OFFICIAL

Crisisworks 4.24 released

Created by Scott Davey
Last updated: Aug 20, 2019 by Peter Kakris
4 min read

We are pleased to announce the staged roll-out of Crisisworks 4.24, which is a major release that includes many new features that are part of a larger roadmap of readiness for the summer fire season.

Powerful New Search Capability

With this release, powerful cross-register searches are now possible using a new search syntax that will be familiar to power users of search engines such as Google.

Here’s some examples of what’s now possible:

  • Basic Searching (search individual words or quote “complete phrases”; it will search all fields and attachments within records and related records)

    "espresso coffee" -decafinated

  • Field and value searches (assigned to Scott, high priority and a title containing the word “Coffee”)

    assigned:"Scott Davey" priority:high title:coffee

  • Complex tag searches (has #red but not #green)

    #red -#green

  • Show records based on a related record’s tags

  • Show cases that are within an affected area I’ve uploaded to the wiki

  • Show me all open recovery cases that have open tasks for fencing.

  • Show me all recovery cases in an affected area, with some tags, that have affected females under the age of 18 along with damaged primary place of residence, and that have granted permission to share.

We will be rolling out enhanced documentation and training over the coming weeks, and will be upgrading the user interface to before summer to make searching like this more intuitive.

Free concierge services for searching, reporting and importing assistance

With this release, we are now introducing some free concierge services to help you get the most out of Crisisworks when in emergencies, without being an expert in all its complexities.

Free* Search Concierge: With Crisisworks' new search technology, it’s now possible to construct much more powerful searches to streamline your operation. If you need to build an advanced search, contact us and we’ll work with you to build a query that gives you exactly what you need.

Free* Import Concierge: We understand that in recovery you're often dealing with external agencies, contractors and spreadsheets of data. Plus, you might have geospatial data such as impact zones or affected properties from initial impact assessments. Now you can use our free concierge service to import this data into Crisisworks easily and accurately.

Free* Report Writing Concierge: When it’s time to get the data out of Crisisworks, you can search, export and use the built-in reports to get the answers you need, however sometimes you need more detailed analysis or specific reporting. Datalink is happy to announce that we are now offering a free report writing concierge service, to analyse and extract data.

These concierge services are freely available (for smaller jobs) for all emergency events, larger or complex imports/reports will be quoted on.

Geospatial area imports

This release also sees an upgrade to our Geospatial Reference Item feature. Now it’s even easier to add and use custom geospatial records to Crisisworks.

When you next work in a large event, you can now import the geospatial observation data from the state control centre directly into a new reference item, and this can then be made available as a linked asset (for relating records such as requests or cases to custom areas), a search index (to manage records within or not within the area), and a layer (for overlaying over maps).

The system reads many common geospatial format including WKT, GeoJSON, KML, GPX and GeoRSS.

Mobile Upgrades

Accompanying this release, the mobile app has been upgraded to make working offline smoother and more powerful.

  • You can now star many thousands of records for offline use — go ahead and star your entire FPN inspection list or environmental health inspection list before you leave the office.

  • Global records such as contacts are now handled better

  • You can choose to switch the app into forced offline mode, which is useful in areas of low and intermittent network capability to avoid frustrating network timeouts while saving records.

Additionally, the system has been made faster and more reliable than before, plus the Windows edition has been upgraded to be in line with the Android and iOS counterparts.

Look out for version 1.10.4 in the Apple App Store (iOS), the Microsoft Store for Business (Windows), and Google Play Store (Android) in the coming days.

Vicmap updates

Our Vicmap property data import system has been upgraded to be more frequently updated, and to support multiple property lookup codes at once (e.g. PROPNUM, CREFNO, etc).

We know that plenty of our Victorian customers are gearing up for the Fire Prevention season, and we will be rolling this out with consultation to each customer using the FPN module, to ensure a smooth transition.

Other changes

Along with these major upgrades, there are plenty of improvements that shouldn’t go unnoticed.

  • Improvements to performance when generating reports and letter merges during peak times

  • Improvements to the speed of message delivery in peak times

  • Support for Queensland geospatial address imports from Queensland Spatial.

  • Minor bugfixes

We have an exciting roadmap coming up, and we hope you enjoy this release.