Hi all,
It’s March! I hope you’re all doing well and staying safe. It’s been about a year since cities and counties in the United States initiated a mandatory stay-at-home order due to COVID-19. I can’t believe that these months are passing by so quickly, but I’m here to bring you another monthly update! If you missed our last monthly update for February, you can find it here: February 2021 – Monthly Update.
This month has been productive and there have been some major changes made with some of the third-party providers we use to provide our service to you all. This month we’ve been working on multiple projects all around and we also started a new initiative. We’ve been continuing to finish up our dynamic application system, the new Mobile Data Terminal (MDT) page on the system, and we’ve also started to work on a new civilian persona management page on the system. There was quite a bit of work put into fixing some ongoing bugs once in for all and we definitely had a higher volume of support conversations submitted this month compared to the last.
Changes we made this month
This month we made a few changes on the CAD/MDT core system side of things to resolve bugs:
- We implemented a high suggested item which was giving Law Enforcement the ability to flag civilians through the NCIC search, we also had some fixes with that a few days later.
- We fixed some issues related to our bug reporting page being able to send our help desk an email with the bug report. We identified the issue as an issue with using quotation marks when sending a plain-text email, this was quickly resolved.
- We also moved away from using our own default HTML email template for emails sending on behalf of communities. We implemented a new HTML email template specifically for community messages. We also added community names as the sender name and the community name on the subject line.
- We fixed a few bugs with system notifications sent to the user portal. The system notifications are sent when a user requests to join a community as a confirmation, when they join a community, etc.
- We fixed a few bugs in relation to the logic with the join/invite page and the community aliases implemented a few months back.
- We also started working on a new civilian persona manager, so we had to move our old civilian manager over to another page in order to continue to operate during the development of our new civilian persona management page.
- We also changed our welcome/email verification HTML email template to be more clear and concise with what the user needs to do.
Most of the work done this month was for bug fixes, changes, and some small additions. There was also some work with the development in new core features which we’ll talk more about below.
On the community, customer experience, and user experience side of things we had a few initiatives this month:
- Our CEO, Drake sent out some check-in emails to our community owners
- We are still actively consistently on our Twitter interacting with people and posting updates when needed
- Our forum is still online and we’re still active on it responding to threads, etc
- Our blog is also still a good platform to get some information, we posted a short release in regards to a DDoS attack this month.
This month in numbers
- Total number of conversations via [email protected] or bug reports: 24 (4% decrease from previous period)
- Total number of messages: 29 (4% increase from previous period)
- Replies sent: 40 (8% increase from previous period)
- Average first response times during operating hours: 30 minutes and 45 seconds (348% increase from the previous period)
- Average response times during operating hours: 23 minutes and 13 seconds (96% decrease from the previous period)
Things we’re working on
Updates on ongoing initiatives
We’ve been working on new developments for our core CAD/MDT system:
- Our new Mobile Data Terminal is still being worked on. We’re working to implement and make the NCIC system fully functional.
- We’re finishing up with our dynamic application system and we’re expecting for it to be finished in the near future then be tested.
New initiatives
We’ve started a few new developments on the core CAD/MDT system:
- We’ve started on a new civilian persona manager to replace the old one. We believe that there needed to be a new UI rehaul for it.
Important information to note
As some of you may know, the core Afterthought System website (afterthought-system.com) is powered by a visual programming language called Bubble. On February 26th, 2021, they changed some terms to their free plan which might change operations for other entities but doesn’t affect Afterthought System because we’re on a high paying plan. This does however affect our dynamic application system, a new product coming soon. The only major difference that this will cause is the pricing for our dynamic application system. If you have any questions or concerns about this feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] to talk more about it.
Things on our minds
As always, Afterthought System is looking for opportunities to grow! If you’re currently an Afterthought System customer, we highly recommend applying for our community partnership program. We have a goal to gain at least 1 more community partner by Q1 of 2021 (End of this month). If you have any business inquires, feel free to send us an email at [email protected].
This is all we have for this month and as always, we appreciate you reading this monthly update. Thanks for all your support!
Regards,
Johnny, Drake, and the Afterthought System Team