Jun
16

Announcing the availability of Storm Center 3

We are really excited to announce the availability of Storm Center 3, the biggest product upgrade to date. SC3 is packed with changes to enhance the user experience and allow you to deliver more information to customers on a variety of devices. We started with an upgrade to Microsoft Bing Maps version 7, which offers new map tiles, improved map controls, and support for iPhone and Android web browsers. Storm Center 3 (screenshot)
We carried the mobile support form Bing through to all of the libraries and features in Storm Center so that the new version is fully supported with the web browsers on iPhones, iPads, and all Android devices. This support goes beyond just “making it work”- Storm Center 3 includes pages and content which automatically optimize for the mobile device with support for dragging and pinching the map to zoom and pan, and touching the icons to see the current information about an outage.

Storm Center 3 (screenshot)

We have also integrated location-based APIs so that Storm Center on a mobile device can automatically zoom to your current location!

In addition to mobile support and the move to Bing Maps 7, we enhanced data flows and formats throughout Storm Center to streamline and minimize the content for use on mobile networks. The combination of these changes will give Storm Center users a great boost in page rendering times, performance, and scalability, with initial tests showing up to a 70% reduction in the data requirements for the application.

We have also integrated a variety of architectural changes and features into the product as fully supported modules. We have enhanced the clustering functionality in SC 3 with support for thematic  clusters, which allows us to use different sizes, colors, and labels to distinguish each outage cluster. Our cloud hosting option is now fully integrated with the product, and can be implemented during your upgrade with a simple addition to your annual maintenance fee. Storm Center 3 (screenshot)Likewise, the SC 3 architecture now has full support for enabling optional modules such as animated WeatherBug lightning and radar, Event History tracking, and complete layer management support.

In addition to the outage map and outage summaries, we have also updated the outage reporting framework in Storm Center 3 with full mobile support. This framework allows us to quickly implement web based outage reporting for your customers, with support for access to the forms using both desktop and mobile browsers. With some utilities seeing upwards of 10% of outage reports coming via the web, it is critical to consider enabling this channel to help meet customer expectations and save costs. Thanks to Storm Center 3, you can deliver a combination of high level summaries, informative maps, and account specific reporting and information all to the desktop and mobile web!

For our existing Storm Center customers, an upgrade to version 3 requires that we work with your team to implement the new product on both the application/web services side as well as implementing your web page templates with it. We also need to work with you to implement your content and look and feel on the mobile pages, which are essentially a brand new page template to consider. We can deploy the mobile functionality as a link from your existing mobile website, or can work with you to launch a mobile website using Storm Center outage maps, summaries, and reporting as your initial content. Overall, this upgrade is a very straightforward process which can be completed quickly.

Posted on: June 16th, 2011 by Jamie Downing No Comments

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