To ensure you continue to receive email from NC4, please add the domain @nc4.us to your Safe Senders List.

	WINTER '10 IN THIS ISSUE FEATURE Homeland Security Cloud™ Conference SITUATIONAL READINESS SPOTLIGHT H1N1 Influenza Coverage E TEAM PRODUCT STEERING COMMITTEE (PSC) UPDATE PRODUCT NEWS & TIPS ESA - ActivTravel Now Available ESA Product Tip: Activating the Proximity Warning feature in Alert Profiles E Team - Commitment to Industry Standards E Team Product Tip: SSL Certificate READER_CONTRIBUTIONS Do you have an interesting tip on how to best use ESA, ESP or E Team? What about input on an aspect of emergency or security management? We welcome contributions to the Readiness Report, so please contact us at info@nc4.us if you have a story idea. FEEDBACK Is there something else you'd like to see in this newsletter? Contact us at info@nc4.us. EXECUTIVE CORNER NC4 President, Jim Montagnino   In early 2009, we partnered with TranSecur to bring a new layer of situational awareness to our customers through the expansion of our global reporting. We soon realized that the complementarities of the NC4 and TranSecur offerings, in addition to the similarities of our corporate cultures, would bring about synergistic benefits to our companies and customers if we were to have an even closer association. As such, in late 2009, NC4 began the process of acquiring TranSecur, which will be completed this quarter. Read the press release.   MARK YOUR CALENDAR     NEMA Mid-Year Conference March 7-8 Alexandria, VA     E Team Customer Call Thursday, March 18 11am PDT / 2pm EDT   SITUATIONAL READINESS SPOTLIGHT NC4’s H1N1 Influenza Coverage Since the emergence of the novel H1N1 virus in April 2009 through November 14, the CDC estimates that about 47 million Americans were infected with the pandemic H1N1 virus, approximately 213,000 people were hospitalized, and nearly 10,000 people have died as a result of the virus.   On June 11, as the virus rapidly spread across the globe, the World Health Organization declared the H1N1 outbreak an influenza pandemic. A second wave of the pandemic recently peaked in the United States, and public health experts are warning of the possibility of a third wave.   While only mild symptoms are experienced by the majority of people that are infected with the novel virus, children and young adults suffer significantly more from pandemic H1N1 than what is usually seen during a regular influenza season. Although about 1 in every 6 Americans now has some immunity against H1N1, the majority of Americans remain susceptible to it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to urge Americans to get vaccinated as H1N1 vaccine supplies increase around the country. An influenza pandemic has the potential of being severely disruptive as has been experienced by several countries around the world. Mexico and Argentina temporarily shut down their entire financial markets, and the healthcare system of Ukraine nearly collapsed under the burden of the pandemic. NC4 continues to closely monitor the global H1N1 situation, publishing the H1N1 Readiness Report multiple times every week and issuing H1N1 incident alerts for secondary impacts like school closures.   For any questions about NC4's coverage of the H1N1 pandemic, please contact David Zietlow at david.zietlow@nc4.us   SUPPORT CORNER Tips from Rhonda for E Team users In order to more effectively assist customers in using the E Team incident management software, the NC4 Support team is in the process of developing a Wiki as well as a Forums tool for E Team users. The new Wiki provides a place to post comments and ideas about E Team, in addition to displaying searchable User Guides and Frequently Asked Questions. The Wiki main page (click to view screenshot) provides navigation links as well as links to the three product lines. When you click on the E Team link, you will go to the E Team Wiki page and will see various tabs at the top. The “discussion” tab will take you to our “Custom Forms” page that will house two types of content – Information and Discussions. The Forums tool (click to view screenshot) will allow users to obtain feedback from other E Team users on best practices for using the E Team software and its components (such as Custom Forms and ARE). This provides a mechanism for users to share templates, reports and forms with other users and a way to troubleshoot problems you may experience. We’re working to roll these capabilities out for general use during the first quarter of 2010. Access will be available from a link on our Support Site which will enable you to use Single Sign on to access these tools. If you have further questions or ideas about the Wiki, please contact us at: Email: support@nc4.us Call: 1-800-209-2312 Support Website: https://support.nc4.us	FEATURE Homeland Security Cloud™ Conference NC4 hosted its inaugural Homeland Security Cloud™ Conference in December 2009, highlighting cloud implementations in Situational Awareness, Emergency Management and Law Enforcement. The goal of the conference was to showcase the proven NC4 solutions currently available in a secure cloud computing environment and to provide an overview of the infrastructure supporting the Homeland Security Cloud. Speakers at the conference included: William Bonk, Branch Chief / Supervisory Special Agent for ICE National Incident Response Unit (NIRU); Bill Nelson, Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) President and Chief Executive Officer; Kevin Manson, Co-founder and board member of the Cybercop Secure Portal; and Amber Arnold, NC4 Subject Matter Expert. The Situational Awareness seminar featured Bill Nelson, sharing his thoughts on the implications of cloud computing for the FS-ISAC. FS-ISAC provides the financial services industry a forum for sharing information about attacks, threats, vulnerabilities, and risk mitigation practices. With over 20 years of federal law enforcement experience, along with numerous awards and accolades for both successful criminal investigations and information sharing, William Bonk presented an overview of the NIRU and their collaboration efforts utilizing the ICE LINK portal (aka NIRU Portal in 2004). Kevin Manson also participated in the Law Enforcement seminar, sharing his work with the CyberCop portal. NC4’s Amber Arnold presented how the Homeland Security Cloud enables information sharing and collaboration among Emergency Management organizations at the federal, state, and local level. Cloud Computing has long been touted as a way to lower the cost and complexity of computing by providing applications that run on the Internet instead of on servers or individual computers in an office environment. More recently, the U.S. Federal Government announced an “application store” through which federal departments could use cloud or Internet-based solutions for office and business productivity purposes. This trend has paved the way for companies to provide effective and efficient solutions for the government, provided they can demonstrate that the appropriate security controls and business rules are in place to protect our nation’s sensitive information. NC4’s Homeland Security Cloud™ currently supports more than 2,500 homeland security communities with a total of more than 80,000 users. With a primary focus on security, NC4’s cloud solution meets or exceeds federal standards for handling sensitive information such as Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), For Official Use Only (FOUO) and Law Enforcement Sensitive (LES) data. If you are interested in learning more about the NC4 Homeland Security Cloud, click here to read our white paper. E TEAM PRODUCT STEERING COMMITTEE UPDATE Jaclyn Barcroft, PSC Chairperson Happy New Year from the E Team PSC! The New Year is a time of year for retrospective thinking and contemplating actions for the future. I suggest that organizations do this with respect to their E Team applications as well. What has worked well for folks, what could use some improvements? Whether it is a procedural adaptation or a software change, now is the time to put together a game plan for 2010. The PSC continues to have input in prioritizing the recommended changes for future product updates. I encourage you to share your ideas and success stories with a PSC member so that we can work together to identify the enhancements that would provide the greatest benefit for the entire E Team community. ______________________ E Team PSC Members: Jaclyn Barcroft, Michigan Department of State Police, barcrofj@michigan.gov Canadian User Group, represented by Lynn Menard, lynn_menard@phac-aspc.gc.ca and Shelley Emmerson, EMMERSSR@gov.ns.ca Coleen Bell, Oakland Fire Department Office of Emergency Services, cabell@oaklandnet.com Joe Casey, Federal Communications Commission, joseph.casey@fcc.gov Preston Cook, Orange County OEM, preston.cook@co.orange.fl.us Bobby Dockery, Georgia Emergency Management Agency, bobby.dockery@gema.ga.gov John Dosh, Escambia County, john_dosh@co.escambia.fl.us Diane Fernandez, Arizona State Division of Emergency Management, diane.fernandez@azdema.gov David Finch, State of Missouri Department of Public Safety, david.finch@dps.mo.gov Shirley K. Ono, Macy's, sono@fds.com Lou Vargo, Ohio County, WV, Emergency Management Agency, lvargo@wocema.com ESA PRODUCT NEWS ActivTravel Now Available In September 2009, NC4 announced its new ActivTravel traveler tracking and alerting capability, an optional add-on capability to ESA. This powerful new functionality combines ESA real-time alerting with traveler locations based on their registered itineraries. ActivTravel includes alert profiles for delivering real-time alerts to security managers or directly to the traveler, an online mapping console (see below), detailed country risk intelligence, and much more. The new ESA 5.5 release includes important new enhancements to ActivTravel: Implementation of ActivTravel capabilities across ESA sub-organizations for more granular access to traveler data in large companies or organizations Support for global expatriate status and incident alerting Support for train travel, in addition to air, hotel, and car rental travel segments Improved ActivMobile map content including access to traveler itinerary information and device auto-detection for appropriate screen dimensions as shown here Configurable time window for pending travel, so alerts are only triggered for current incidents that affect future travel out to a user-specified time period New “ActivTravel Admin” role to provide new levels of control for some users, as well as a new user interface for improved control of traveler alert profiles Improved single sign-on and 1-click integration to powerful TranSecur features, including Global Security Information (GSI), recent and pending traveler reports, historical data, and more Improved browser support for non-Internet Explorer browsers To learn more about ActivTravel, please contact your NC4 account representative or email info@nc4.com. ESA PRODUCT TIP New Graphical Feature: Proximity Warning A Proximity Warning provides users with a visual queue to help bring immediate awareness that there is an incident that could potentially be of higher risk to your enterprise. When an incident occurs within a specified proximity to one of your registered facilities, the icon on the map to indicate that location is highlighted with pulsing red circles. As an example, an alert profile existed for the Karachi Marriott Hotel. When the profile's alert criteria was met by the Security Protest incident, two things happened: Alerts of this incident were sent to those assigned to this alert profile. On the Situation Map Console, the Security Incident icon starts to pulsate with the red proximity warning graphic. To activate this feature for alert profiles that you want the Proximity Warning feature to be used on: You MUST activate the Proximity Warning feature in the Alert Profile's set-up, by checking the box next to Proximity Warnings, as shown in the image below. If an Alert Profile with the activated Proximity Warning checked is met for one or more locations, those locations will pulsate with the red proximity warning graphic. To acknowledge the proximity warning and remove the red proximity warning graphic from the Situation Map Console, simply click either the Acknowledge Warning or Cancel Warning button as shown in the first image above. We believe you will find the Proximity Warning feature useful, particularly when NC4's Situation Map Console is shown on a large display screen. Please contact NC4 Support if you have any questions on setting up alert profiles to utilize this feature, or making adjustments to any of your alert profiles, support@nc4.us or 1-888-624-4411. E TEAM PRODUCT NEWS Commitment to Industry Standards With the upcoming release of R9, NC4 continues to show its commitment to industry standards and their practical use to enable Situational Readiness through interoperability.The use of standards enable multiple operations to effectively share information and processes, enhancing day to day operations and emergency response. New functionality in R9 will support standards from major national and international information exchange initiatives including the National Incident Management System (NIMS), OASIS, National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Newly designed modules in R9 provide users the ability to capture Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Messages, Non-weather Emergency Messages (NWEMs) and the Hospital Availability Exchange (HAVE) information. Using the Emergency Data eXchange Language (EDXL), CAP and NWEM messages can be received from and transmitted to FEMA’s Disaster Management Interoperability Services (DMIS). A demonstration of CAP and NWEM messages can be seen in the presentation, Demonstration of Incident Management Components for DM-Framework on the DMIS website (CAP and NWEM overview begins at the 15:30 minute mark in the presentation). Utilizing the R9 Custom Forms capability provides the ultimate flexibility when it comes to supporting standards. Through the Custom Forms manager and designer, administrators can publish and create additional data elements to support a variety of operational and technical standards. Incident Command System (ICS) data components can be designed and published to the application using the Custom Forms functionality. Custom form components can be further enhanced by technical staff to support personalized business logic, for example adding agency specific cost accounting business logic to your ICS forms. Custom Forms also provides the ability to augment existing modules by publishing user designed tabs, allowing the organization to continue existing operations while adding new data components. An example would be augmenting the existing suspicious activity module with the updated Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) standard data elements. The R9 embedded mapping client (project name Atlas) is a revolutionary mapping technology that is designed to interoperate with a variety of standards. The flexible design of the new mapping client enables users to change base map services, as well create and add map layers on-the-fly, for combined views of data including weather information such as animated weather radar and hurricane tracks, in addition to other hazards data such as MODIS active fire maps, traffic web cameras, and others, for a more advanced common operational picture. As a standards-based mapping client, the integration of virtually any other geospatial data set in ArcGIS 9.3.1, KML, WMS or GeoRSS format allows users to easily view consolidated content from different sources. Examples include: weather radar, Hazmat plumes, DOT webcams, News Feeds, Fire maps, Earthquake feeds, Satellite photos, Flyover images, Population demographics, Blog posts, Flicker, etc. A demonstration of the new map client can be seen at Interoperable Mapping for Situational Awareness on the DMIS website (mapping client overview begins at the 06:50 minute mark in the presentation). The new mapping client fully supports ESRI's latest release ArcGIS 9.3.1. ArcGIS 9.3.1 does require its own dedicated server to achieve necessary performance in a production environment and there may be additional fees associated with using ArcGIS. Please contact your sales representatives for details. We will continue our commitment to interoperable communication and collaboration by supporting new standards. Currently under review for future releases are EDXL-RM (Resource Message), EDXL-Situation Reporting, EDXL- Tracking of Emergency Patients (sTEP) and Web Feature Service (WFS). E TEAM PRODUCT TIP SSL Certificate As a reminder, please have your IT department check SSL certificate expiration dates. If the certificate is near expiration, request a new certificate through your provider. This will avoid any downtime with E Team. For additional information on SSL certificates, refer to the section on Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Configuration in the System Administration Guide (available for download from the support site). If you have further questions regarding SSL Certificates, please contact us at 1-800-209-2312 or support@nc4.us.
NC4, 100 N. Sepulveda Blvd., El Segundo, CA 90245, 877.624.4999  www.nc4.us We respect your privacy. If you no longer wish to receive this report please reply and enter REMOVE in the subject line. A printable version of the newsletter is available here.