The last release of Dashboard was Summer 2011 and since then there has been a slow but steady (and appreciated) flow of feedback from you regarding things that Dashboard should do, shouldn’t do, and seems to be doing without being asked!  We log pretty much all of these against either Bugs or Feature Requests for the Dashboard product; when we hear the same feature request more than once we increase the weight of it accordingly to make sure that it gets the attention it deserves, but equally if somebody thinks of something cool that Dashboard should do we weight that pretty high too – we all like good Kung Fu so if there is something you want to suggest then get in touch.

At the start of January, Dashboard wasn’t scheduled at all for work – there was a list of things we must address when we did look at it but that was as much as we had.  Those familiar with January will know it plays host to BETT week and that for most companies everything else stops during that week.  But for our developers it’s often a chance to get some much needed R&R, when they’re not tending our on-stand live demo platforms, visiting to talk to customers first-hand, or accepting our BETT award!

One of the development odd-jobs listed for BETT week was to correct the Fax number in Dashboard as we’d changed number a while back, but hadn’t got round to correcting it in Dashboard.  Thing is, it seemed silly to publish a whole update to Dashboard just for that; so we had a look at what else was outstanding for Dashboard and decided that we really ought to have a product release to address all these feature requests, and maybe a few of the bugs.

The next half-day or so was spent looking through all the features that you had requested and estimating the amount of developer work required to deliver them, we also graded them in terms of benefit for time cost.  Some didn’t make it; a lot of them were mine   Of course we also looked for opportunities to cunningly provide several features with the same bit of code so we could get more benefit for each bit of code we wrote and we kept referring to our longer term plans for Dashboard to see if any of the proposed changes could be made to align to those and allow us to start building for the future versions of Dashboard now.

The result?

Well, six days of development and four days of testing later we had cleared all bugs confirmed against Dashboard and introduced over 30 new features, some internal and some customer facing.  Some of the features some were really small, like helpfully including the Server Name on Excel exports and some were very complex – like completely redoing the Status column to tell you more accurately what the health of a specific Xporter looks like and why.  A lot were ones that everybody has been asking for, like grouping installations by update URL to spot your test schools and showing the current heartbeat status for schools in Rollout Manager.  We also changed the Fax number.

We also paved the way for some of our longer term ideas for Dashboard, including a recent schools list for when you log in, the ability to ‘follow’ a school so that when you apply a fix you can get an email update and won’t need to check back in on it, and laying the foundations for the Dashboard element of self-healing Xporter.

In the meantime it’s back to our other key development projects, mostly a mixture of Messenger Online, Emerge, and some other exciting things that we can’t tell you about yet!

We were delighted to receive this award at last Wednesdays BETT Awards Show. The BETT Awards recognise outstanding educational products and learning solutions and with a huge number of entries, are seen as the most respected in the sector. All category finalists were selected from a very competitive pool of entrants.

We were also pleased to announce our Broader Alliance with WisePay! Having listened to our customer’s requests, we have partnered with WisePay to help schools streamline the cash collection process and simplify online payments. Through WisePay, parents are able to securely make payments to their school 24/7.

Our Emerge partnership with SchoolComms was also announced during the BETT Show. As Emerge now integrates with both Messenger and SchoolComms, this will enable schools to take registration in the gym or on the field, communicate with parents or guardians whilst on a school trip, or send an emergency message from the playground where a school evacuation is necessary – perhaps due to a fire alarm being activated. Parents or guardians can also receive behavioural, attendance or general communication updates from schools in ‘real time’ by text message, as issues or questions arise.

On the topic of Emerge, we were delighted to also offer our customers the all new Android version! Emerge for Android was well received at BETT. Lawrence Royston, MD of Groupcall, explains why the new integration was a natural progression: “The streamlining of efficiencies is a priority for us; we are constantly improving our products to benefit the end user from either a functional or financial aspect.”

We were able to catch up with familiar faces as well as meet many new technology enthusiasts throughout the show. Many thanks to all those involved in setting up the BETT Show, it was a fantastic way to close the curtains on Olympia and make way for BETT at Excel in 2013!

Click to view slideshow.

Having just celebrated our 10th Birthday we are pleased to be exhibiting again at the 2012 BETT Show and are also excited to be shortlisted for the BETT Awards in the ICT Company of the Year category.

Groupcall were the first company to deliver an integrated solution that allowed schools to send SMS messages to parents and the product evolved quickly and was well received. This year at BETT 2012 you can expect to see lots of new product developments as well as our Emerge App, now available for Android devices too. As well as our exciting alliance with Wisepay and Schoolcomms, we will have some great special offers available to those who visit the stand!

We currently have over 20,000 organisations around the world using Groupcall every day to communicate and share information with millions of people. From Messaging to mobile and moving data to corporate emergency contact, our products touch a lot of people, click here for the full Groupcall product suite.

If you can’t make it to BETT you can always see what others are saying on the day by following #GroupcallBETT & #BETT_Show on twitter!

We look forward to seeing you there and here’s to a great BETT Show!

It began in the summer of 2001, when my wife Joanne and I received a call from our children’s primary school because they had a flood. This meant the school wouldn’t open on the first day of the autumn term. The only way they could contact all of the parents during the summer holidays was to phone each family, all 400 of them. That was the light bulb moment, there had to be a quicker and cheaper way of communicating with parents, whether it was an emergency or just something that had changed at school. With our joint backgrounds in software design and development and together with Alex Felton, my friend and colleague of 25 years, Groupcall was born!

We were the first company to deliver an integrated solution that allowed schools to send SMS messages to parents and the product evolved quickly and was well received. When Sir Bob Geldof heard about the project, it struck a chord because he was worried about his daughter travelling across London to school. He quickly became a founding partner of the company and has been involved ever since. Then in 2006, Groupcall was announced as the winner of the Daily Telegraph’s Trailblazers Award, a national competition for entrepreneurial UK businesses.

As a small family-run business of just 25 employees, the team at Groupcall are the real backbone of our products and a special mention must go to Stuart Abrahams, our Sales and Marketing Director, who took a leap of faith and joined us from a much larger organisation. Over the last 3.5 years, he has helped us grow and mature Groupcall into the professional organisation it is today.

To give you a sense of how our products have evolved over the past 10 years, we currently have 20,000 organisations around the world using Groupcall every day to communicate and share information with millions of people. From Messaging to mobile and moving data to corporate emergency contact, our products touch a lot of people, click here for the full Groupcall product suite.

We are continually motivated to keep innovating and pushing technical boundaries to produce better ways to share information and communicate. We feel fortunate to have all of our team and customers with us along for the journey and would like to thank them so much for their loyalty and support over these last ten years. We look forward to the next 10 and will continue with the same mission statement “the right data, the right place, the right time”.

Lawrence Royston,

MD

All of Groupcalls products are “vigorously” tested before launch, and Messenger 4 was no exception. With the initial mention of the M4 upgrade back at BETT 2010, our delay in delivery was due to some unexpected bugs. As with all new technology products, occasionally unexpected bugs will surface once people start using products on a mass scale.

With 2,500 schools currently using Messenger to contact parents it became imperative that these bugs were squashed and the result… these new & noteworthy features of M4:

• Contact Preference - The system can now send messages to All Parent Contacts and Students Direct, not just Primary Parental Contacts.
• Contact Groups - The Messenger system now has the Contact configurations button at the top of the section. This includes the options to add New Contacts/Modify previous Contacts and Delete. Contacts.
• Number Formats - messenger will now display any contact numbers that are set to an incorrect format for the set type of message, as red. This would have to be changed within the MIS system, followed by a MIS refresh.
• Output List - a new feature of M4 is that you can now output your list to Microsoft Excel as well as sending it directly to the printer.
• Sending Messages - Message over 159 characters will send over one message (displayed as units in the top right hand side next to characters) this will turn red if you go over one unit.

We hope you enjoy the new features of Messenger 4!

See all of our updates and news by following us on Facebook, GroupcallLtd and Twitter, @Groupcall

Some of the stuff we’ve been doing is pretty cool too, for example we’ve now got the ability to write back Free School Meal eligibility to SIMS systems via XVault and our SIF agent – imagine all that measurable saved time (and money) not having to post out lists to schools every week because the entitlement is recorded directly into their MIS, potentially on the same day! XVault also now has improved integration with our LA messaging products and can aggregate data from multiple schools to provide LA-wide messaging. When combined with Emerge the stack gets even cooler because you can record attendance into MIS using Emerge and then it will automatically cascade up to the messaging platform too.

While working through the SIF and XVault improvements we’ve also spent some much needed time looking at how we support our customers with centrally hosted MIS systems. Among the changes we’ve made is to generalise the design of our centrally hosted Xporter so that customers can use a simple GUI tool to enable SIF agents for hosted schools and also for their LA extracts too. This means that both the deployment times and supportability of our Hosted Xporter software are much improved. So far we’ve migrated all of our South-West Grid centrally hosted SIF Agents to the new configuration and have also helped a couple of local authorities successfully deploy hosted extracts for multiple hosted schools in minutes.

We’ll also be at the next UK SIF conference, on 7th Dec, where we’ll continue our proactively work with the community on the next UK SIF data model and will be working to improve the way that SIF Agents in the UK are certified, so that it’s much easier for people looking to deploy SIF-enabled solutions to simply specify exactly what they need from it.

For more information on SIF and XVault visit http://www.groupcall.com/pro_xporter_sif.html

The team at Groupcall are pleased to announce that Groupcall Emerge is now available to demo on Android devices.

We thought it might be a nice idea to showcase more screen shots from the Android App and offer you the exclusive opportunity to download a demo of Emerge for your Android Device.

Simply click on this link on your mobile device, download and install: http://www.groupcall.co.uk/Emerge/Android/

Happy demo’ing!

Well, without putting my neck out too far, we anticipate trials to commence sometime in October with a general release towards the end of the year. The team at Groupcall, thought it might be a nice idea to ‘whet your appetite’ further and provide a sneak preview, hot off the press from Martin’s (the lead developer for this project) desktop.

The development of Emerge on Android marks a key step in the evolution of a product which started quickly and is progressing even more quickly. Now the most talked about ‘App’ in schools. However, developing for another platform has forced us to go back to the drawing board with many of the mechanisms used on the iPhone version and has required us to completely re-engineer some of the core Emerge components for Android at an operating system level.

One of the main challenges, which will come as no surprise to most of you, has been to keep the Android version as secure as the iPhone, secure access to school’s sensitive information is central to the design of Emerge. I can’t give away too many secrets, but providing the same level of database encryption and decryption has been ‘interesting’ (read extremely challenging).

Another key feature of the design has been to make it look as similar to the iPhone version as possible, while giving it its own personality.

The net effect of all of this work? Another version of Emerge that works beautifully and delivers everything that is expected from it…and more…

Take a look and let us know your thoughts.

http://groupcall.com/pro_emerge.html