January just flew by, 2021 is already off to a great start!
It’s clear everyone is feeling recharged and energetic after the holiday season – ready to take on the new year! 2020 was a wild ride, no doubt there. But despite all the hurdles and disruptions, we were able to find new growth, develop ground-breaking features, and set a new standard for what’s possible. Here’s some of the highlights from last year…
Forensic Advantage Solutions Acquisition
In August, we expanded our public safety portfolio by bringing Forensic Advantage Systems into the family. For nearly two decades, FAS has worked closely with law enforcement agencies on the design, implementation, and integration of numerous mission-critical applications.
“We are excited to join a customer-focused organization that offers stability and growth to the companies it invests in, and we look forward to growing with them.”
David Romig II, Vice President Forensic Advantage Systems
New Team Members
In addition to the Forensic Advantage team, we welcomed aboard three new team members to our support services staff. We take our client support very seriously and so it’s only natural we insist on having a full staff of passionate and caring team members available to help you get the most out of your products.
“It’s not enough to come in and sell me something, it’s the people that come in after the salesperson is gone that matters. Caliber gives me the best maintenance that any CAD vendor can offer. I have talked to these people so many times over the years I feel like I know them.”
Theresa Russell, Director Ohio Co. 911 Center, WV
Thank You Notes
Growth for us was not just about expanding, it was about growing within as well. We wanted to make sure that as individuals we were promoting personal growth within our teams. That’s why we decided to engage gratitude in 2020 – by setting a goal as a business unit to send 10,000 handwritten Thank You’s. We believe written notes are artifacts of gratitude. We see them displayed on desks, tucked away in drawers, memories to be shared for decades. Thank You’s are reminders of relationships and celebrate the impact of your life lived.
Map Improvements
Our commitment to our clients is not just about making sure they have the right tools for the job. We are always introducing new ideas into our products, making sure that they are innovative and future ready – ready to help you protect tomorrow, today. An area that saw a lot of enhancement in 2020 was in our mapping. We enhanced the Maps in CAD NG, WebCAD 3.0, and Mobile 10.20 to incorporate hosted layers. This allowed our clients to add layers such as weather radar, COVID-19 cases, hospital utilization, and more. We also introduced Tertiary AVL for better tracking of resources. Now Users can track and display vehicles, personnel, and their devices all at one time.
CAD NG: RapidSOS Interface
RapidSOS has partnered with some of the largest technology and service providers out there in order to collect and distribute valuable information about 9-1-1 callers. They are able to collect information from smart phones, wearable technology, connected vehicles, and even location based applications like Uber. Our RapidSOS interface allows our CAD NG clients to access and review this information instantly, directly into CAD. They can view caller locations on the Map and track any movements, as well as review any supplemental data provided by connected devices.
CAD NG: WebCAD 3.0
You can’t mention 2020 without saying something about COVID-19 and some of our developments were a direct response to the pandemic. Priorities changed for our clients as they were presented with new challenges like lock-downs and enhanced safety regulations. WebCAD 3.0 was developed as a way to help our clients face these challenges head-on. The latest enhancements to WebCAD allowed our Users to create and update incidents remotely so that other resources could be leveraged to manage calls.
Online RMS: Community Reporting
Online RMS also saw enhancements in Custom Forms, giving birth to Community Reporting. Now agencies can design their own unique reporting forms in Online RMS and display them in their agency’s website. This allows the public to report non-emergency crimes or provide tips to law enforcement remotely, without the need to tie up resources or appear in person. And the submissions can be automatically routed to the appropriate users to follow-up.
Rethinking What’s Possible
When you can’t travel and you can’t gather in groups, we needed to get creative in order to ensure success in our deployments. Its an impressive feat that we were able to implement a project, from A to Z, using entirely virtual tools! Considering all the puzzle pieces that need to fall into place (setup and deployment all the way to training and cut live) its obvious that we couldn’t do this alone. Our clients’ support and their trust in us was key, so a huge shout out to everyone involved in making our mission a success!
We were able to apply the use of these virtual tools to our Regional User Groups as well. User groups are a great way to get valuable tips and tricks, hear what’s driving innovation, and discuss use cases to help us spur new ideas for future developments. We had big plans to offer even more User Groups in 2020 but with safety concerns and travel restrictions, we couldn’t hold these groups in person. We knew these sessions were too important to just give up on so we found ways to hold them remotely. We were able to host user groups for 5 different regions and they were a huge hit!
