Black Coral Services

Deployment of any major system within an organization such as incident management software represents a significant investment. It requires processes to be updated, affected people be trained, and tests and exercises be carried out to ensure the success of the adoption of the technology. In the end, the only measure that matters is the success you have in fulfilling your public safety mandate, and the ease with which Black Coral’s products enable you to do this.

To better ensure your success, Black Coral believes in supporting your adoption of our technology. We do this by offering a full complement of services as described below through our Black Coral Services team. This team consists of trainers, consultants, project leaders, project managers and support personnel, all of whom are well versed in the Black Coral products and how to use them most effectively.

Customization, Forms and Reports

SoftRisk® allows for various levels of customization to make a site look and feel unique while maintaining a consistent application structure, especially the common data model that all instances of SoftRisk support. Sample services include:

• Web Application Customization: Customers are able to customize the website itself, providing locations for Terms of Service, header and footer modifications, customization of all key dropdown (combination lists) data types.
• Forms Customization: SoftRisk supports specific forms for collection of information (e.g. ICS forms) using InfoPath. InfoPath is licensed as part of Microsoft Office Professional. SoftRisk will look for known data elements, for example Incident Name and Incident Number, in customer-defined forms and populate them automatically. This effectively allows the InfoPath designer to have total control over the data in the forms and the appearance of that information, while benefiting from not having to enter information twice.
• Standard Report Customization: Standard printed reports can be customized to include the specific organization’s name, ensuring there is no confusion over the origin of a generated report.
• Ad Hoc Report Customization: In addition to the built-in reports predefined in the application, SoftRisk can be used with either Crystal Reports (SAP/Business Objects) or Microsoft Report Server.

SoftRisk includes forms that have a consistent look and feel to make data entry and importing as easy as possible. End users with administrative privileges can customize the forms throughout SoftRisk (Incident Manager, Site Manager, Resource Manager, Contact Manager) by modifying the majority of the drop down menus. This is done using a simple forms administration wizard, and does not require any programming skill.

SoftRisk can accommodate the integration of FEMA forms. The System Administrator will control which forms are accessible to their respective users.

With respect to forms customization, as the data are stored in a Microsoft SQL relational database, SoftRisk lends itself to what amounts to an infinite amount of customization and ad hoc reporting.

Black Coral Services are able to either assist you in developing your own reports and forms, or to save time for your organization, to do these tasks for you.

Integration

Black Coral's systems engineers can help you leverage your investment in existing applications and systems by integrating them with Black Coral applications. Black Coral products have been designed with integration in mind and have APIs to assist engineering teams to integrate them into existing operational environments.

The Black Coral team has deep corporate expertise and experience in integration of its technologies with GIS, CAD, AVL, and other incident management and GIS systems. Additionally Black Coral can provide deep information sharing capability across multiple levels of government and jurisdictions.

Support for Multi-Jurisdictional Customers

Virtually all organizations involved in public safety today have a mandate to work with others in fulfilling their mandates. This occurs at all levels of government, whether federal, state or local, and across jurisdictions such as fire, police, etc. The Black Coral team has the knowledge and experience necessary to provide deep information sharing capability across multiple levels of government and jurisdictions.

Training

Keeping with the overriding goal of ease-of-use, Black Coral’s training programs are designed to enable users to quickly gain the skills they will need to be productive with the products. There is a focus on making sure users understand the user interface model and are comfortable navigating the various features of the products. In doing this, they will learn both the primary and typical tasks performed by users, but also be ready to “discover” new features as they need them through the consistent interface design and easy to use navigation.

Black Coral is able to support rapid deployment of new users by providing, in a matter of minutes, basic training in the use of the products. The result is your organization is able to train new “surge users” to be effective in the limited way they may be making use of the software.

Training is available for all Black Coral solutions in a variety of formats to suit each customer’s unique requirements and budget constraints. It can be provided on-site or via the Web to regular and administrative end users, groups and other trainers in a hands-on setting.

In addition to standard training on Black Coral’s off-the-shelf applications, Black Coral can also provide training to customers who would prefer to design their own custom forms and add custom mapping layers within Black Coral’s applications.

Technical Support

Black Coral Services stands behind our products, and works to ensure you get the technical support you and your team require. Our support personnel are well versed in all of our products and how to use them effectively in a variety of public safety situations. The support team works very closely with the engineering team, ensuring that your inquiries are addressed quickly and accurately.

Black Coral Services offers as a standard service support during regular business hours. For customers who require longer periods of support, Black Coral would be pleased to discuss your specific needs and work towards ensuring you have the backup you require to fulfill your mandate.

For more information on these services, please contact services@blackcoral.net