Haystax Technology updated its Constellation for Incident Management platform. The core Constellation system is already used by numerous state and local agencies and private enterprises nationwide, and the update delivers added functionality, mobility, deeper app-to-app integration and collaborative capabilities across our customers’ entire chain of leadership, analysis and operations.
Merging data from a wide array of sources, Constellation for Incident Management pulls out the highest priority threat signals and presents them in an easily-digestible format, allowing law enforcement, fire, emergency management and corporate security teams to quickly understand emerging risks, and giving them the confidence to respond decisively.
“Constellation for Incident Management helps first responders and emergency managers to improve planning and coordination and maximize their available resources, all of which are key to better response times and efficacy,” said Chriss Knisley, President of Haystax Technology. “Above all, our goal is to enable decision-makers to prioritize their risks and make faster information-driven decisions in real time, and these updates help them do that even more effectively than before.”
The latest Constellation for Incident Management updates include:
- Events App: One of the newest apps in Constellation allows users to track scheduled events and view them against incidents, assets and other data on a map or in a timeline, providing greater context and thus more comprehensive situational awareness. Sports leagues can map out their security requirements for an entire game season. Large festivals and conventions can track all sanctioned and unsanctioned events across multiple days, deploying extra security personnel when VIPs will be present. And fire departments can schedule the year’s fire drills at all their area schools.
- Timeline App: A new way of seeing Constellation app data, the Timeline app displays incident reports, scheduled events and newly completed assessments in a sequential view for easy visualization and monitoring, and rapid access to details.
- Constellation for Fire Safety: A new Constellation configuration developed specifically for firefighters, the app enables fire departments to load critical information (for example, hazmat, construction methods, ingress/egress) about each asset they may respond to, and to conduct NFPA 1620-compliant pre-incident planning assessments on each asset. A mobile reporting app enables on-scene personnel to submit status reports and photos, and all the integrated asset, incident and assessment data can be easily visualized on a map.
Other enhancements and upgrades to existing Constellation apps include:
- Assets App: New 'Person' and 'Place' asset types have been added; assets can be labeled as to their risk priority level; locally relevant news and social media posts from the Threat Streams app are displayed on individual asset pages, and users can define how they are filtered (e.g., by importance, relevance, time or threat model score); and each asset-page miniature map now displays local threats streams, incidents, events and other assets.
- Assessments App: Scoring support is now available, so that users can for example accurately gauge their required levels of resources with pre-event assessments and can analyze major gaps with post-event assessments; in addition, a new SWAT assessment template has been added that can be used for many asset types like airports, hotels and schools.
- Map App: Now displays ‘heat maps’ at specific locations, alerting users to unusually high levels of geo-located social media activity detected in the Threat Streams app; distance measuring tool added; additional sender and image information is included in the incident icons.
- Incidents App: Incidents can now be automatically created from Threat Streams feed items, at which point automated alerts are sent to users.
- Threat Streams App: Can now ingest custom data feeds (for example, emergency dispatch/CAD) through the use of APIs; and hundreds of additional feeds, including 4chan, have been added.
- Mobile Constellation App: Now integrates our new Events, Timeline and Field Interview apps.
Many of our long-standing customers are seeing the benefits of Constellation for Incident Management. For example, the city of Indianapolis recently switched over to the new system having previously been a user of Haystax Technology’s Digital Sandbox 7 (DS7) platform. Inaugurated at the most recent Indianapolis 500 race, Constellation enables city officials to monitor, report, alert and respond to threats from a shared environment, providing the city with even better usability, improved sharing between central command and officers in the field and better collaboration.
