M4 – The Upgrade

The Messenger 4 upgrade is now complete! We thought a blog post was in order to express our trials, tribulations and most importantly share the new features of M4.

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

What’s new with SIF

Over the last few months we’ve been busy working on lots of different areas of our SIF offering and, in turn, have also improved our support for hosted SIMS, Facility and G2 integration. It’s hard to talk about our SIF product suite without straying into the realms of one of our key SIF integration products – Groupcall XVault. XVault has also been on the receiving end of some TLC over the last few months and has a whole host of new features tucked into it – including support to aggregate SIF data from not only SIMS and Facility but now also E1 and G2 schools.

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

Demo Emerge on your Android!

The long await is over…

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!

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First view of Emerge on Android

By far the most common question I get when I demonstrate Emerge is “When will it be available for Android?”

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.

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http://groupcall.com/pro_emerge.html