the datagrid for the main registers
•  Emails and SMSs are sent in the background, and this makes announcements faster to save (that is, information set to publish to users or positions using email and/or sms)
•  Performance of logging in and going on duty is improved, and performance across the system continues to get better with each release
•  Lots of minor improvements have been made across the board with hundreds of code commits and vast testing

We hope you enjoy this release.