FEATURE

In Florida, a partnership of city and county Emergency Management agencies, and NC4, the provider of the incident management system E Team, have successfully transformed the region's capabilities in preparing for, responding to, and recovering from emergencies and disasters.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Florida's Governor and the Department of Law Enforcement established seven task forces throughout the state. Florida's Regional Domestic Security Task Force for Region 5 represents 9 counties in the east-central region of the state, an area that includes the cities of Orlando and Daytona Beach as well as popular tourist destinations such as the Kennedy Space Center and the Walt Disney World vacation area. Although originally set up to respond to terrorist threats, the Task Force also responds to all other emergencies and disasters, including frequent hurricanes and tropical storms.

The Chair of the Task Force recognized for several years that one significant weakness in the region's preparedness and response capabilities was the lack of a common incident management system in the state for gathering and sharing information and requesting or offering support/resources from neighboring or nearby cities, towns and counties. Some counties already had sophisticated data systems, some had less than ideal systems, and some had no system other than pens and paper. Needless to say, none of these systems were compatible with one another. More Details.

E TEAM PRODUCT STEERING COMMITTEE UPDATE

by Lou Vargo, PSC Chairman

Greetings from the Product Steering Committee.

I would like you to know that the new procedure for providing data to the Product Steering Committee does work. In the last quarterly newsletter, the contact information of the Steering Committee members was made available to all users. Since that time, we have received user input from several people.

Each of the ideas/concepts received is placed on the agenda for our quarterly PSC meeting, the most recent being held September 27. At this last meeting, much of the discussion was about the newest 2.4.52 product release which became available on August 30, 2006. Three of the six general enhancements that are included in this release are those that had been requested by the PSC on behalf of the user community.

The next Domino release is tentatively slated for January 2007 and the Product Steering Committee is reviewing and prioritizing those submissions to be considered for inclusion in this release. One of these submissions is from Will County Illinois EMA. Their concept of a detailed screen for inputting Hazardous Materials Response information will be useful for many of our users. Public Health of Canada has presented a conceptual idea of making the product more useful in the public health arena.

I encourage each of you to continue to submit ideas and concepts that will enhance your use of the product. These ideas will be submitted for review and with this team concept, we will continue to strive to make E Team a better product for emergency management everywhere.

E TEAM PRODUCT NEWS

Latest E Team Domino Release 2.4.52. NC4 is committed to the support and enhancement of E Team on the Domino platform and is working with the Product Steering Committee to prioritize future enhancements. Release 2.4.52 offers the following new features:

• Checklists can now be optionally replaced by Interactive Job Action Sheets. Job Action Sheets are interactive checklists that can be specifically created for any position within an organization. Job Action Sheets allow users to keep track of responsibilities associated with their Position.
  
• 'Distribution' terminology replaced by 'Access Control'. To avoid confusion with email distribution lists, the term 'Distribution' has been replaced by 'Access Control' for determining who has the ability to see a specific document. There is no change to how this feature works within the application.
  
• Additional columns for sorting. More sorting capability has been added to select views.
  
• Notification message field increased. The Notification message field has been increased to display additional lines of text without the need to scroll.
  
• Increased width of site selection window. The width of the site selection window has been increased to display additional columns, eliminating the need to scroll.

To schedule your system upgrade, please contact support@nc4.us or call 800.209.2312 with your availability.

A LOOK AT NC4's E TEAM TRAINING CURRICULUM

The Computer Based Training (CBT) for E Team Release 2.4 is now available and CDs are being sent out to customers. The CBT focuses on basic functions, the Incident Report and Resource Request. It is geared to prepare a new user with the basics to use the system for an activation, or refresh a previously trained user. Based on customer feedback and demand, we will look into adding additional CBT modules.


We recommend that you place copies of the CBT on EOC computers and/or on an internal intranet site where users can access the training module.

The CBT, as well as many other product and reference documents, is available for download from NC4's support site, support.nc4.us

In addition to Computer Based Training, NC4 offers comprehensive and professionally prepared Lecture Training to get your organization rapidly up and running with E Team. This new training program has been very successful and includes the following:

• A complete set of materials for the customer
• Courses that are delivered by professional trainers with a Public Safety background
• Training that is designed with optimal instructor student ratio that follows current instructional principles for maximum retention of course materials
  

Our Lecture Training programs include:

• Power-User: Overview of entire E Team system
• End-User: Power-Users customize the End-User curriculum based upon the jurisdictions CONOPS and SOP’s
• Train-the-Trainer: In-depth curriculum to train instructors how to deliver all aspects of training on the E Team System
  

In addition to the above training options, we also offer non-standard Training such as:

• Delta Training: Additional Training when going through point changes,
  e.g., 2.2 > 2.4
  
• Custom Training: Specifically for Special Events
• Exercises: Short duration (2-4 hour), functional exercise for E Team use in the EOC – Excellent validation of E Team use against current operational procedures
  

For further information on our training programs, please contact rick.comerford@nc4.us.