Recording from March 20, 2025
What This InformaCast and Visitor Aware Update Covered
This Spark Session is a product update series for existing customers — a direct line to the product management team covering what has shipped recently and what is coming next. The March 2025 session covered three distinct areas: new Singlewire InformaCast capabilities around Webex Calling phones and IP camera integrations, a redesign of InformaCast scenario tiles with a preview of upcoming enhancements, and two new modules planned for Singlewire Visitor Aware that extend the platform deeper into daily school operations.
InformaCast: Webex Calling and IP Cameras
Webex Calling phones can now be imported into InformaCast, assigned a floor plan location, and configured with silent panic buttons — at no additional licensing cost for customers already using InformaCast for phone notifications. When a staff member presses the panic button, the exact room is highlighted on a floor plan delivered to the security team, and the alert can be routed directly to 911 for Alyssa’s Law compliance. The Cisco 9800-series phone was highlighted specifically: it runs Cisco PhoneOS, supports text and image notifications alongside audio, and includes a dedicated red button on the back that can be configured as a panic button in either a Webex Calling or CUCM environment.
The Verkada IP camera integration is now live. When an alert is activated, the security team’s dashboard shows the incident location on a floor plan and surfaces nearby Verkada camera feeds with a single click. Generic RTSP camera support is in active development, which will extend this capability to Milestone, Meraki, Genetec, and the vast majority of other major camera vendors — again with no additional licensing fee. The combination of location-aware alerts and near-instant camera access is designed to give security teams the information they need to assess and respond before leaving their post.
InformaCast: Scenario Tile Redesign and Roadmap
The InformaCast scenario tile interface has been redesigned for consistency across every platform — Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. Icons and color indicators are now separated from the button label to reduce visual noise and maintain readability. Character limits have been tightened, and tile sizing responds correctly when the dashboard is resized. Looking ahead, the team previewed three additions: icons and color coding from The “I Love U Guys” Foundation integrated directly into InformaCast for any customer who wants to align their scenario buttons with SRP terminology, approximately 45 additional icons, and the ability to organize scenario tiles into meaningful groups on the dashboard.
Visitor Aware: Dismissal Manager and Hall Manager
Two new modules are coming to Visitor Aware. Dismissal Manager replaces megaphones, paper car line sheets, and fragmented last-minute communications with a single digital dashboard visible to teachers, administrators, and front-office staff simultaneously. Every student’s dismissal type is displayed in real time — bus, car line, parent pickup, walker, or after-school program — and the car line process is supported with guardian QR code scanning, license plate recognition to auto-queue students as a car pulls in, and a guardian portal where families can set weekly dismissal preferences and add temporary guardians directly. Hall Manager, planned for the summer, provides digital hall passes with timed accountability windows, conflict detection that prevents two students with a documented history from being in the hallway simultaneously, and a real-time record of student location that becomes a safety asset if an incident occurs during the school day.
Presenters
Brad Parkel (Host) • Go To Market Enablement Director • Singlewire Software
Cameron Bjorklund • Director of Product Management • Singlewire Software
Ben Koca • Product Designer • Singlewire Software
Joanna Haugland • Chief Product Officer • Singlewire Visitor Aware
Five InformaCast and Visitor Aware Updates Worth Acting On
- Webex Calling phones now support location-aware panic buttons at no added cost — Any phone in a Webex Calling environment can be imported into InformaCast, given a floor plan location, and configured as a silent panic button. When pressed, the precise room is highlighted on a floor plan routed to security teams and, if configured, directly to 911 for Alyssa’s Law compliance. No additional licensing is required for customers already using InformaCast with their phones.
- The Verkada integration is live — and broader camera support is coming — Security teams can now click a nearby Verkada camera feed directly from an incident floor plan within InformaCast, giving them a real-time view of what is happening before anyone moves. Generic RTSP camera support is in development, which will extend this same capability to Milestone, Meraki, Genetec, and most other major camera vendors — no hardware changes, no added fees. When it ships, the location-plus-camera workflow will be available to nearly every InformaCast customer.
- Scenario tiles are more consistent now — and smarter updates are coming — The redesigned InformaCast scenario tile interface is now consistent across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, with cleaner contrast, proper character limits, and icons separated from the button label for faster recognition under pressure. Coming soon: “I Love U Guys” Foundation icons and color coding built directly into InformaCast for customers using SRP terminology, roughly 45 additional icon options, and the ability to organize scenario tiles into meaningful groups on the dashboard.
- Dismissal Manager brings car line management into Visitor Aware — Dismissal Manager replaces paper sheets, megaphones, and scattered communications at end-of-day pickup with one digital dashboard that is visible to every staff member at the same time. Guardian QR code scanning, license plate recognition for auto-queuing, a guardian portal for managing weekly dismissal preferences, and a temporary guardian workflow all flow through the same Visitor Aware platform — with every interaction logged for reference.
- Hall Manager adds student accountability from pass request to return — Coming in summer 2025, Hall Manager replaces paper hall passes with a digital system that issues time-limited passes, tracks whether a student returned within their window, and can prevent two students with a documented conflict from being in the hallway at the same time. As an added safety benefit, it gives schools a real-time record of every student’s location during the school day — information that is otherwise unavailable the moment it matters most.
Resources Referenced in This Session
- InformaCast with Webex Calling
- Verkada IP Camera Integration
- All Singlewire Technology Integrations
- Visitor Aware Overview
- Dismissal Manager
- Hall Manager
See what’s new — and what’s next
Want to configure Webex Calling panic buttons, connect your cameras, or explore Dismissal Manager for your school? Our team can walk you through any of the features covered in this session.
Read the Full Session Transcript
This transcript was generated from the recording and lightly edited for readability. Speaker attributions are approximate.
Brad Parkel — Go To Market Enablement Director · Singlewire Software
Hello, and welcome to our second Singlewire Sparks webinar. My name is Brad Parkel, and I work with the product management team here at Singlewire Software. I wanna thank you for being a valued customer and for joining us here today.
Our goal with these sessions is to provide you with information on new product features, both features that have recently been introduced and things that are coming in the near future. We’ll be talking with our product management team about these things and giving you a chance to ask some questions.
We’ll have a series of polls throughout the course of the session, and you’ll see these show up periodically.
And also, if you have any q and a questions, we have that in our q and a panel. Click the button and submit a question.
So I’d like to introduce our panel. We have Cameron, Joanna, and Ben here to talk about a few things with us. Here’s today’s agenda. And with that, I’ll turn things over to Cameron. Cameron, it’s all yours.
Cameron Bjorklund — Director of Product Management · Singlewire Software
Okay.
So I’m gonna start, talking to folks today about some changes we’ve made recently to our InformaCast Fusion product.
We’re gonna look and talk about, Webex Calling phones and, some of our IP camera work.
So for, Webex Calling phones, we have, within the last month made a new enhancement to our InformaCast Fusion product, where, you can now import your Webex Calling phones, from our control hub into InformaCast, assign them a location, which is something that you’ve you’ve, never been able to do with a Cisco phone in the InformaCast product to date, and then, configure silent panic buttons, onto those Webex Calling phones, and they will work with service URL requests. And then because, you are assigning the phone a location when someone initiates a silent panic button from the Webex Calling phone, we will be able to pinpoint the location of that phone. We will be able to bring up a floor plan. We will be able to highlight to the room, that, that phone is located in.
We will also be able to, bridge that panic button event not only to your internal security team, but also all the way to the, the 911 dispatch center for Alyssa’s Law compliance.
So this will work on all Webex Calling phones, and it is in the product today. So this is something that folks with Webex Calling environments and InformaCast, Fusion can go configure today.
And you’ll have silent panic button capability that can be Alyssa’s Law compliant and then also, produce the location of the panic button press.
Another, feature we’ve added for our Webex Calling, phone users here is text and image support on all, Webex Calling, Webex Calling phones that are running PhoneOS.
So this is, Cisco’s newer, operating system that they put on Webex Calling phones. It now supports, text and audio, text and image, including audio, and, that can increase, you know, what people are seeing and the information they’re getting in an emergency from, an InformaCast Fusion alert. So I have a couple of screenshots to show for this.
Right here, we have a screenshot of a notification that we, that was sent when I sent it from, Webex Calling phone. So this was a silent panic button event.
And most importantly, I, in my InformaCast Fusion instance, was able to connect my Webex Calling, account to it. I was able to import all my phones, and then their location was brought over from, and, brought over from Webex Calling into InformaCast.
And then now you can see that on the notification, it was sent. You know, my security team got this information. Potentially, the 911 dispatch center got this notification.
But, also, that floor plan is, coming in here with the exact room that is highlighted.
As we all know with emergencies, time is of the essence, and knowing exactly where to go is a very important piece to save, minutes and seconds in a in a crisis. And we are able to, when a panic button is pressed on a Webex Calling phone, able to produce the location and send that directly to security teams and police so they know exactly which room in your building is being impacted.
Next, this is, if anyone hasn’t seen it, this is Cisco’s new 9800 phone that they’ve, they released last year.
The this is a newer Webex Calling phone that runs, PhoneOS, the operating system. And now, just like our old CUCM phones, we now support, text and audio and images on the, Webex Calling phones running PhoneOS.
The 9800 phone in particular is of interest because on the back of the phone, there’s also, a special red button that can be configured to be that silent panic button.
So not only can this phone receive notifications and receive the text and receive the audio and receive the images from the notifications, it is also able to, there’s a button on the back of the phone that’s that’s red and can be configured when pressed, to produce a silent panic button, like we saw in the previous screenshot, you could get the, location of the incident and the notification going out and all of that stuff.
So we’ve done a lot of work with, Webex Calling, and supporting increasing the InformaCast presence and support on those phones, recently, and I hope folks who are who have a Webex Calling environment or thinking of a Webex Calling environment, are looking at these features, within InformaCast.
Something we talked about at the last Singlewire Sparks session was IP camera integrations into InformaCast.
So our last Sparks session, we had talked about how we were working, on an integration with Verkada, and it was coming soon. That has been released, so that is out in the wild. So if there are any folks out there who are ready to, tie in their Verkada camera feeds into their InformaCast emergency workflows, that is doable today.
So similar to the screenshot we saw a couple slides ago, where, a Webex Calling device, for example, but we have other means that we’ll get a notification, and the location and a floor plan to your security team. But the kinda next fast follow on that your security and others can do is, they can, click on a nearby camera feed from a Verkada camera and see what’s going on. So imagine someone presses a panic button.
The floor plan is delivered to your security team. Your security team is gonna be able to quickly click on a nearby camera and kinda see what’s going on. Maybe it was a false alarm. Maybe it was a, you know, an actual emergency.
Regardless, they’re gonna get the information, they need. And, as I discussed earlier, obviously, with emergencies, you know, saving time, is incredibly important. And so getting that information, quickly, about where the location is, where do I need to respond, and what is going on, can all be done within InformaCast within seconds of someone pressing a panic button.
And then just a quick, update, on kind of our future plans for IP camera integrations within InformaCast Fusion. We’ve been getting a ton of positive customer feedback from our Verkada integration. And, I mean, the other thing that we’re hearing loud and clear is that there is high demand to support more IP camera vendors. It is you know, we recognize that not everyone has, Verkada as their IP camera solution. So we are already, we have an engineering team working on supporting, a more generic camera layer, the RTSP stream for technical folks on here. And so, in this year when we’ve released that functionality, it won’t matter if your camera is Verkada or Milestone or Meraki or any of the other, wonderful, major IP camera players out there. You will be able to pull in your camera feeds into InformaCast, and you will be able to do the same exact workflows that I just discussed.
Someone hits a panic button. Maybe it’s a panic button on a Webex Calling phone. Security team is gonna receive that floor plan. You’re gonna know the location of that emergency because it’s gonna be highlighted, and you’re gonna be able to click on nearby cameras and get information quickly about, the incident and respond accordingly.
That is all I have today for InformaCast Fusion updates here. Alright. Hopefully, your audio is working better.
Brad Parkel
Yeah. Can you hear me, Cameron? Maybe we still can hear you. Okay. Good.
Not sure what started on the on the open here, but, just a quick question, Cameron, with IP cameras and with the things you talked about, earlier, is there anything that a user will need to do to activate or make changes to enable these features?
Cameron Bjorklund
Nope.
Today, if you have Verkada and there’s no additional license cost or any of that, you can you can go right in and you can pull in your Verkada cameras into the product and start using it. Same with the Webex Calling. There is no additional license fee today, as long as you’re already licensing your phones, for use to send notifications to and DialCast and all of those things. You can go right in and you can, hook up your, Webex Calling, environment into InformaCast and pull in the phones and all that at no additional cost as well.
Brad Parkel
Okay. Awesome. So Verkada is active today, and then we’re gonna be hearing and seeing a lot more here in the future with these other, services potentially in fall.
Cameron Bjorklund
Yes. Yep. More other services. Hopefully, something that will kind of, be a silver bullet here for the vast majority of cameras out there so, the vast majority of our customers can take advantage of that.
Brad Parkel
Okay. Awesome. Thanks, Cameron. We’ll catch you at the end for a little q and a, at the end of the show.
Cameron Bjorklund
Awesome. Thank you, Brad.
Brad Parkel
Alright. Ben Koca, you’re up next, and we’ve recently made some changes to fusion scenario buttons. And this is something that I think a lot of people are familiar with. It’s something very visible in the product, And this was done for a number of important reasons, you’re gonna talk about, and then there’s some new things coming too.
Ben Koca — Product Designer · Singlewire Software
Yep. Thanks, Brad. It’s all yours. Excited to be here. Everyone can hear me okay?
Cameron Bjorklund
I think we’re good.
Ben Koca
Alright. Thanks, everybody.
So as Brad had indicated and I’m as I’m sure many of you have seen, as of late, our scenario buttons got a little bit of a glow up over the past couple weeks.
Part of that is, when we wanted to update our scenario buttons, there was a lot of things that we realized that were, kind of configuration things that weren’t clear to users and a lot of things that caused them to look really inconsistent. You can kinda even see it on the example screen here. There were ways that people could, you know, type different text, and it caused the text size to resize automatically. There were ways to just kinda, like, get, things to line up differently just by doing spaces. And it was really hard to see things like the icons and having the contrast and all that, with having the all of that color right on top of the buttons. So, so what we had done was, made an update across platforms. You now have, these scenario tile buttons that are gonna be a lot more consistent across the board, and give you a lot more customization and functionality.
So, you know, today, you know, when you when you focus on these things, you’ll get a good hover state.
We adjusted the character count for these a little bit. There was we were able to add way too much text in the past, and we realized that a lot of customers were not really providing much text, you know, as part of that. So we kind of reduced it to just make it easier for, scalability.
On top of this now, if you resize your page layout, all of these things will resize in tandem. You won’t be having, things competing with each other for attention.
As well as a big part, you know, this layout of these buttons is now consistent across platforms as I had mentioned earlier. So if you have the, InformaCast application on, you know, InformaCast for Windows, Mac, Android, or iOS, these buttons are gonna look similar across the board now. So, you know, your users are not gonna have to kinda second guess when they’re jumping from platform to platform.
And the last thing I would note is, again, we separated out the color and the icons over onto the side, again, so that, you know, when users are trying to read the text or identify it via, one of the various methods, you know, there’s a lot of different ways that you can identify you’re selecting the right scenario. Because that is important, and we wanna make sure that we stay time critical when, someone is initiating one of those scenarios.
But that’s not all the work we’re doing. There’s still plenty of things on the horizon, and I kinda wanna give you a hint for some of these because I’m really excited about these. And it’s things that have been near and dear to my heart, and I’m really excited to roll them out for everybody else.
And that includes a few different things. Like, first and foremost, we recently, have a partnership with the I Love You Guys Foundation. And as part of that, we are looking to start incorporating their icons and color into, InformaCast.
Look for that in the near future here. It’s gonna be really I’m really excited to get this rolled out here, and it looks really cool having that kinda show up and having those scenario buttons match the I Love You Guys Foundation.
On top of that, you know, right now, today, I think there’s maybe, like, twenty different icons you can choose from in scenarios.
I’m looking to quadruple or even, you know, add even more beyond that, than what we have today. And, obviously, with that, that’s gonna create, a lot more options for you to choose from. So we’re gonna kinda change the visibility of that. I’m, probably gonna have something where when you open up the page, you’ll be able to see a whole list of icons, and you can be able to select any of them from that list.
And then that’ll apply it right to the scenario button. And then the last one, I know that, I’ve I’ve seen this from, plenty of you online asking for this feature. We’re gonna be looking to allow you to organize these scenario buttons in meaningful ways on your dashboard. I know, we get a lot of feedback around this on being able to, you know, organize things if they’re emergencies or tests and, the whole gamut in between.
So, that’s on our road map. Looking that, we would make sure that is, you know, something to keep in mind and that we will, look be looking to roll that out later this year, hopefully. So, that’s all I had for the scenario buttons, but I’m happy to I’ll be sticking around in the channel. So please feel free to throw any questions my way, and I’ll be able to happily answer as we go.
Brad Parkel
And, Ben, we open things up. If people are interested in giving some input to scenario buttons, they can click yes. And we’re we’re always looking for feedback for everything with our products, but this is an opportunity for, people to give some input to these to these changes Mhmm. In future changes.
Ben Koca
Yeah. For sure.
Brad Parkel
And, additionally, with I love you guys, this is something that we typically see maybe more exclusively in the K-12 space.
But these icons are things that anyone any one of our customers can make use of. Is that right?
Ben Koca
Yes. Yeah. It you do not have to be using the I love you guys, standard response protocol or their reunification protocol, and to use these icons. But I would highly recommend that when we do roll those out is to go take a look at their documentation. They have a lot of really good plans in place for, you know, again, reunification and, critical response. And it’s not just, just does not only apply to K-12 schools. There’s, plenty of use cases for all the other verticals, health care, manufacturing, and more.
Brad Parkel
Okay. So more to come on this front. You know, as always, we’re we’re looking for, again, feedback and input from all of you on, how these changes are impacting you and in ways we can improve, the service.
So thanks, Ben, for the update.
I just wanna make a quick mention that as we’re, talking and we’re in the severe weather season, I know in the Midwest here, we’ve seen everything from, seventy degree weather to, blizzards here in the last few days. Just asking some questions, you know, have you implemented severe weather alerting, the CAP protocols in InformaCast, either to, your security team, letting them know to, that something is approaching and they can push a button to notify the organization.
In some cases, I know that often in, Tornado Alley that there is a desire to have that information go directly to everyone in the organization, and in some cases, there’s a combination of both.
So a lot of implementations here it’s looking like and others that are soon to implement.
We will be putting together, I know, a few links to our CAP protocols that we can share with you and information on how you can introduce this and turn this on in your organization, relatively easy. It’s not something that you need to purchase. It’s part of InformaCast today. It’s just making the effort, and going through the steps to turn things on.
Okay. So we’re gonna come back now. We have, one more speaker here
today, Joanna from our Visitor Aware team. And, Joanna, I know you’re not a stranger to, blizzards this week, so and severe weather, But, you’re here to talk about, Visitor Aware and some new things that are coming, dismissal manager and hall manager. Take us through what’s coming and what we can expect.
Joanna Haugland — Chief Product Officer · Singlewire Visitor Aware
Perfect. Thank you, Brad.
So with Visitor Aware, unlike what the name intends or implies here, we are actually more than just visitor management.
So through customer conversations and calls with prospects, some of which you might have actually seen my face on some of these calls. I’m on quite a number of them to make sure that we keep our ear to the ground and make sure that we’re supporting our customers the best that we’re able to. So through those conversations, we actually have two new modules that will be hitting the scene this year, one of which being hall manager and the other one being dismissal manager.
Currently, within our product suite, we have visitor manager, bus manager, safety manager, and then, of course, our integrations with InformaCast Fusion. So one a couple of those that I wanna highlight with InformaCast Fusion would be the ability for as visitors are checking into your location, being able to include them into your umbrella of communication while they’re on-site. So when they check out, they’re removed from that distribution group, and they will not be contacted. But if an incident were to happen, you now have them under your umbrella of communication.
Secondly, the ability to include family reunification within that scenario directly. So through Visitor Aware, family reunification is the process of accounting for students during an incident.
And then once it’s all clear to do so, when it’s time to accept guardians on-site to reunify those guardians with your students, you’re able to do that through our platform as well. And that can be tied directly into that scenario. So everything is preconfigured, ready to go out the gate. It’s a couple of taps, maybe one tap to get that scenario active and going, and everything just flows and everything is just seamless in that sense.
Bus manager, safety manager, and visitor manager are modules that are available today.
Safety manager includes family reunification that we just talked about as well as safety drill manager. Visitor manager is visitor management, volunteer management, and student management. All of that lives in the visitor manager module. And then bus manager is solely focused on making sure students are getting on the correct buses and that they’re accounted for. So then your safety or your, transportation coordinators rather would then have those insights in real time.
First up is our dismissal manager product. So this will be helping to create a more structured dismissal product process for your schools.
So we’re really trying to streamline that end of day dismissal management process.
Through the conversations with prospects and customers, it became clear that within the K-12 environment, they really want one vendor that has as many capabilities as possible.
So within the Visitor Aware product suite, we’re able to do a lot of things currently and then adding in dismissal manager and hall manager to really tie up that robust product suite available through Visitorware.
Why dismissal manager? I’ve talked to several customers that are using, like, blow horns or, like, megaphones to get attention and call up students for that car line pickup process, as well as paper sheets of what student is going home with what guardian. All of that would be accommodated on that paper sheet that you’re trying to keep track of car side. There’s also those last minute updates that become a pain point. So if I, as a guardian, call in last minute, where do those notifications go? Who’s in charge of getting that information back to that teacher as quickly as possible? And there’s always the possibility of miscommunications.
Things happen. Logistical nightmares happen. So a way to prevent that from happening.
Teachers also need those real time insights to know what student should be in what line and headed out what door at the end of the day to make it as seamless and streamlined as possible.
And then everybody on this call probably knows if you have kids in school or if you work personally in a school, the front office handles everything. So it’s like the central hub of everything. Everything gets pushed through there, and communication is key because all of them wear so many different hats throughout the day.
The dismissal manager dashboard will be the one place that all users all users have access to get that instant notification of what student should be headed where.
So whether they’re riding on the bus, whether they’re car line pickup, parent pickup, so, a guardian physically walking up to the building to grab their student or if that student is walking home by themselves at the end of the day or, again, accounting for those students that are going to an after school program and being able to note those students and those dismissal types in one spot.
All of the users will be able to see it because everybody kind of wears so many different hats in the K-12 environment. So teachers being able to know where their students in their classroom are going, but also with that process, being able to have admin and staff being able to be involved as well. So knowing where that student is supposed to be, helping that student along the way, or, you know, just grabbing that additional hat and jumping into the process in real time as well if that’s needed.
It also will display if a student has been signed out or has been noted as absent for that day. That student would be would be crossed out. However, you would still, as a teacher or a teacher or staff member involved with the process, be able to note that student as released because things get crazy. In the upfront office, I’ve seen it where a note gets written on a post it note, and that’s not entered into the Visitor Aware software until later that day. So if a student was signed out earlier and they weren’t yet signed back in or that information would be entered later, you’re still able to account for that student and know where they should be headed at the end of the day and be able to account for them as being released. So that will still be live in the software regardless.
For the dismissal manager dashboard, it will be laid out in a way that a teacher would be able to see instantly if a student is marked as bus, car line, parent pickup, walker, or after school, and then being able to account for that student as released from the classroom, so they’ll be able to mark that student as released. However, the car line pickup process is kind of a monster of its own. So there’s way more activity that will be accounted for in that car line dismissal process, one of which being the ability to account for those guardians that are rolling up in their car. We are going to be hardware agnostic with this process.
We’ll use whatever device that person, whether it’s teacher, admin, or staff out by the car side. But as that car is pulling up, the ability to use that device that they’re on, that built in camera right on that device to scan the QR code. We don’t like to multitask and have different pieces of hardware for accommodating one process. We want it all in one device.
So using that built in camera on that Android or iOS device right by that card to scan that guardian’s QR code to queue up those students.
With that, we also have the ability to note temporary guardians. So if I as a guardian am unable to make it to the school to pick up my kid for the car line pickup process, I can actually note that a different person will be in charge of that for me. So if that’s not somebody that’s included with your student information system, that’s not a problem. I can actually call into the office and then say, hey.
My neighbor’s gonna come pick up my kid today. They will be added as a temporary relationship and be granted access to my student for that day. So everything is noted and logged in the platform. Everything will be a digital record that can be referenced later on, and everything will be accounted for.
Another key aspect of that car line pickup process would be the ability to implement a license plate recognition camera. So with that, if a car license plate number is associated to me and I’m pulling up in my car, once that camera recognizes that license plate number, knows that I have two students to go to that school, it automatically queues up those students for pickup. So then I, as a staff member, don’t have to scan that Guardian QR to know what students need to be queued up. Though those students are automatically queued up and prepped to go out to that car line pickup process.
Once those students arrive curbside, then that person in charge of the process can mark them as picked up, or they can rescan a QR code and mark those students as picked up. Where that comes in handy is if that isn’t a typical person that picks up those students, it’s a quick sanity check too. So even for those temporary relationships, being able to rescan that QR code, know that, yep. Okay. Great. This person is supposed to be getting in this car with this individual. And then having that sanity check approving that student got into the car and then having that digital record going forward.
With dismissal manager will come the ability for guardians to have access to their guardian portal through which they can actually designate what dismissal type for the day of the week. So on Monday through Wednesday, my student will be car line pickup. Then Thursday, Friday, they could be Walker. So being able to kind of carve out that dismissal process for my students for the day of the week would be possible within the Guardian portal.
If any deviations happen with that schedule, I can get into my Guardian portal and then note as such. So even the day of, I can get in, log in, and then note, nope. My student’s not gonna be a walker today. They’re actually gonna be car line, or, hey.
They’re going home with a friend on the bus. Being able to get into my portal and note that. That also helps to offload the front office staff as well. So think of it as a way of guardians partnering with that front office staff to make sure that things are accounted for and kind of alleviating that stress and that burden.
Coming in the near future would be the ability for guardians to get into their guardian portal and add those temporary relationships directly through their portal as well. So then instead of calling into the front office every time, I can actually log in as a guardian and note that my neighbor is the one that will be picking up my children.
And then with that, when I enter my, temporary relationship within the guardian portal, that person is actually notified and can accept that responsibility.
So having that note sent to that person directly as well.
The next piece or the next module that we have coming out closer to the summer time frame is the ability to allow Visitor Aware to assist with that hall monitoring process.
So we have called this module hall manager to help manage your halls and get those key insights with your students.
One of the things that came up pretty consistently within those customer and prospect conversations was that with paper passes, you really rely on that trust component with your students. So instead of leaving it open for them to potentially abuse that privilege or misuse that privilege, you just don’t allow it at all. So a digital way would prevent that from happening. With paper passes, they can actually get in and they can tamper with the destination or modify the date and time. They can also and I’ve also heard that teachers don’t even fill it out completely themselves to begin with. So that could be also a pain point that could be alleviated.
The paper pass process also doesn’t allow you the ability to track anything those insights. So after the fact of, say, little Susan requesting a pass, same class period, same time, meeting up with a friend in the bathroom to vape, now you have those key insights to realize and track down like, oh, okay. I see what’s going on here. We’re actually gonna have to figure out a way of preventing this from happening. So in the future, being able to track what student is headed to where and if it’s a habit or if something maybe even medical is happening, but having those key insights to know what’s happening.
And then if you have any potential students that have issues with another student so we’ve all been young ones. We’ve all gone through the education system preventing those fights and those, misbehaviors from happening altogether, alleviating those students from being in the hallway at the same time.
So the hall manager module would be that digital hall management system. So quickly validating that a student has access to go ahead and go out into the hallway and checking that if there’s any potential limitations associated with that student. So if I as a student only have the ability to get a pass every class period or three passes per day, I’m held accountable to that, and I only have those number of passes to be used before being granted that pass. But then also if I as a student am granted that pass holding me accountable to a ten minute window to go out use the restroom and come back.
So then those statuses then would be updated for that student pass as that process continues. So if I request a pass, I’m marked as pending. Once that’s approved, then would then start that ten minute countdown window. So I would go out, use the restroom, come back.
The teacher would have those insights to know, like, oh, gosh. Susan, you’ve been out fifteen minutes. This is not okay. And then sending out somebody to track down that student and figure out what’s going on.
And then the ability to customize those restrictions. So preventing a student from having access to the hallway if another potential student that they have issues with is out there, they would wait until that student is marked as being back in the classroom before being granted their pass. So then just completely alleviating that situation from happening.
Another great another great thing with the hall manager module would be having access to those insights. So as mentioned previously, being able to go in and monitor, okay, little Susan is requesting this pass during this class period every day and missing a good chunk of instructional time. What’s going on here? And really being able to, be more proactive about keeping that instructional time active and keeping that student in the classroom.
Another great aspect as it pertains to safety is knowing where that student is at all times within your school building. So if an incident were to happen hopefully that never happens you know that student requested for a pass to go to the nurse’s station or requested a pass to go to the front office, the restroom. You have a better idea of where that student is in the moment in case that happens to you.
And then I think that is all I wanted to talk about for the new exciting modules.
Brad Parkel
So, Joanna, you and you and the Visitor Aware team have been very active and very busy with these, new features, and these are things that are right around the corner. And you’re talking about this right now with customers.
I know school and is sometimes a difficult time to introduce new things to an organization, but certainly the conversations are taking place.
Joanna Haugland
Absolutely. Yes. I’m actually a little bit of a stickler, and I love being on those prospect calls and those customer facing calls to know just how I can do my part to support the K-12 environment. If there’s something that we can do or tweak something that can better accommodate a certain process, I wanna know about it. And if we can do it, we’re gonna do it. We wanna support our customers.
Brad Parkel
Yep. Very good. Alright. So, Joanna, just, you know, on the side here, we’re opening up, if people have, an interest in talking with you or other members of the team about anything we’ve seen or talked about here today, simply click yes.
And someone on our team or on one of the teams here at Singlewire will get back in touch with you to, follow-up.
Joanna Haugland
Yes. Please reach out. Book those meetings. We wanna talk to you.
Brad Parkel
Yep. Okay. I’m gonna bring everyone here back onto the stage, to chat just a bit. We have some, items in the q and a that we’re looking to have some questions on.
Let me bring things up here, quickly and go through a couple of questions. I know one right off the top, you know, is this being recorded, and can we, see this, recorded? Yeah. We will rerecord the introduction.
I’m not sure what exactly happened with my audio on the on the intros, but we’ll reset that and then make this available for others in the organization to see. I know we’re, putting this out on the first day of March Madness. And so, we wanna also understand that there’s a lot of likely people that haven’t, seen this or weren’t able to join for work reasons or other reasons. And so, this will be available here soon.
Alright. We’re just gonna kinda do a few questions then to the group.
Let’s start off here with one around Webex Calling.
And this can be an easier or difficult question. Cameron, do you wanna do you wanna tackle this?
Cameron Bjorklund
The answer is yes. Any phones that are in the control hub, Webex Calling environment, will be pulled into InformaCast when you connect the two up.
Brad Parkel
Alright. Very good. Next one here, for a plan to integrate RingCentral phones and systems for this functionality.
Cameron Bjorklund
We currently do not have plans for RingCentral.
We obviously hope that this can kinda be broadened out to, all UCaaS phone providers out there, but, you know, we gotta it’s a little bit of a one off implementation, for each phone, and then also, you know, we gotta get the, the provider of that phone system to also make some changes on our behalf, which can be difficult to do. Cisco was the first one to kind of put in the pieces that we needed, to support the silent panic button flows and stuff.
Brad Parkel
Okay. And to kinda keep on this theme, working with Teams phones. Sounds like there’s there’s more to come.
Cameron Bjorklund
Yep.
Same
Brad Parkel
in the mix.
Cameron Bjorklund
Yep. That is in the same exact, boat.
We have requests out to Microsoft, for some particular pieces we need in place, to support silent panic buttons and locations and the like.
Brad Parkel
Okay. Back to the Cisco phones, there is a new Cisco phone with a red action button that’s on the top of the phone.
Does do these changes incorporate, you know, that button being used for different things?
Cameron Bjorklund
Yes. So the 9800 phone in particular, like a lot of the Webex Calling phones, can be used either in a Webex Calling environment or in a CUCM environment.
And in either place, that red action button on the 9800 phone can be used for silent panic button events within InformaCast.
Brad Parkel
Alright. A few questions about, cameras.
And I think there’s always, questions on different vendors that we’re using. I’m just gonna put a couple of these up.
Any plans with Genetec?
Cameron Bjorklund
We are hopeful that the stuff we’re working on right now for kind of generic camera support is gonna work with the lion’s share of the camera providers out there. We’ve already done we haven’t done testing with Genetec, but we’ve done testing with, quite a few other, camera vendors. But assuming Genetec supports RTSP streams, which, again, the vast majority of the camera systems do, it will work with the, stuff we’re implementing now.
Brad Parkel
Okay. And Rhombus as well was mentioned?
Cameron Bjorklund
Yep. Same boat.
Brad Parkel
Okay. Very good. Just to also go back to one point, Ben, you were talking about I love you guys earlier. Mhmm.
As I understand it, we have a webinar coming up on April thirtieth with the topic of reunification with I love you guys. This is something that, people on this webinar watch your inboxes. We’ll be sending more information out to that to that soon. Do you have any, additional information on that, Ben?
Ben Koca
I do not at this time.
I’ve been working closely with some of the other, aspects of the I Love You Guys Foundation team to work at rolling out some features within the app itself. But the webinar, I would say, I think, the team can provide more context around when that what the subject for that’s gonna be.
Brad Parkel
Very good.
Alright. A question about door access systems, to lock down specific doors. I know door access and building access is something that, we can do with the API.
Cameron, do you wanna talk about that?
Cameron Bjorklund
Yeah. So right now, we don’t have, like, a specific door access, you know, implementation, but we do work with the vast, vast, vast majority of access control systems today, through a contact closure intermediate.
We haven’t done any other investment there because that seems to be working great for customers.
So I am not familiar, with, I guess I don’t know. I guess there’s not a specific one listed here.
But, there’s, like, a 99.9 percent chance that a contact closure, between the door access control system and InformaCast is gonna get you exactly what you’re looking for.
Brad Parkel
Very good.
Alright.
Joanna, question for you. With the student portals and dismissal manager, are these are there any plans to integrate with SIS systems?
Joanna Haugland
Yes. So we actually pull information from student information systems. We don’t push back in since it’s not across the board a accommodated process. There are, like, three potentially three vendors that allow us to push information back into them.
But we rely on the ability to create a CSV file with an automated email at the end of the day with that attendance information, or we have an SFTP process that we can set up to more easily drop that information in a location as well. But we are able to grab and consume that student information system data.
Brad Parkel
Alright. And another question, I think, for you. How well does this integrate with schools that focus on neurodivergent students?
Is customization possible?
Joanna Haugland
Oh, that’s a good conversation. Definitely book some time with us, and we can go over that and kind of, troubleshoot and problem solve so that it can better work for you.
Brad Parkel
Alright. Another question. Is there a way to trigger scenario from a Cisco phone?
Cameron Bjorklund
Lots of ways.
We’ve actually, fairly recently, I think within the last year, now support, DialCast sending a scenario.
So, you know, tons of customers use DialCast already today. If you have been using DialCast for many, many years, but you’ve been hoping for those to send scenarios, they definitely can now. So, get in touch with us, and we can we can help you out there. And then all of the, stuff I just talked about with the silent panic button, service URL integration, either on CUCM or Webex Calling, both of those can also send scenarios.
Brad Parkel
Very good. Can we get InformaCast for Hyper V?
Cameron Bjorklund
This is something we are actively looking at right now.
Ever since, VMware was, purchased, we’ve been getting kind of a deluge of, you know, requests to kinda move to different virtual hardware, to run our fusion server on. And we are trying to kind of, you know, distill that and try to figure out, you know, what the majority of people need. I can tell you right now, Hyper V is in the top three. So, you know, we’re you know, stay tuned as we flush out plans there.
Brad Parkel
Right. Another question on the InformaCast front. Update revamp notification schedulers to make it more usable and industry standard.
Cameron Bjorklund
Let’s schedule some time and chat on this. I’d like to I’m not super familiar with Microsoft Outlook.
So I would love a little demo of kind of what you’re talking about, and we can, see if there’s something we can do in InformaCast.
Brad Parkel
Very good.
Possibility of using security cameras for QR scanning. And, Joanna, I know you kind of touched on this with, the car pickup line. Where does this technology live? How does it is this an option?
Joanna Haugland
That, I know. I just commented on his question, actually. So I need to know more information around this to see if there is a solution that we can entertain and roll out.
To my knowledge, the best way is with the LPR cameras, so license plate recognition. But if there’s a security camera that you’re using, that makes sense for QR code scanning, I’m I’m intrigued. I’d like to know more about that.
Brad Parkel
Awesome. Any plans to add more icons for scenarios if we can’t do it ourselves, Ben?
Ben Koca
Yeah.
We’ve actually, as I mentioned in during the slides, there’s about there’s about forty seven more or forty five more icons I’m looking to add when we start rolling out these additional updates, besides the I love you guys foundation icons. And the other thing I was gonna mention is, we have heard feedback about, people wanting to be able to upload icons themselves.
We’re gonna we’re continuing to monitor that feedback. And, once we roll out these additional icons, I’m gonna kinda circle back to customers and see, you know, if there’s still a desire to upload your own icons, because that does have some of its own caveats that come with it. And, just trying to see if we can, you know, provide icons, on our behalf just to make it easier for customers to begin with.
Brad Parkel
Awesome. And bringing this up, customer found an iOS, the new scenario buttons would select the text in the button as opposed to running the scenario.
Cameron Bjorklund
Funny enough, I saw this one ahead of time, and I’ve already logged a bug ticket with our engineering team.
Brad Parkel
Very good.
Alright. I think we’ve covered most of the questions here today. There were a few that were more specific to individual vendors.
But, Cameron, I think you covered a lot of that. And, Joanna, you know, the point of making things agnostic as possible with our technology is always a focus, here with us. So I think with that, we are kind of at the end of our session for today.
We will be doing more of these in the future. And so if, you know, keep, you know, keep an eye on your inbox for more sessions like this.
We always have resources that are on our Singlewire community so that you can learn more, to read KB articles or view our documentation to learn how to do things. But we are always open to a call to our support team if you do have a question or are stuck and need a little help.
So we’ll leave things there for now. Be sure to, again, watch for more Sparks sessions here in the future, and thanks again for your time today. We appreciate it.