With many companies utilizing remote-working during the COVID-19 pandemic, effective communication is more important than ever. Unfortunately, being in the middle of responding to a global pandemic will not prevent your organization from suffering from other business disruptions. Likely disruptions you may face are: Cyber/ phishing attacks – these attacks can cripple your regular communication methods such as email, or may exploit ineffective communications to extract illegal payments.

Our May update brings new features to our Signl Center in the web app and adds a new view that displays your upcoming duties to the mobile app! When part of an on-call duty team, your private life and work-life-balance are pretty much affected. Knowing about scheduled duties in advance and having such information at hand, can simplify things a little bit. That’s why we have added a new feature to our mobile app. The mobile app now displays the next 3 upcoming duties if those have been scheduled.

Our April update is BIG. It introduces emergency alerting to reach you entire team. We hope this will be a bit of humble support to your organization in this Covid-19 crisis. The core of this release is the new signl center, the new place to track alerts and their delivery in real-time, to see incoming events and how they are processed. You can now send emergency alert to your entire team with a single click.

SIGNL4 provides great support for geolocation information and in multiple ways. When a new alert with geolocation information is displayed in the mobile app, the app renders a map to visualize geographic information of the incident. A double click allows to open the default map application on the mobile device, e.g. to get directions or traffic information.

“Servcies&Systems” category subscriptions provide a highly flexible way of routing alerts to specific user groups. This can for instance be used to route alerts based on responsibilities or skills. But other scenarios are possible too as the category subscription mechanism is extremely powerful. SIGNL4 currently provides two fundamental ways of routing alerts. The first layer is the routing of alerts based on the “on duty” status.

SIGNL4 provides plug-and-play chatbot integrations with Microsoft Teams and Slack, both via certified chatbot apps. Why does it makes sense to integrate SIGNL4 with chat tools after all? There are two basic uses cases that we address with the integration into Teams and Slack. By default, SIGNL4 notifies by mobile push, text and voicecalls, all according to user preference. The focus is clearly on mobile alert notifications. And of course, tracking and escalation of critical alerts is built-in.

Our first SIGNL4 release tin 2020 includes some great new features. Have a look. For all those who still need to work with pager devices in addition to their smartphone, it is now possible to include this device in the alarm workflow. This might be the case to secure alert delivery even in areas with poor cell coverage. Legcy pager support is provided through a new app we have added to the SIGNL4 app gallery. This apps sends an email to a paging gateway.

Event and alert severity are extremly important information for an effective alert management and response. Severity information determine the speed of response, needed resource allocation and the action path taken. Naturally, critical alerts have higher priority than major alerts which again overrule minor alerts.

Our 2nd December update adds alert counters to the web app, allows for disabling the opt-in/out from “Services & Systems” categories and adds a new encoding format to the SIGNL4 webbhook.

Our December update includes a new role model for users in a SIGNL4 team, great new app features and integration with Azure Sentinel. Two default user roles are now available in each SIGNL4 team: Administrator and User. This allows for restricting standard user rights versus administrative access. For existing teams, all users are migrated to administrators, i.e. you should check this role assignment and downgrade some team members to users yourself if necessary.