As we head towards Christmas, we are delighted to announce the release of Crisisworks 4.21, which contains two new features to help manage resources and reference information, as well as improvements across the system to make it easier to use, faster to use and more robust.

New Features

• Resource Contacts: Resources can now be linked to contacts, giving you a central place to both manage your resources and organise your contact information for the operators of that resource. The contacts appear in your contact directory and can be searched by resource name. Plus, contact information will now appear whenever resources are assigned to requests and other registers.

• Create assets from library items, and view them as map layers: The library has always supported Geospatial Features, but now these are also stored as assets, allowing you to find them from asset searches on other registers, and allowing you to overlay each category of geospatial feature as a separate map overlay. Using this feature, you can import, view, manage and overlay datasets such as vulnerable facilities, road blocks, staging areas or initial impact data, and relate the data to requests and other registers.

• Auto-refresh: When working on register data grids, your data will automatically refresh whenever data is changed by other users. This applies whenever you are filtering by using the counters, but will not automatically happen if you are in a custom search.

Key Improvements

• Improved usability for managing user duty and user profiles: The duty management screen has now moved the action buttons from the bottom to the top right of screen, so they are always visible. The duty form also makes it clear if a user is proceeding without changing their duties, or if they will have no resulting duties, which are common problems for new users.

• Bulk remove tags: You can now use the Bulk Edit feature to bulk-add and bulk-remove tags.

• Improved property search: Crisisworks has improved both the performance and accuracy of property searches, with improved matching to property addresses based on the phonetic sound of a street name or suburb. Note that now you must type in 3 or more characters to return any assets.

• Resource counters for requests are back: To help coordinators track assignment of requests to resources, each in-use resource is listed as a separate counter on the data grid. An “All Resources” counter allows coordinators to view all items having resources.

Other improvements

• Code optimisations make data fetching vastly faster for many key operations such as loading the data grids, searching assets and other activities where there are lots of records involved.

• Merging two or more items now correctly merges all comments added against those items, into the resulting item. The item merge facility has also been added to the information register.

• Asset contacts now support regions. Asset contacts, which are used for mail merging infringement notices among other things, now support sites that use regions. When importing asset contacts, your default region will be used if you set “auto” in the import form.

• Users are in the global contact system by default. Users that are imported will now default to being in the global contact list, unless you provide an import column in your CSV file to override that behaviour.

• The Emergency Sample event template has been updated to include additional positions to make creating new events on this template easier.

• All Crisisworks sites are now discoverable via a Google search. This helps users that search for the Crisisworks works from within the search bar rather than the address bar to find their site.

• Background tasks such as data imports can be re-processed even if they were successful. This allows for asset contact imports to be re-run after a Vicmap import, which is required to map contacts to newly added properties.

• User location data gathered during mobile operations is now securely deleted after 1 day

• An audit of customers using both properties and parcels has found ways to remove duplication for these customers.

• The FPN module has an increased resolution for attached photos.

• UnitingCare: Added reports and an export feature for CR Common and CR Common Services.

• The import system now provides more detailed error messages for any failures.

• The import rule for the infrastructure assessment module now includes the missing asset type and damage level fields.

We hope that you enjoy this release, and please let us know if you have any questions or issues.