Release Notes

Finish a training course, remove your sandbox when you are done, and a guided tour you can actually find.

• NewTraining courses can be completed: press Finish on the last step of each guided tour and it is ticked off. When every tour is done the course shows Completed — in the tour and on your Training page — and it stays that way even after you remove the sandbox. Progress follows you to any browser or phone.
• NewRemove sandbox: when you are finished with a course, the amber bar (or the Course complete panel) deletes your practice organization and takes you back to your team. You can start the course again any time.
• ChangedThe guided tour is bigger and opens by itself the first time you enter a training sandbox. Closed, it is a large amber button in the bottom-right corner showing your progress, and the amber bar has a Guided tour button to bring it back from any page.
• FixedThe organization picker — at the top of the page and on the sign-in screen — is readable again: white text on blue, where the list used to open as off-white text on white.

WardPing — a new flavour for hospital teams: page the clinician on call for a service from a phone, with every page tracked on one board. Nothing changes for search and rescue or fire organizations.

• NewWardPing (a fourth product flavour, alongside SARManager, FirstTone and FirstTone Fire): an on-call pager for hospitals. Services such as Internal Medicine or General Surgery each have first call, second call and staff tiers and a call schedule. A page goes to whoever covers the lowest tier right now, climbs a tier when nobody acknowledges it in time (two minutes for STAT), and every page belongs to a case that the first page opens.
• NewWardPing keeps the brief private: notifications name only the service, the case label and the sender, and the text is read in the app by the sender, the clinicians it was sent to, and administrators. The central board shows timings and acknowledgements, never the message.
• ChangedNothing changes for SARManager, FirstTone or FirstTone Fire organizations: WardPing is a separate product, and an organization only ever sees the product it runs.
• ChangedThe phone app (Operational Edge 2.6.0) is more reliable when you switch servers or hand the phone to someone else: callouts follow the person who is signed in, and a server you have left stops paging the phone as soon as it can be reached.

Start a training course yourself — no code needed — from your account menu.

• NewTraining is in your account menu: click your name at the top right and choose Training. Pick a course and press Start to get your own practice organization straight away; press Continue to go back to it later. Courses are for members of a team on SAR Manager.
• ChangedThe built-in courses are open to every member — nobody has to hand out codes. A platform administrator can still close a course to members or run it by code from the console's Training tab, and a trainer's code still works on the Training page.

Eleven ready-made training courses, one for each part of SAR Manager, each with its own guided tour.

• NewBuilt-in training courses: Getting around, Call intake and deployment, Callouts and on-call, Running an operation, Searcher check-in, Close-out and reports, Pre-plans, Tech Admin setup, Personnel & Equipment, Maintenance, and Disaster response (SARDR). Each one offers only its own guided tour, and a module course turns on just that module in the practice organization — the Maintenance course starts with a real yard layout.
• NewThe courses start closed. A platform administrator opens one by issuing its code in the console's Training tab and hands the code to the class; trainees enter it at /training as before.

Who's out can now reach your RC on duty and your leadership, not only your mutual-aid search managers, and every step reports back who was alerted.

• NewWho's out: a step from DataDiver can now be addressed to your RC on duty (the members on call in the RC on-call group set in Who's out → Admin) and to your leadership (the members subscribed to leadership updates), as well as to your mutual-aid search managers. A search being concluded is the first step that reaches all three. The emergency tone is still for search managers on an ICS 213RR only; everyone else is notified quietly, and nobody is paged twice for one step.
• NewWho's out: quiet notices, such as a team declining a deployment order, now reach the RC. They appear in the Log under their own title and never change a request.
• ChangedWho's out: the Log now shows which role each person was alerted as. DataDiver is told who was alerted for every step, by name only. Phone numbers are never sent.

Training moves inside SAR Manager: each trainee gets their own private practice organization, entered with a course code and their normal sign-in.

• NewTraining courses. A course code from your trainer, entered at /training after signing in as usual, gives you your own practice organization: a made-up team of 25, a live practice search, and you as Search Manager. Entering the code again takes you back to the same one. It appears in your organization list on the web and in the app as "TRAINING — <course>".
• NewNothing in a training organization reaches a real person or system — no texts, calls, emails, invitations, D4H, CalTopo, 3CX or drone links. "Sent messages" shows everything the app would have sent, with real numbers and addresses hidden. The one exception: your own phone gets the alerts, marked TRAINING and never as a Critical Alert, so you see what a callout looks like.
• NewIn your training organization you can switch the role you are practising (Search Manager, IMT, Tech Admin, Searcher, Viewer), reset the scenario, and jump back to your real team from the amber bar. While your phone is in training it does not get your team's real callouts — switch back when you are done.
• NewTrainers listed on a course see every trainee's practice organization and can join one to help. Practice organizations are removed 14 days after their course ends, or after 60 days unopened.
• FixedEvacuation-roll markers (SARDR) push to CalTopo again for organizations whose CalTopo secret was saved after v2.22.

Two new modules: Maintenance — a live fleet status board with work orders, service and D4H write-back — and Who's out, the phone side of DataDiver's mutual-aid process.

• NewMaintenance (new module, licensed per organization): a live board of every vehicle, trailer, UTV and boat on a map of your yard — green operational, amber limited, red dashed non-operational with the reason under the name, what is inside what, what is off-site, what is on a task, and what is overdue for service. Tap an asset, pick the status and the reason, save: everyone else sees it within seconds. It replaces the parking diagram that went stale the moment a truck moved.
• NewMaintenance: work orders (open, in progress, waiting for parts, closed) with parts logged against them, service schedules by days, kilometres or hours with a fleet-wide Service due list, mileage and hours readings, and a full history of every status change — who, when, from and to.
• NewMaintenance: the site layout is yours to draw — zones (building, parking pad, yard, off-site), an aerial photo to trace over, assets dragged into place — and saved boards decide which assets show (a Fleet board, a Rope board, a Comms board) and who may change statuses from each. The whole layout exports and imports as one file; SEASAR's 13302 layout ships as the first template, with a blank one beside it.
• NewMaintenance: optional one-way write-back to D4H — status changes update the linked equipment item, work orders become D4H repairs. Meter readings cannot be written (D4H has no field for them) and say so in the sync log rather than pretending.
• NewWho's out (new module): when DataDiver's RC sends your team an ICS 213RR mutual-aid request, it reaches your mutual-aid search managers' phones with the emergency tone — through silent — and every other step (resource covered, deployment order, request complete, search concluded) arrives quietly. Answer with the people you authorise per resource line and accept or decline a deployment order from the module; the answers, delivery and read receipts, and who holds each role go back to DataDiver automatically.
• ChangedRoles: IMT holds Maintenance View + Edit and Who's out View + Respond; TechAdmin holds all three Maintenance permissions and Who's out View + Administration; Search Managers hold everything. Searchers and Viewers see neither module. A custom role can be given any of the new permissions.

The tax-credit CSV downloads work again.

• FixedReports → Tax credit: the Members, Detail (audit trail) and Tag issues CSV buttons gave a sign-in error instead of a file. They now download.

Security updates and a tighter server; nothing changes in how you use the app.

• SecurityUpdated the web framework to close three published vulnerabilities, and the server now always runs without administrator rights.
• ChangedSEASAR: your tax-credit letter logo now lives only in Settings → Tax Credit Letter, where you can change it. The copy built into the app has been removed, and your letters print as before.

Brings the site back after v2.30.0 failed to start.

• Fixedv2.30.0 did not start because of how its server image was built, so the site was unavailable until it was rolled back. This release carries the same features — tax-credit letters per organization and the close-out character limits — with the build fixed.

Tax-credit letters belong to each organization, with a letter builder in Settings, and close-out stops PDF boxes from silently dropping long answers.

• NewSettings → Tax Credit Letter: your organization name, certifier, logo, SARVAC letterhead, credit amount, dates and the letter wording, with a Preview sample letter button. Letters and emails stay off until the required details are filled in, so no organization can print another's name.
• ChangedSEASAR: your letter details and logo were copied into your own settings automatically and your letters print exactly as before. Other organizations: fill in Settings → Tax Credit Letter before your first letters.
• ChangedSARVAC's standard wording and the eligibility thresholds stay current with the app until you change them; "Reset to SARVAC default" goes back to the standard text.
• FixedClose-out: when a box on an uploaded PDF only holds a few characters, the screen now limits the answer and refuses to generate with that field named, instead of printing the box blank.
• SecurityDownloading a tax-credit letter now refuses a year with untagged activities, the same as emailing one, and uploaded letter logos are checked so a crafted image cannot slow the server.

The phone app now tells you when an update is ready, and when a newer version is in the store.

• NewWhen an update to the phone app has downloaded, the home screen offers "Restart now" so you get it straight away instead of the next time the app starts. It never appears while you are on a callout or checked in to an operation. (Needs the app update published alongside this release.)
• NewPlatform administrators can set the latest and minimum phone-app version for iPhone and Android (super-admin → Platform → Mobile App Versions). Phones on an older version see a "New version available" card with a button to the store; below the minimum it comes back every time the app opens. It never blocks the app.

A form builder for close-out forms: edit an uploaded PDF or build a form from scratch, and close-out asks proper questions with required answers.

• NewForm builder (Settings → Close-out Forms). Every uploaded PDF now opens in a builder where you rename its fields, group them into sections, add help text, mark answers Required and choose what fills each one: operation data, a fixed value, a question at close-out, or nothing. Use New blank form to build a form from scratch, or Duplicate as built to turn an upload — even a flat, scanned PDF — into one you can change.
• NewForms built from scratch print as finished PDFs with your organization, the operation, the Alberta time and the form version on every page. A table can fill its rows from the operation's check-ins or teams. Preview PDF shows the form before you use it.
• ChangedClose-out now asks each question with the right control — text, number, date, time, checkbox, choices — grouped by section with its help text. Generate stays off until every Required answer is filled in. Answers save as you type, are shared with anyone else closing the same operation, survive a reload, and are kept after you generate, so a correction is just Generate again.
• ChangedClearing an answer at close-out now prints that field blank, and a field set to skip is never filled.
• ChangedIf someone else saved a form in the builder while you were editing it, you are asked before anything is overwritten.
• FixedYour organization's name no longer defaults to SEASAR's. If you saved Settings → General without typing your own name, check it now: it prints on your close-out forms.
• FixedFallback text set for an empty operation value now prints on uploaded forms too, and the Preview button on the Close-out Forms list opens the PDF again.

Close-out forms and reports now show the right date and time for evening operations.

• FixedClose-out documents generated in the evening showed the next day's date and a time six or seven hours ahead. The SAR 104, incident report, close-out report, team log, ICS forms and the operation date on your uploaded forms now use Alberta time. Re-generate any close-out package made after about 6 pm if its dates matter for your records.
• FixedThe SAR Forms header shows the operation's start date and time in Alberta time, whatever time zone your computer is set to, and a last-seen time you typed is shown exactly as you typed it.
• FixedThe SMEAC briefing stamp, D4H whiteboard update times, and the default date when a qualification is awarded without one now follow Alberta time instead of the server clock.

Fire departments see at a glance which trucks can roll, roles are named for your kind of service, and TechAdmins can manage Equipment.

• NewFirstTone Fire: each truck on the Apparatus board now shows whether it can roll with the people available right now, which seats (officer, driver, firefighter) are filled, and who is short. A chief or admin sets which qualifications fill each seat in Setup → Staffing rules, with a live count of who matches. Out-of-service trucks show no staffing.
• ChangedBuilt-in roles are now named for your kind of service. Fire departments see Chief, Officer, Admin, Firefighter and Viewer; FirstTone teams see Manager, IMT, TechAdmin, Member and Viewer. What each role can do is unchanged, and SAR teams see the same names as before.
• ChangedThe fire product is now called FirstTone Fire everywhere it is named.
• ChangedTechAdmins can now open and manage Equipment. If your organization has customised the TechAdmin role, your saved list is kept as it is; add Equipment to it in Settings if you want it.
• FixedA crash or restart while an organization was being added or renamed can no longer leave the server unable to find any organization. The previous list is kept and used automatically.
• FixedTwo server processes starting at the same moment no longer trip over each other setting up the platform database.

Apparatus & Stations for fire departments, invited members see your organization in the phone app straight away, and several fixes.

• NewFirstTone Fire: Apparatus & Stations. A board of every truck by station, showing whether it is in quarters, available, responding, on scene, returning or out of service, for how long, and which incident it is on. Officers change a unit's status from the board; a unit sent to an incident must be given that incident on purpose, never by default. Setup holds your stations and apparatus. Fire departments now open on this board. SAR teams see no change.
• ChangedFirstTone: the menu is regrouped into Incidents and People & Equipment, and an operation's Board tab always shows who is responding and where.
• ChangedWhen you add a member who already has an account, the phone app now offers your organization to them straight away, before their first sign-in with you. Removing a member now also takes your organization off their phone's list.
• FixedPush alerts reach everyone even when a server has phones running both the SARManager and FirstTone apps. Before, a mixed batch could be refused as a whole and nobody in it was alerted.
• FixedThe check-in screen no longer says "7h 60m available".
• FixedPersonnel & Equipment: assessment dates, availability blocks, service life and inspection due dates now fall on the right Alberta day, instead of a day early.
• SecurityActivity-log entries can no longer be lost when the database is briefly busy.

New Operational Edge icon, up-to-date printable guides, and easier-to-read panels.

• ChangedThe browser tab and home-screen icon is now the Operational Edge mountain mark, the same one the phone app gets in its next store update. If you added SARManager to your home screen, remove it and add it again to pick up the new icon.
• ChangedThe three printable guides under Help (Searcher, SM / IMT, TechAdmin) are rewritten for today's screens, with new screenshots. They now cover answering a callout by text or phone, the three-step check-in, the operation tabs, callout waves, event codes and the current Settings tabs.
• FixedPale warning and highlight panels, such as the Reporting question on Close Operation, were hard to read on the dark theme. They now use the theme's own colours.
• FixedSmall section headings no longer switch to the large display font.

Security hardening: the server drops administrator rights, and drone enrollment links stay out of logs.

• SecurityThe server now runs without administrator (root) rights wherever the hosting allows it, so a flaw in the app could do far less to the machine it runs on. Nothing changes for you.
• SecuritySARDrone: the controller enrollment link and QR on the Admin tab now keep the enrollment code out of server logs. Controllers already set up with the old link keep working; if a controller says the new link has no code, the older link is under "Controller says the link has no token?".
• SecurityThe test tooling behind the app was updated to close a reported advisory. It never ran in the live app; this only keeps the development side clean.

A tidier sign-in box.

• FixedThe sign-in box no longer repeats the logo under the page heading, and its title is a plain, normal-sized "Sign in".

The new look reaches every page, the sign-in screen and the phone app.

• ChangedThe sign-in page now matches the rest of the app: the Operational Edge mark, SARManager in the display face, and the sign-in box itself in navy and gold. The organization picker after sign-in got the same treatment.
• ChangedEvery page now opens the same way — a small gold label for the section, the title, and a one-line description: the SARDR, SARConnect, SARDrone and SARScribe module pages, Call Intake, the Deployment Wizard, Close Operation, Help, My Account, Close-out Forms and the Volunteer Tax Credit page.
• ChangedAn operation's page now leads with its name in large type and its state (Active, Deployed or Training) above it. A training operation keeps a yellow frame so it can never be mistaken for a real one.
• ChangedButtons, focus rings and highlights that were still blue are gold, and the number tiles on Reports, the Tax Credit page and Personnel & Equipment use the same large figures as the rest of the app.
• FixedOn Pre-Plans and Event kit the sidebar highlighted both that page and Operations; only the page you are on is highlighted now.
• ChangedThe SARManager phone app gets the same navy and gold look in its next store update (2.4.0).

A new look: SAR Manager now shares DataDiver's layout, typography and navy-and-gold palette.

• ChangedThe app shell is redrawn to match DataDiver: a taller header with the Operational Edge mark and the product wordmark, a wider sidebar with line icons and a gold marker on the current page, and your name as a pill in the top-right that opens the account menu.
• ChangedPage titles are set in Cormorant Garamond with a small gold section label above them and a one-line description under them; body text is Montserrat. Buttons are square and uppercase; status badges are outlined pills.
• ChangedThe navy, slate and gold palette is now the default dark theme. Your Light, High Contrast and Colour Blind Safe choices in the account menu still work and were re-tuned to the new palette.
• ChangedOn a phone or a narrow window the sidebar becomes a strip under the header instead of covering the page.
• ChangedThe footer moved into the content column, with the version link on the left and the developer, About and Privacy links on the right.

Security housekeeping: the last items from the October review.

• SecurityThe list of pages reachable without signing in is now exact, and a test checks every page and API route in the app against it, so a future page cannot become public by accident. Sign-in sessions minted for another SAR Manager server are refused on this one.
• SecurityEvery entry in the platform audit log now carries a tamper-evident hash chained to the previous entry; the super-admin console can verify the whole chain and will name the first entry that was altered or removed. A retention period can be set there too — older entries are exported to the backups folder before they are removed, and nothing is removed until a period is chosen.
• SecurityChoosing an Operations Chief, and the “new call” text to search managers, now go by capability rather than by role name, so a custom role with the right permissions is eligible. Removing a SARConnect draft that already has an operation needs the Call Intake permission; changing the D4H connection from the Crew module needs Settings administration.
• SecurityThe on-call phone feed accepts its token in a header (so it stays out of access logs); the Twilio, join and register endpoints refuse oversize requests before reading them; an inbound text no longer rescans every organization on every message.
• ChangedRemoved: the old /portal page (replaced by Viewer accounts long ago), the password field on user edits (sign-in has been through Clerk for a year — nothing checked it), and the desktop-era single database. Radio-log entries confirmed by the SARScribe sidecar rather than a person now say so. The container reports its own health to the platform.

Your integration credentials now stay on the server and are encrypted at rest.

• SecurityThe D4H API token, the CalTopo secret and the 3CX client secret are no longer sent to your browser or phone. Settings shows whether each is set (and the last four characters of the D4H token) with a Clear button; type a new value only when you want to replace it. Every D4H, CalTopo and 3CX action uses the stored credential on the server.
• SecurityThose credentials — and the platform Twilio, SendGrid and HERE keys — are now encrypted inside the database, so a copied database file, a backup or an organization export no longer contains them readable. The platform operator sets one key (SARM_SECRETS_KEY) and sees the state in the super-admin console; values stored before the key was set are encrypted the first time they are used. If the key is ever lost, the credentials simply need to be re-entered — nothing else is affected.
• SecurityThe D4H proxy now checks the right permission for each action: reading members needs the Roster capability, equipment and inspections need the Equipment capability, and anything that changes an incident, exercise, whiteboard or attendance record needs Manage operations. Before, any one of those let a user do all of it.
• ChangedThe super-admin console warns when a platform credential set in the console is shadowing a different value in the server environment or Key Vault, so a rotated vault secret is not silently ignored.

Security release: the findings of the October security review, closed.

• SecuritySigning in to an organization for the first time now requires the email on your account to be verified, and an account created from an event join code is only ever matched to the roster row that code created — never to another organization’s member by email. If you see “Verify the email address on your account”, confirm it in your account settings and sign in again.
• SecurityNew organizations are no longer created with a placeholder “admin” login; the super-admin console provisions the first Search Manager directly. Existing placeholder logins are retired automatically once the organization has a real administrator.
• SecurityRestoring an archived operation now writes only that operation’s own records, and downloads of generated documents and incident-report PDFs are limited to files inside your organization’s own storage.
• SecurityEvery check-in page that is reached from an operation link — status, special resources, vehicles, the roster lookup — now requires you to be a member of the organization that owns the operation. The check-in dashboard’s briefing (subject details, IPP, plans) is shown to command and to the member’s own check-in only, no longer to read-only Viewer accounts. Intake drafts are limited to people who can take calls.
• SecurityThe Logs page now shows your organization’s own activity trail. The raw server log, which is shared by every organization on the server, is available to the platform operator only.
• SecuritySARConnect accepts an inbound dispatch email only when the mail provider confirms it really came from the sender’s domain (SPF or DKIM), on top of the accepted-senders list. A forged “From” can no longer create a draft or page the team. A platform administrator can switch this off for one organization whose dispatch agency relays through a forwarder that breaks these checks.
• SecurityMap labels drawn from CalTopo feature titles and from dispatch text are now shown as plain text, so nothing in a title can run in the browser. The CalTopo map link on an operation must be an https:// address.
• SecuritySettings that name a server the app connects to — the D4H region and the 3CX phone-system address — are now validated: the region must be one of D4H’s regions and the 3CX address must be an https:// address to a public host. Rate limits on sign-in and webhook paths can no longer be sidestepped with a forged client address.
• ChangedThe super-admin console’s organization list shows each database’s size on disk, and the daily backup pass trims each database’s write-ahead log.

Filter the roster by any member type, and choose which D4H member types to import.

• NewThe Personnel roster’s member-type filter now lists every type on your roster — Operational, Member In Training, Observer, Retired, and any custom D4H status such as IMT — instead of only Operational and Member In Training.
• NewSettings → D4H → Member types to import: tick which D4H member types Personnel → Import from D4H offers (Operational, Member In Training, Observer, Retired). It starts with Operational and Member In Training, exactly as before. Retired members you import arrive inactive and are never paged. Members already on your roster keep syncing whatever their type, so someone who retires in D4H is still marked Retired.

Retired members sync as retired — and are no longer paged.

• FixedThe roster sync from D4H showed retired members (and observers) as “Member In Training”, which also meant a callout to members in training could reach people who have retired. Retired members now show as Retired, are taken off call and are left out of every callout. Observers show as Observer. If someone is reinstated in D4H, the next sync brings them back. Run Sync from D4H on the Personnel page (or wait for the automatic sync) to correct the roster now.

Security updates to the components the app is built on.

• SecurityUpdated the web framework and the image library to their latest security releases. These close several published vulnerabilities, including one rated critical. None of them could be reached through how SAR Manager uses those components, so nothing was exposed — this keeps it that way. Nothing changes in how you use the app.

Channels already in your comms plans now show their names too.

• ChangedComms plans saved before v2.19.1 had radio channel numbers in the Channel column. Those are now switched to the channel’s name from your channel list — in every pre-plan and in every operation that is still open. A number is only switched when it matches exactly one named channel in your list; anything else is left as it was. Closed operations keep their comms plan exactly as it was printed.

The version label at the bottom of the page is right again.

• FixedThe version shown at the bottom of every page said v2.19.0 after the v2.19.1 update, although v2.19.1 was running. It now shows the version you actually have.

Settings and Pre-Plans fit your screen, and radio channels go by name.

• FixedSettings and Pre-Plans now arrange their cards to fit your screen: one column on a phone or a narrow window, two on a wide one, with each card filling the next open space. No more long empty gaps beside a short card, and wide tables scroll inside their card instead of being cut off.
• ChangedRadio channels go by name. Adding a channel from your channel list now puts its name (“SAR Primary”) in the comms plan and on the printed ICS 205, where it used to put the radio’s channel number. Channels already in a plan keep what they had — add them again from the list to switch them to the name.
• ChangedA pre-plan’s comms plan now shows just Channel, Purpose and Notes. The frequencies and tones still come along from your channel list and print on the ICS 205 when the pre-plan is applied to an operation.

SARScribe capture boxes are registered once, and you start transcribing from the operation.

• NewSARScribe: register a capture box with your organisation once — SARScribe → Sessions → Capture boxes — and paste its token into the box a single time. After that, nobody handles tokens again: the box waits, registered, until an operation needs it.
• NewStart transcribing from the operation. On an operation’s Communications → Comms plan tab, a SARScribe card shows which box is listening and lets you Start transcribing, Move a box here from another operation, or Stop. The box follows within a minute.
• ChangedRadio traffic always lands in the operation it was heard on. If the box loses its connection and you move it to another operation in the meantime, the traffic it saved while offline still goes to the first operation once it reconnects. Closing an operation releases its box automatically.

Every D4H group is now pickable, pre-alert chooses its own recipients, and three more ICS forms.

• FixedCallout group pickers now list EVERY D4H group your team uses. If a group was only ever somebody’s secondary group in D4H — Swiftwater, K9, Rope on members whose primary is Ground — it never appeared in the picker, on the website or in the phone app, even though paging it would have worked. That is why the groups in the app did not match the ones in D4H. Nothing about who a group reaches has changed; the lists you choose from are simply complete now.
• ChangedPre-alert picks its own recipients, on the pre-alert page. Choose them from a drop-down checklist of groups and members instead of inheriting whoever the last callout went to, and use the new On call / Off call / Everyone toggle to limit a pre-alert to the people currently rostered. The page itself has been tidied up — the fields no longer run off the side on a laptop or a phone.
• NewThree more ICS Canada forms: ICS 215 Operational Planning Worksheet, ICS 215A Incident Safety Analysis, and ICS 208 Safety Message. They fill from the operation and the risk assessment the same way the forms you already use do, and they print with the rest of the package. That brings the set to twelve.
• ChangedThe words on screen now match the kind of organisation the deployment is set up for. A search and rescue install reads exactly as it always has — Searcher, Operation, Base, IPP. A FirstTone install reads Member, Incident, Station; a fire department’s reads Firefighter, Incident, Station, Company, with fire call types (structure fire, wildland, MVC, alarm, hazmat, mutual aid) in place of the SAR ones. Lock-screen pages, the operation list, forms and reports all follow, so an operation’s type reads as words everywhere instead of falling back to “SAR operation”.

You choose whether creating an operation tells the whole team — and the pre-alert page lays out properly.

• NewSettings → Operations → “Tell everyone when a new operation is created”. Until now, creating an operation sent “New operation — open the app to check in” to every member’s phone, however the operation was made and before anyone had been called out. If you page people selectively, turn this off: the callout is then the only thing that reaches a phone, and the members you did not page are not told to go and check in. It stays ON unless you change it, so nothing changes for teams that rely on the broadcast. Callouts, pre-alerts and team notifications are unaffected either way, and a training operation has only ever notified the person who created it.
• FixedThe pre-alert page now fits the screen. It was missing the standard page layout, so the text ran underneath the sidebar on the left and off the edge on the right.

You can resend somebody their sign-up invitation without deleting and re-creating them.

• NewResend invite, on the Users page. When an invitation email lands in a junk folder or gets deleted, press Resend invite on that person’s row and they get a new one. Until now the only way was to delete the member and add them again, which threw away their roster link, their roles and their history to fix an email problem. The button appears for anyone who has not signed in yet.
• ChangedResending cancels the old invitation, so the newest email is the only link that works — no more wondering which of three emails is the current one. If the person already has an account, the app tells you so and points them at Forgot password instead of sending an invitation they cannot use.

A usability sweep of both apps — the on-screen keyboard no longer covers what you are typing, tab bars fit on a phone, and the Personnel dashboard tells you at a glance who is ready for a role.

• FixedThe on-screen keyboard no longer covers the box you are typing in. On a phone the check-in page’s bottom bar sat under the iPhone home indicator, and any pop-up asking you to type something could put its text box behind the keyboard with no way to scroll to it. Both are fixed, across every screen at once.
• FixedTab bars now scroll sideways instead of pushing the page off the screen. Settings has seven tabs and a member’s record has seven — on a phone the later ones were simply unreachable, and the whole page slid sideways when you tried.
• ChangedRemoving a qualification from your organisation now asks first. It was a small × that deleted a shared record immediately — the only action in the app that could do that without confirming. The button is also a proper size now.
• ChangedThe Personnel & Equipment dashboard answers “who is ready for a role?” without leaving it — a new tile, plus a short list of anyone who is one requirement away, which is the list a training officer can actually clear before the next callout. The page also loads in one request instead of six.
• FixedOn a phone: the sign-in screen scrolls, so the Sign in button is always reachable on a small handset; the command board’s Priorities editor is no longer covered by the keyboard and Save works on the first tap; the gear sheets have a proper Close button instead of a tiny one; the Save button on Log a clue clears the Android navigation bar; and the radio-check indicator prints the minutes beside the dot, so it no longer relies on colour alone. (Needs the next app update to reach your phone.)
• NewTeams on the Standard workflow can now start an operation from the phone. Creating an operation was always allowed — only calling people out depends on your workflow — but the button was hidden along with the callout tools. Calling the team out still happens on the web console, and the screen says so.

The training server now shows trainees how to practise on the phone app as well as on the web.

• NewTrain on your phone. The training sign-in page now starts with a choice — on the web, or on the phone app — and the phone option shows the steps and a QR code: install the app, sign in as you normally do, then Settings → Scan new code. The app then runs against the practice server, with the amber training strip on every screen, until you choose Leave training in Settings.
• NewThe training strip has a "Train on your phone" button, so a trainer can put the code up on the projector for the whole class, and each trainee is offered it once, on their first visit.
• ChangedIf a training server has not been set up to accept phones yet, the phone option says so plainly instead of showing a code that would not work. This changes nothing on a real SAR Manager server.

The Secretary can now do the whole volunteer tax credit in the app: who qualifies, their certification letters, and the audit record — straight from D4H.

• NewVolunteer Tax Credit (SRVTC), under Reports. Pick a calendar year and it works out who qualifies for the federal Search and Rescue Volunteers’ Tax Credit from D4H attendance — primary, secondary and admin hours, the verdict, and in plain words what anyone who is short is short of. Anyone within 25 hours is flagged as near rather than simply not eligible, so you can ask them whether hours are missing.
• NewCertification letters, ready to send. Download an eligible member’s SARVAC letter as a PDF, or email it to them with the PDF attached. Members who are close get an hours-check note instead, asking about hours missing from D4H or volunteer firefighter hours. Emails go one member at a time on purpose — there is no “send all”, because a wrong tag would otherwise send the whole team an incorrect tax document.
• NewIt stops you before a mistake goes out. If any activity is untagged or carries both tag types, the page lists them and the letter and email buttons stay switched off until the tags are fixed in D4H — untagged hours count toward nothing, so the totals are not final. A member with no address in D4H gets no letter at all, rather than one with a blank address line. Download the Members, Detail and Tag issues CSVs and keep them with the letters: Detail is one row per member per activity, which is what makes a certified total defensible if the CRA asks.
• ChangedBeing unavailable now also takes you off the duty phone. If you have set “unavailable until”, on-call routing skips you and moves to the next person in the rotation — unless that would leave nobody on call, in which case the duty line still rings you. It must never ring nowhere.
• NewMutual aid is now two separate switches: asking for help, and accepting requests. A team that never sends a request can still hear one. Accepting requests is on by default, and turning it off tells a partner you are not accepting rather than leaving their request in a queue nobody answers.
• FixedCommand can see which teams have not been told about their tasking, and the Personnel & Equipment sidebar is now four short sections instead of one long list.

Your assignment now finds you: the check-in page keeps itself up to date, the phone home screen says which team you are on, and command can see at a glance which team has not been told about its task yet.

• FixedThe check-in page updates itself. Until now it loaded once, when you finished checking in — so if command put you on a team ten minutes later, your screen still said "No team yet" until you reloaded it. That is almost certainly why people at the last exercise were not sure whether they had been assigned. It now refreshes every few seconds, and again whenever you come back to the tab.
• NewOn the phone, once you are checked in and on a team, the big button on the home screen is your team: the team name, what it has been tasked with, and who is leading it. No hunting for which operation, which tab, which team — it is the first thing on the screen.
• NewCommand can see which teams have not been told. A team that has a current tasking nobody has sent out now shows "Not notified" beside the Notify team button, in Operations → Teams. Sending is still a deliberate act — moving people between teams should not page anybody — but forgetting the button is no longer invisible.
• NewThree lines of guidance the first time you check in, on the web and the app: stand by at staging, command puts you on a team, your team and your task appear on this screen. Dismiss it once and it stays gone.

Searchers now see their team, their team lead, who is with them, their task and where to go on one card — and IMT teams can send a pre-alert to ask who is available before committing to an operation.

• NewOne assignment card answers everything a searcher needs: the team, the team lead, who else is on it, the task and where to report — on the screen you land on, not a tab away. This comes straight from the feedback after the last exercise, where everybody could name their team but only about half could name their team lead, and only 40% were sure what to do next. Nothing was assigned yet? The card says so, and tells you to stand by at staging.
• NewPre-alert, for teams on the IMT callout workflow. When a call comes in and you do not yet know whether there is an operation, paste what dispatch said (or just give the agency and the person) and send it. It pages the group you chose for pre-alerts, rings through silent on every phone, asks people to answer Responding or Unavailable — and leaves a draft operation behind so the whole team can see it. Accept turns the draft into a real operation with everything you pasted already filled in.
• NewPre-alert recipients are set once, in Settings → Operations: a roster group, a D4H group, or both. Unlike a callout there is no screen to pick people on — that is the point — so if no group is set the pre-alert is refused rather than paging the whole team.
• FixedA training operation no longer creates anything in D4H. Drills used to create a real D4H event marked "TESTING PLEASE DELETE" — and one started from the phone made it silently in the background — leaving clutter in the team record for somebody to tidy up. Training operations now leave no trace in D4H at all.

Readiness now tracks where you are trying to get: a target per role, a month-by-month trend, and a development plan for each member built from their own gaps.

• NewSet a target for a role — "12 Team Leaders ready" — and the Readiness page tracks it: how many are ready, how many more people it would take, and whether the target is met. Targets can be a number of members or a share of the roster.
• NewRecord the month and watch the trend. Pressing "Record this month" on the Readiness page stores how many members are ready for each role, and the trend table then shows the months side by side with the change. The numbers are stored rather than recalculated, so the history survives the operations, assessments and members it was worked out from — an operation archived next year does not change last month’s figure.
• NewEvery member can have a development plan. Start one for a role and it is filled in from that member’s own gaps, each with something to actually do — "book the course", "be assessed at the higher level", "get out on a tasking". Tick steps off as they are done. The plan is seeded once and is then yours: re-running readiness never rewrites somebody’s plan underneath them.
• ChangedThe training-needs list now says how many members are blocked by each thing AND how many of them already have it on a plan — the difference between "14 people need Wilderness First Aid" and "14 people need it and nobody has booked it".

Personnel & Equipment grows up: your own fields and statuses, real competency assessment with levels and sign-off, a readiness view that answers who you can send tonight, PPE that retires on age and use, kit checks — and, if you want it, SARManager becomes the system of record and publishes back to D4H.

• NewYou can now record what YOUR team tracks. Add your own fields to a member, an item of equipment, a qualification or a course — text, numbers, dates, yes/no or pick-lists — and name your own membership statuses ("Probationary Responder", "Sabbatical"). Because a status has to mean something on a callout, each one you create says whether it pages as Operational, as Member In Training, or not by status at all, so nobody is quietly added to or dropped from a page. Your fields appear in the member and equipment CSV exports. Set both up under Personnel & Equipment → Setup.
• NewCompetencies: what the team can actually DO, which is not the same as what certificates they hold. A competency is held at a level on a ladder you define, against written criteria, signed off by a named assessor with the evidence attached — and the history of who signed off what is kept permanently, even if you later delete the competency from your catalogue. There is a matrix of everyone against everything, and an Assessments queue showing what has lapsed, what lapses soon, and who is waiting on a first sign-off. Assessing is its own permission, separate from editing records, because an assessor is often not an administrator.
• NewReadiness answers "who can I send tonight?". Describe what a job needs — a competency at a level, a qualification, or recent experience like "two taskings and four trainings in twelve months" — and the new Readiness page shows who is ready for each role, who is one requirement away, and a training-needs list of what is blocking the most people. The recent-experience part is counted from your own operations, training records and imported D4H attendance; nobody types it in. A requirement that lapsed last week shows amber inside the grace period you set rather than locking somebody out mid-callout.
• NewEquipment now retires on age and use, not just on a calendar. Record when an item was made and when it went into service, and how long it lasts from each, and the item tells you which clock bites first — a rope finished 10 years from manufacture or 5 from first use, whatever the last inspection said. You can also inspect every N uses instead of every N days: logging use counts down, and an inspection resets it.
• NewInspections can follow a checklist. Build a template ("sheath intact end to end", "no core shots") under Setup, then work through it when you inspect: each step is pass, fail or not applicable, and one failed step fails the inspection and takes the item out of service no matter what you selected. The wording of each step is kept with the record, so reworking the template later never changes what an old inspection says you checked.
• NewKits can be checked before they go out. Give a container a packing list — with critical items flagged — and record a check against it; the check is complete only when nothing is short, and it says exactly what was missing. Consumables now carry a count with a reorder point, and the Service page lists what needs reordering. Manufacturer recalls can be recorded once and matched against your register by model, so "the X-200 ropes are recalled" becomes "these four, in these locations".
• NewAn item can require a qualified operator. Say that a kind of equipment — a drone, a rope kit, a chainsaw — needs a competency, and every item of that kind carries the requirement so check-out can flag somebody who does not hold it.
• NewSARManager can now be your system of record, with D4H kept up to date from here. On the D4H page, choose which system owns the records. Leave it as it is and nothing changes — D4H stays the source, exactly as before. Switch it and your changes to members, groups, qualification awards and repairs queue up and publish to D4H when you press Publish, while member, group and qualification imports are refused so a pull cannot overwrite what you now own. A Reconcile report shows where D4H disagrees and you decide each one: push mine, accept theirs, or ignore.
• ChangedSome things D4H simply will not accept, and the publish queue tells you so instead of pretending. D4H has no way to create a member, to edit or withdraw a qualification award, or to rename an existing piece of equipment — so those changes live in SARManager only, and each one appears in the queue marked "not pushed" with the reason. Nothing is silently dropped.

A pre-plan can now hold the whole scenario, your radio channels and medical facilities are kept once in settings, and searchers see their team, the comms plan and the safety plan on their phone.

• NewA pre-plan now carries the scenario, not just the paperwork: the lost person behaviour profile, the equipment to deploy, the place with its standing orders, and a risk assessment for that area or kit. You can pre-plan a search for a dementia patient at a care facility once, and start from it every time.
• NewSettings has a new Global Pre-Plans tab. Your radio channels and your medical facilities live there, entered once. Building a comms plan or a medical plan — in a pre-plan or on a live operation — is now picking a channel or a facility by name instead of retyping frequencies and phone numbers. The Regional Asset Directory moved here from Settings, Operations.
• NewSearchers see more of the briefing on their phone. Below the SMEAC briefing they now get their team — the leader and everyone on it by name, not just "S3" — plus the radio communications plan and the safety plan, including the nearest medical facility and the ambulance route. Each card appears only when there is something to show.
• FixedStarting an operation from a pre-plan never changes the operation’s name or description. The pre-plan’s name labels the pre-plan; the operation keeps the name your intake gave it.
• FixedA risk assessment that came from a pre-plan is no longer wiped when the Search Manager adjusts a single factor on the deployment wizard’s Equipment and Risk step.

Templates are now called Pre-Plans, the radio communications plan has its own place on the operation, and you can write a comms or medical plan straight into a pre-plan.

• ChangedTemplates are now Pre-Plans, under Operations. Same feature, the name search and rescue actually uses.
• NewThe radio communications plan has its own tab on the operation: Communications, then Comms plan. It was only reachable through SAR Forms, then Briefing Info, where nobody found it. Both doors edit the one plan, and it is the same plan the ICS 205 prints.
• FixedYou can now type a communications plan and a medical plan straight into a pre-plan. Until now those two could only be copied from an operation you had already run, which made the first pre-plan impossible to write. Capturing from an operation still works and is still the quickest way.

Pre-plan an operation once and start from it: templates carry your standard assignments, radio plan, medical plan, safety notes and CalTopo pre-plan map.

• NewOperation templates. Operations ’ Templates is a library of pre-plans for the places and call types you know: your standard assignments, the radio communications plan, the medical plan, the safety concerns for that area, and a CalTopo pre-plan map. Build one by hand, or capture a real operation you ran well and save it as a template.
• NewStart from a template at Call Intake. The first question on the first screen is which template to use, or none at all. Pick one and its values land on the new operation, and the intake steps it already answers are stepped over. A stepped-over step stays visible in amber and you can still open it — if you type safety concerns for tonight, they win over what the pre-plan says about the area. Pick no template and nothing changes: you write the whole operation exactly as before.
• NewImport the CalTopo pre-plan maps you already draw. Drop the exported file onto a template and its base, command post, staging, marshalling, parking and boundary come with it; that map is then used for the operation instead of your team default. Templates also export and import between teams as a file.
• ChangedThe board, the forms and the deployment wizard now say where a value came from, so nobody wonders why a comms plan was already filled in. An operation that started without a template can have one applied later.
• FixedThe ICS 206 medical plan PDF now fills in its aid stations, ambulance transport and hospitals from the medical plan you entered. It had been printing those three tables blank.

A new Personnel & Equipment add-on: member records, qualifications, training, hours and the equipment register, with a one-click import from D4H.

• NewPersonnel & Equipment is a new licensable add-on — the team’s records office, alongside the roster you already use on an operation. It holds each member’s profile and emergency contact, their position, the groups they belong to, and their qualifications with expiry dates; courses and training records; who is away and when; hours and attendance; and the equipment register with inspections, service, repairs and who is holding what. Ask for it to be switched on for your team and it appears under Modules.
• NewImport everything from D4H in one pass: members (every status, retired members kept but made inactive), positions, groups, qualifications and their awards, equipment with its categories, kinds and locations, inspection schedules and results, repairs, and attendance history. Admin → Import from D4H walks you through connecting, choosing what to bring over and watching it run. Re-running is safe — records are matched on their D4H id and updated in place, and nothing you have entered here is ever deleted.
• NewA qualification matrix shows every member against every qualification at a glance, colour-coded valid, expiring or expired, so you can see the gaps before a callout finds them for you. Members, qualifications, expiries, training, hours, attendance, equipment, service and positions each export as CSV.
• ChangedWhere Personnel & Equipment is switched on it becomes the one place member records live: the Roster link opens it instead of the old roster page, so there is no second list to keep in step. Teams without the add-on see no change.
• ChangedHours now add up what a member did across operations and, where imported, their D4H events, exercises and incidents — shown as separate columns so you can tell operational time from training at a glance.

IMT roles can go to any IMT member or Search Manager, on scene or not, and to people outside the roster.

• ChangedThe role console and the IMT Checklists pickers now offer everyone who answered the callout PLUS every IMT member and Search Manager, whether or not they are on scene — a command role is often worked from home or from the road. A searcher who is merely on the roster is still not offered.
• NewAdd outside person: on Operations → IMT Checklists, put someone who is not on your roster (an agency safety officer, a liaison, another team's planner) straight into a role. Pick the role, enter their name (phone, email and agency optional) and submit. They get a roster record marked external, never picked up by a callout, and hold the role at once with no offer to accept; take it back like any other.

IMT roles have one holder each, the IMT screen splits roles from checklists, and the Board shows only the three command posts.

• FixedThe role console and the IMT Checklists role pickers no longer fight over who holds a role. Delegating one role used to wipe a person assigned directly to another, and the Deployment and Safety roles kept falling off the org chart. Now each role has exactly one holder: an accepted delegation, or whoever was assigned directly, and only a decline or take-back removes that person.
• ChangedOperations → IMT Checklists is a split screen: on the left, who holds each role (the role console for the five delegable roles on the IMT workflow, direct pickers for every other role); on the right, the checklists. A full org chart of every role sits beneath both.
• ChangedThe Board's org chart shows only IC, Operations and Planning. The full chart lives on the IMT screen.

A shorter operation page with Planning/Logistics and Safety tabs, teams that fold away, and the clean-up tools a mock search needs afterwards.

• ChangedThe operation page has eight tabs instead of eleven, never more than three levels deep. IMT Checklists now lives under Operations (Teams & Assignments · IMT Checklists · Historical). Incident/Subject Details and Equipment moved under a new Planning/Logistics tab. A new Safety tab holds the Risk Assessment, the Urgency / Mission Risk / Medical Plan forms and Incident Reports; those forms are the same ones as on SAR Forms, so filling one in either place shows in both. Old links and bookmarks to the former tabs still land in the right place.
• ChangedTeams & Assignments: press "Teams made" once the teams exist and the Teams column folds to a narrow summary (name, lead, size, current tasking) so the assignment cards get the width; "Edit teams" opens the full editor again. The Unassigned bar and Special Resources now share one row. The Command card is high-contrast in every theme.
• ChangedCommunications has one Callouts view instead of separate Internal Callout and Callout Waves tabs: the callout wave composer on top, the whiteboard, and the plain SMS / voice blast folded beneath it.
• NewChange the CalTopo map mid-operation: a "Change map" button on the Board's map header takes a new map link. Markers already plotted stay on the old map; new clues and markers go to the new one.
• NewWhen teams are formed, everyone with command view on the operation gets a quiet push. Tapping it opens the Teams page on the phone (needs the next app update to land on Teams; older apps open the operation).
• NewClosing an operation now asks two questions first: is it included in Reports, and does it count as an operation or as training. Close is refused until both are answered. Reports opens on the summary tiles alone, with the breakdowns and the member / operation tables one click away.
• NewAfter a mock search: "Delete accounts" on an ended event code permanently removes the accounts the code created and their roster rows (members who already had an account are never touched). The Users page can also delete any selection in bulk.
• ChangedEvery text-only button on the web and in the app is now drawn as a button, so what you can press is visible at a glance. Cert expired / expiring chips no longer clutter the Board; they stay on the Check In list and the roster.
• FixedWhen a clue fails to reach the CalTopo map, the Board now shows CalTopo's own error beside Retry instead of a bare "Push failed".

A closed operation goes quiet, volunteer hours count every hour on scene, and teams build themselves.

• FixedOnce an operation is closed or cancelled, nothing more is sent about it. Every way of paging people from an operation (callouts and escalations, the Notify SM texts, command messages, team pulses and tasking notices, IMT role offers, mutual-aid requests, agency escalation calls and emails, and SARDR stage alerts on a deployment tied to the operation) now refuses with a clear "this operation is closed" message instead of reaching a phone. Closing the operation also closes its open callout waves, so the callout drops off members' phones and can no longer be answered or re-sent.
• FixedVolunteer hours are no longer cut at 24 hours per stint. A member who stays through a multi-day search is credited for every hour between check-in and check-out. Operations closed before this release keep their old figures in Reports until you run the Reports backfill, which recalculates from the check-in records.
• FixedA member who set their status to Demobilized without checking out no longer shows as overdue on the phone's command board. The board, wall display and overdue alerts already ignored them; the phone now agrees.
• FixedReturning gear is no longer limited to 200 items at a time. A container-level checkout could hand someone more than that, and they could sign it all out but not bring it all back in one go.
• ChangedThe Teams panel on the Operations tab is much shorter. Each team card lists only its own members (with a remove button) and an "Add member" picker of who is still unassigned on scene, instead of every check-in as a toggle. Leader, resource type and equipment sit on the same rows as the taskings.
• NewA Command card at the top of the Teams panel shows everyone holding a command role on the operation (assigned in the IMT Checklists tab) with every title they hold, such as Safety Officer. Command staff are kept out of the unassigned list and out of every field team's member picker.
• NewAuto-build teams. Set "Teams of N" on the Teams panel and SARManager splits everyone unassigned on scene into teams of that size, putting one qualified leader on each team (as its team lead) and spreading medical qualifications across them. It uses your Qualification Highlight rules from Settings to recognise Search Managers, Team Leaders and medical quals. Existing teams are left alone, and the new teams can be edited like any other.

SARScribe: a licensable module that turns command-post radio traffic into the incident record.

• NewSARScribe module (licensed per organization by the platform administrator). A capture box at the command post listens to the radio channels, transcribes each transmission and proposes what it means. The module shows the live transmission log with the verbatim words, a review queue where a scribe confirms, corrects or rejects each proposal with one key, sessions for registering the capture box (its token is shown once), a vocabulary editor for team names and place names, and an ICS 309 Communications Log export. Nothing the model proposes changes an assignment or the map until a person confirms it, and life-safety traffic is always shown loudly, never logged silently. A kill switch on every tab drops the operation to verbatim transcription only.
• NewICS 309 Communications Log joins the close-out form package for every organization. It fills itself from SARScribe transmissions where the module is licensed and prints as blank rows for hand entry everywhere else.
• SecurityTranscripts of radio traffic are discoverable records and can carry subject personal information. The module keeps audio on the capture box; only text reaches SARManager. Talk to your records officer about retention before the first live use.

Android callouts on the Loudest tier now ring through Silent and Vibrate, like the iPhone.

• ChangedAndroid phones on the Loudest tier get the callout siren on the alarm channel, which rings through Silent and Vibrate the way an alarm clock does. It needs the 2.2.0 app from build 27 onwards, which creates the new "Urgent callouts (alarm)" channel; older app versions keep the previous channel and behave as before. Two things to tell Android members: the siren now follows the Alarm volume slider, not the notification volume, and Do Not Disturb still needs SARManager granted DND access in Settings to get through.

Take gear by container or by item from the web check-in page, the same way the app does.

• ChangedThe Gear tab on the web check-in page now lists the containers deployed to the operation (plus loose items) instead of whole presets. Open a container, tick the items you are taking (everything not already signed out is ticked by default), run the quick check, and it is signed out to you. If someone already quick-checked that container on this operation you review their check instead of repeating it, with Re-run always available. This matches the app; the printed kit QR still opens the whole preset.

Run a training exercise like the real thing: walk-ups join from their phone browser with no app, get paged, and a training operation can message everyone.

• NewJoin an event with no app. The event kit sheet has a fifth QR code that any phone camera opens: the person creates their account right there (name, email, mobile number, emergency contact, password), is signed in without being asked for the password again, and lands on the exercise's check-in page. Callouts reach them by text with the check-in link. The sheet still has the app codes for anyone who wants push alerts and the Responding button.
• NewLive messaging on a training operation. Tick "Live messaging" next to the Training box in the operation header and the exercise pages its real audience: callouts, searcher chats, team pulses, re-pages and overdue alerts all reach the people on the operation instead of only you. Titles still say TRAINING, CalTopo still uses the training folder and D4H still gets "TESTING PLEASE DELETE". Untick it and the operation goes back to paging only you. Mutual-aid requests stay redirected to you either way.
• FixedA walk-up's mobile number now always reaches the roster. If their email matched a roster row that had no phone, or they were rejoining after an earlier event, the number they typed was dropped and the callout text had nowhere to go. The typed number now fills an empty roster phone (a number already on the roster is never overwritten). The sign-up form also asks for an emergency contact, which goes on the roster the same way the D4H sync writes it.
• FixedOverdue field alerts now name the operation ("Overdue - Elkwater-2026-09-15-1234") instead of only its type and place, so a manager with several operations open can tell which one has gone quiet. If the operation name carries the subject's name it falls back to the type-and-place form, since the alert lands on a lock screen.
• ChangedThe Event kit moved from Users to the Operations menu. Opening an exercise's check-in page before it is deployed now says "Not open for check-in yet" with who you are registered for, instead of "Operation Not Active". Signing in with one organization no longer stops at the organization picker.
• ChangediPhone app 2.2.0 (build 33): if your team sends its loudest callouts and Critical Alerts are off on your phone, the home screen tells you and opens the right Settings page. Dismiss it and it comes back in a month.

Answer a callout by text or keypad, get paged when a field team goes quiet, log clues onto the map, and see your team's hours and year at a glance.

• NewAnswer a callout by replying to its text. Reply 1 (or Y, YES, R) for Responding, add minutes for an ETA ("1 30" = responding, 30 minutes out), or reply 2 (N, NO) for Unavailable. You get a short confirmation back. Only a phone number on the roster with an open callout can answer; a number the app does not recognise is never replied to. If your number is shared with another member, or you have callouts open on two operations at once, the text asks you to use the link instead. Your team has to switch this on first (see the admin note below); until then the text carries no "Reply 1" line.
• NewAnswer a callout voice call with the keypad: press 1 if you are responding, 2 if you are unavailable. The Search Manager's callout board marks these answers "via SMS" or "via phone", because a text or a keypress is only as trustworthy as the phone number it came from.
• ChangedCallout texts are shorter and cheaper. The link is now a short one (…/c/ plus ten characters) that opens the same sign-in-protected check-in page, and the text fits in a single message: a long dash in the operation line used to force every callout text into three billed messages. Texts name the operation by its type and place, never the subject's name.
• NewOverdue alerts for command. When a team in the field goes past the red radio-check time without being heard, or a searcher passes their drop-dead time, everyone with Operations permission (and accepted IMT delegates) gets a push notification, repeated every 30 minutes by default while nothing changes, at most three times. The clock starts at check-in, so someone who checked in and was never heard from counts too. People at base, in staging or on scene never trigger it. A training operation alerts only the person who created it. Off until your admin turns it on (Settings → Operations → Alerting).
• NewClues panel on the Board. Clues logged from the field show with who found them, their team, the time they were found, the location in UTM and how accurate the fix was (worse than ±100 m is flagged in red), and a photo if one was attached. Each clue is also added to the operation log and ICS 214, and plotted as a gold marker on the CalTopo map, with a Retry button if the map was not ready.
• NewMembers can mark themselves unavailable until a date and time (up to 90 days, with an optional reason), from the phone app's settings. Group callouts skip them until then, even with "include off-call" ticked; a member you tick by hand is still paged. The Roster page shows an orange "Unavailable until …" badge. On-call duty routing is not affected.
• NewCertification warnings. When a member checks in with a D4H qualification that has expired or expires within 30 days, command sees a red "Cert expired" or amber "Cert expiring" chip on the Board, the Check In tab and the Roster page, and one warning line in the operation log. Check-in is never blocked: D4H records are often a week behind, so verify with the member. Expiry dates arrive with each D4H roster sync. Your admin can change the 30 days or limit the check to the qualifications that matter (Settings → Operations → Certification Warnings). Members with no D4H records are never flagged.
• NewThree more ICS forms for close-out: ICS 205 Radio Communications Plan, ICS 209 Incident Status Summary and ICS 211 Check-In List. The radio plan is edited in SAR Forms → Briefing Info (its first channel is filled from the CP frequency). ICS 201 and 202 now print the objectives from your Incident Action Plan instead of a blank box. The ICS 209 never includes the subject's name. Tick the new forms in Settings → Close-out Forms to offer them.
• FixedThe ICS 204-AH contact column now prints each team member's own phone number. It was printing their emergency contact, so a team leader calling a searcher could reach the searcher's next of kin instead.
• NewCommand post display, for a TV in the command vehicle: open "Command post display" from the Board (or the view page). Full screen, keeps the screen awake, refreshes every 15 seconds, and shows teams with their radio-check timers, taskings, who is on scene, weather and callout counts. If it cannot update for a minute, a red STALE banner says so. It never shows phone numbers, coordinates or the subject's name, so it is safe on a screen anyone can see.
• NewVolunteer hours on the close-out page: each member's hours with the time between a check-out and a later check-in left out, flags for a missed check-out or a stint over 24 hours (capped there), and "Set actual check-out" to correct the time someone really left. Download CSV needs the export permission. Hours also print in the close-out report. Choose the outcome (located, suspended, cancelled, other) as you close, and it is now kept for reporting.
• NewTeam Reports (new Reports page): operations by type, outcome and tasking agency, volunteer hours per member, and mutual aid given and received, for this year, last year or a custom range, with CSV downloads. Operations count in the period of their start date in Alberta time. Numbers survive archiving an operation. Search Managers have the new "Team Reports" permission by default; give it to a custom role (a treasurer, say) without handing over any other power. If operations closed before this release are missing, press "Add to reports" on the page (needs close-out permission). This is not yet a SAR Alberta provincial return: which fields the province wants, and whether the year is calendar or fiscal, are still to be confirmed.
• ChangedCheck-ins cope with patchy signal. A status change, message, check-out or team-leader update that a phone re-sends after losing signal is recorded once, not twice, and keeps the time it actually happened — a message written in a valley shows in Command's thread at the time it was written, and does not count as a fresh radio check. A queued status that is older than command's latest change no longer overwrites it. Checking out and back in counts as two stints, so the gap is not counted as hours.
• FixedD4H attendance now carries end times. Check-in sends a provisional end (your drop-dead time), check-out and closing the operation send the real one. If D4H was down at the time, press "Resend attendance times to D4H" on the close-out page; pressing it twice is safe.
• FixedIMT role console buttons go to the right place: Risk assessment opens Incident/Subject Details → Risk, Initiate CalTopo map opens the Board, Medical plan opens the Medical Plan form, and Operational objectives opens the Incident Action Plan.
• FixedA CalTopo request that hangs now gives up after 30 seconds and reports a failure you can retry, instead of waiting forever.
• FixedThe privacy policy now says what the app actually does with location: it is read once, only when a member logs a clue, and never tracked. It previously said check-ins were geotagged; they are not.
• SecurityThree new addresses answer without a sign-in, each deliberately narrow. The text-reply and keypad webhooks accept only requests signed by Twilio with the platform's key and refuse everything if that key is missing; the keypad route additionally requires a per-call signed token that expires after 30 minutes and must match the member the call was placed to. Both give the same empty answer to every caller, record the real outcome in the audit log, and limit how often one phone can answer. The short link only redirects to a page that still requires sign-in, sends unknown, expired and malformed codes to the home page alike, and is rate-limited.
• SecurityCheck-in writes are now tied to the person signed in. Before, a signed-in user who knew an operation id and a roster id could set another member's status or check them out — in any org. Now the server checks that you are an active member of that org and that the row you are writing is your own; Search Managers and anyone whose role carries the Operations permission can still act on any member, and a team leader on their own team. The same rule now covers reads — a member's private thread with Command, their held equipment and their dashboard can no longer be read by another member. Nothing changes for a normal check-in. Every refusal is recorded in the audit log. Note for event organisers: end the event only after everyone has booked out — a disabled walk-up account can no longer update its status or book out.
• ChangedText replies are recorded for 48 hours after a callout goes out (a standby text sent the evening before is answered the next morning), and every text the server cannot act on — replies switched off, a number not on the roster, no open callout — now leaves an audit entry, so a member who says "I replied" can be checked. Reply 2 is final: a later "1" gets a text saying so and pointing to the link. If two orgs on one server share a number, the reply goes to the org where that phone has an open callout.
• ChangedFor admins, before members can use the new features: (1) the platform administrator points each org number's incoming-message webhook in the Twilio console at /api/twilio/sms (numbers with SARConnect stay on their SARConnect address, which now handles replies too), then you tick "Let members reply 1 or 2" in Settings → Operations → Alerting; (2) tick "Alert command when a field team goes overdue" in the same card and check the radio-check times; (3) review Certification Warnings; (4) open Reports and press "Add to reports" once. The keypad answer needs no setup.

Security housekeeping before the demonstration weekend.

• SecurityEvery dependency advisory that has a fix is now fixed, the important one being a Next.js update that closes a critical hole in its image handling. Three advisories have no safe fix available and are documented instead, with the reasons and what would change them: two are build and test tooling that never runs on the server, and the third would break the phone app if patched today.

One tap says you are responding, walk-ups create their own account from the kit, and an unanswered page keeps coming back.

• NewWalk-ups create their own account from the kit QR. Scan the join code and, if you have never had an account, tap "New here? Create your account" on the phone — or open the /join link printed on the kit sheet on a laptop. First and last name, email, phone and a password, and you are a searcher in the event's Temporary Group and signed in: no invitation email to wait for, no admin in the loop. An email that already has an account is told to sign in instead. A code still expires on its own, and now carries a Max joins (50 by default on the kit form; 100 when you leave it unlimited).
• NewA join code can be bound to a training operation. Pick the exercise when you create the code and everyone who joins lands on it. The kit page gains Send test alert — a TEST wave to the Temporary Group that rings the joiners' phones even though it is a training operation, so you can prove the room is reachable before the exercise starts. End event still switches off the accounts the code created.
• ChangedResponding is the answer. On the alert — the web check-in page now, the phone with the 2.2 app — tap Responding, optionally pick an ETA (15 / 30 / 45 / 60 / 90 minutes) and To base or To scene, and the board records you as deploying that instant. Check-in is now the arrival step ("I'm here — check in"); a member who checks in without tapping first is still counted. Unavailable is unchanged.
• ChangedBoards show "on site" once a member has checked in, and "deploying" now means en route OR on site — read the two together to see who is still driving.
• NewEveryone sees who is responding (2.2 app): a count and a list with each member's ETA, destination and team. Never phone numbers — the list is for morale and planning, not for calling people.
• NewKeep paging. Settings → Operations → callout card: "Re-page unanswered members every N minutes, up to M times" (3 and 3 by default; set the count to 0 to turn it off; Quiet never re-pages). The server pushes the same alert again — same headline as the original wave — to anyone who has not answered, even if their phone is locked. Push only: nobody is texted twice. Test waves are re-paged too.
• NewLocation on the alert (2.2 app): the IPP place, an Open in Maps button, and the CalTopo map link.
• NewPhone app 2.2 (a separate build): the create-account screen, a one-tap Responding sheet (the lock-screen Responding button opens it), the who's-responding list, a siren that keeps sounding on the alert screen until you answer (with a Mute button), and Open in Maps. Older app versions still receive every alert and re-page; only the new screens need the build.

Test a callout on one phone, and see which devices will actually get a Critical Alert.

• NewSend a callout to specific people. The Send Callout card gains a Specific members picker (with a "+ Me" shortcut) and a "This is a test" box; the phone app gets a one-tap "Test on my phone" switch. A test wave is titled "TEST — …" and reaches only the people you picked.
• NewUsers and Roster now show the device behind each member: none, iPhone or Android, and whether Critical Alerts is allowed or was declined on that phone — so you can see who will ring through silent before you rely on it.

A callout now reads like a dispatch on the lock screen — who you are looking for, what to do, where to go.

• ChangedThe callout notification is composed from the operation, not typed. Its title is Deployment Request (Standby Request for a standby wave; Transport Request, IMT Request and so on for a targeted wave; a training operation is prefixed TRAINING —). On iPhone a second line shows the operation type and place, such as "Missing person search — Elkwater". Pull it open and it reads Searching for: (age, sex, profile, description, last seen, clothing — never the subject's name, because a lock screen can be read by anyone holding the phone), then Instructions:, then Report to:, then your message. You can still type your own headline; it replaces the default title.
• NewTwo new lines per operation: Instructions and Report to. Both are editable on the Send Callout card (and on the phone when composing a wave), prefilled from your organization's default instructions and from the IPP place ("IPP — Elkwater"). They are saved on the operation, so the next wave inherits what you last sent and you do not retype where to muster at 2 am.
• NewSettings → Operations → Default callout instructions. The Instructions line every wave starts with; ships as "Proceed to the IPP for briefing and tasking. Bring SAR pack, radio and PPE." Clear it and the Instructions line is left out until a search manager types one for that operation.
• NewA live Lock screen preview on the Send Callout card shows the title, the second line and the expanded text exactly as the phone will show them, updating as you type.
• ChangedPhone app 2.1: the two lock-screen buttons now read Responding and Unavailable (they were Respond and Cannot deploy), and the in-app decline says "unavailable" too. Both still open the app. The new wording — and the Instructions / Report to fields on the phone's compose form — needs the 2.1 app build that carries it; the notification content itself reaches every app version.
• ChangedText messages keep their one-line form: "<title>: <type — place>. <your message> — <link>", still trimmed to 150 characters with the link never cut. The Searching for / Instructions / Report to sections go only to the notification, where there is room for them.

Walk-up searchers join a mock search by scanning a printed kit, and the app asks how it did at book-out.

• NewEvent join codes. Create one from Users → Event kit, bound to a roster group such as a Temporary Group, and anyone who signs into the phone app and scans it becomes a searcher in your organization and a member of that group — with no admin in the loop and no account to pre-create. A code expires on its own (24 hours unless you say otherwise, up to a week) and can be capped at a number of joins. Members you already have are simply added to the group; their roles are untouched.
• NewEnd event. One button removes everyone who joined from the group and deactivates the accounts the code created — never deletes them, so the attendance record survives and a returning searcher gets the same account back by scanning the next code. People who already had an account only leave the group.
• NewThe printable event kit: one sheet with four QR codes in the order a new arrival scans them — join the venue Wi-Fi, install the app from the App Store or Google Play, then join the event — plus the code in plain letters for anyone who would rather type it. The Wi-Fi password is typed at print time and never saved. The page warns you when your callout workflow is Standard, because a deploy wave to a group needs Simple or IMT.
• NewAsk for app feedback at book-out. Switch it on in Settings → Operations → Feature Toggles and every member who books out — on the web check-in page or the phone — is asked for a 1–5 rating, what worked well and what they would change. It is one screen and it can be skipped. The answers appear in an App Feedback card on the close-out page, download as a CSV, and are printed in the close-out report, so they travel with the operation into the archive.
• ChangedPhone app 2.1: the sign-in screen has a "Joining an event? Scan the kit QR" link. Scan it, sign in, and you land in the organization already joined — the app then asks for notification permission (and, on iPhone, the separate Critical Alerts prompt), so the first callout reaches you. The book-out feedback card appears on the phone too when your organization has it on.
• FixedPhone app 2.1: switching organization now re-registers your device with the new server, so a callout from the organization you just switched to actually rings your phone rather than the one you left.
• FixedPhone app 2.1: tapping a callout notification while the app was fully closed no longer shows an error — the app waits for you to sign in and then opens the callout you tapped.
• SecurityPhone app 2.1: a server address remembered on your account follows the same rule as one scanned from a QR code — https only, on an allowed domain — so a bad address in either place cannot point the app somewhere it should not go.

Callouts become a conversation, the duty phone follows a schedule, and there is a training server your team can break.

• NewCallouts now get answered. Send one and every member sees two buttons on their phone — Deploying or Cannot Deploy — and you watch a live board fill in. No more guessing who is on the way from who happens to have checked in.
• NewTapping Deploying opens check-in. That is deliberate: finishing check-in IS the answer, so you still get quals, fitness, drop-dead time, the vehicle seat and the driver inspection — one record, not two. A member who answered can also send or update an ETA afterwards without touching anything else.
• NewThe board tells you who was never actually reached. Someone with no phone on file and no app is shown separately from someone who simply has not answered yet — they are different problems and they need different phone calls.
• NewSend as many callout waves as a search needs. An initial page and a top-up two hours later are separate, each keeps its own answers, and neither overwrites the other.
• ChangedA text message is no longer required to run a callout. Members with the app are reached by notification, and anyone without a registered device still gets a text. An organization with no SMS number can now call its team out at all — previously that simply failed.
• NewAttach a voice brief or a photo to a callout. Record up to sixty seconds straight from the browser — no upload, one button — or add an image, and members get it in the same tap they use to answer. The urgency in a dispatcher's voice survives in a way a re-typed summary never does.
• NewYou can answer a callout from a laptop, not just a phone. The check-in page shows your open callouts and IMT role offers, and Cannot Deploy is available before you start checking in — declining no longer means completing the check-in you were declining.
• NewChoose how much process you want. Settings → Operations offers Standard (exactly what you have today), Simple (the answer loop above) or IMT (Simple plus role delegation), with optional Transport, Standby and Mutual Aid add-ons you can switch on individually — the add-ons work under Standard too.
• NewIMT roles can be delegated. Every role starts with you, with its tasks as big buttons on your screen; hand one to someone who answered Deploying and those buttons move to them. If they decline, or you take it back, it returns to you — a role is never left with nobody.
• NewAn accepted delegate holds real command — for that operation only. A Safety Officer or Planning Chief who took the role can work the teams, assignments, board and their own role's checklist without a Search Manager account, and that access closes the moment the role is taken back.
• NewTransport callouts show a seat map, and flag any vehicle that has people in it but nobody driving — the thing that actually stops a team leaving.
• NewAssignments can be marked Containment, Reflex, Specialty or Search, so the tasking list can be read at a glance for what to send next.
• NewTell a team what it has been given. One button pushes their current tasking to every member, instead of somebody walking over to say it.
• NewMutual aid is a real request, both ways. Ask a partner for what you need (15× GSAR, 1× drone) and, if they also run SAR Manager, their duty people are paged on the siren channel and their accept opens the operation in their own org — their people then appear on your board and you hear back either way. A partner who does not run SAR Manager gets a text to the number you hold for them. You can withdraw access mid-search; anyone who already turned up stays on the record.
• NewGroup your roster. Alongside the groups that come from D4H you can build your own — a drivers list, a callout rotation — and target a callout at either, or both.
• NewLoudest callouts finally sound like one. The alert level you pick in Settings → Operations now plays a real siren on the phone and breaks through an iPhone's Focus modes; Standard and Quiet callouts are unchanged.
• NewLoudest callouts now ring through an iPhone's silent switch. Members on the 2.1 app get a separate iOS prompt to allow Critical Alerts; anyone who declines, or is on an older app, keeps getting callouts exactly as they do today.
• NewWho answers the phone is now a schedule, not a flag. The Roster gains on-call groups (SM, IMT or your own): a phone tree — a ranked call-down list — or a rotating schedule that hands over at a set hour and survives the clock change. The system keeps each member's on-call flag in step every hour, pushes the current holder to D4H as a real duty period, and a new On-call-now card at the top of Communications shows everyone who holds the pager right now.
• NewA 3CX phone system can follow that schedule. Settings → VOIP holds the connection, with a Test Connection button; the duty number then routes to whoever is on call, with the next person as backup. Members carry an extension on the Roster, the on-call card shows whether that extension is actually registered, a Call button on the callout board rings a member from your desk phone, and one click pushes the active roster into the 3CX phonebook.
• NewA new dispatch rings the duty phones. The moment a dispatch lands from SARConnect, everyone who can take a call gets a notification that opens straight onto the review screen — no more waiting for someone to notice the queue.
• NewLeadership Updates. Grant the new capability to a custom role and its holders get quiet notifications as an operation moves — accepted, active with the check-in count, a team called out, mutual aid asked and answered — without being on the callout themselves.
• NewAn operation started from the phone can create its D4H incident and whiteboard note and open a CalTopo map by itself. Settings → Operations → Mobile Intake & Quick-starts lets you choose whether the phone takes the quick page-only form or captures task number, subject profile and IPP as well, and switches each quick-start on or off.
• FixedA member could end up as two people — the account that signed into the app, and the roster row that came from D4H — so a callout aimed at the roster missed their phone. Signing in now claims the existing roster row, already-split accounts heal themselves the next time the app registers, and changing someone's role no longer overwrites a D4H-synced name or qualifications.
• ChangedCheck-in on a computer now looks like check-in on a phone: three steps instead of six, bigger buttons, same wording and colours. What you are taught in a classroom is what you meet in the field.
• NewA training server. A separate deployment your team can break: trainees sign in with a shared password and pick a role, and land in a scripted world — a live operation with teams S1–S3, assignments numbered from 101, a full roster and kit, and closed searches for the history screens. Nothing leaves the box: no text, call, email or push ever reaches a real person, and a Reset rebuilds the scenario for everyone. The phone app works against it with no reinstall.
• NewOn the training server, an Outbox shows every message that would have been sent — press Send Callout and read the twenty-five texts, wording and all — and a guided tour walks three short tracks: take a call and deploy, run the board, check in as a searcher.
• FixedA platform administrator with no organization account was signed out at login instead of being taken to the console, which made a fresh deployment impossible to set up. They now land on the console.
• FixedA training operation no longer pages the whole team. Text messages already went only to the person running the drill; push notifications now do the same — only the caller's own devices ring, while the board still fills in as if everyone had been alerted.
• SecurityEvery open dependency advisory is cleared — twenty-one in all. The one that matters is the Next.js update (server-side request forgery, a middleware bypass and a denial-of-service), alongside the address-parsing fixes that protect a server which fetches organization-configured URLs for D4H, CalTopo and 3CX.
• ChangedThe phone app 2.1.0 ships alongside this release and is required for the phone-side features: the Deploying / Cannot Deploy buttons, the siren and Critical Alerts, the on-call card, and voice briefs on a callout. Members on an older app keep receiving callouts exactly as they do today.
• ChangedNothing changes unless you change it. Every organization stays on the Standard workflow after upgrading, the existing Send Callout card is untouched, and none of the above appears until somebody switches it on in Settings.

Screens keep themselves up to date, drivers get their pre-departure check on the phone, and the newest callout is impossible to miss.

• FixedThe Operations list now updates on its own. A new operation — one taken on a phone, or one that arrived from dispatch — appears within a few seconds, and an operation you just closed drops off the list without anyone reloading the page.
• FixedThe Check-In tab refreshes every fifteen seconds instead of every two minutes, and it no longer blanks out to "Loading…" while it does. A searcher who marks themselves On Scene from their phone shows up on your screen almost immediately.
• FixedAn open operation now keeps its own details current, so a change made by someone else — a status change, an edit to the incident details — reaches your screen without a browser refresh.
• NewApp: drivers are now asked for the pre-departure vehicle inspection. If you take a driver's seat when you check in, the ten-point walk-around comes up before you finish, and Command sees "Inspection complete" against your vehicle on the board. Previously this only existed on the website, so a driver who checked in on their phone never did it and the board sat on "Inspection pending" all callout.
• FixedThe board now matches an inspection to its driver by their roster record rather than by their name, so a completed inspection can no longer read as pending because a name was spelled slightly differently in two places.
• NewApp: the most recent callout now has a large CHECK IN NOW button at the top of your operations list, and that operation's tile glows so you can see they are the same one. With two or three operations running at once there is no longer any guesswork about which one you were paged for.
• FixedApp: your operations list and dashboard now refresh on their own and the moment you bring the app back up, instead of showing whatever was on screen when you put your phone away.
• ChangedApp: "Continue with Apple" has been removed from the sign-in screen — it never completed a sign-in. Use Google, Microsoft, or your email and password.

A way out of the System Administration console, and the footer link now points at www.

• NewThe System Administration console now has a "Back to app" button beside Logout. It has its own screen with no sidebar, so the only way back used to be logging out or editing the address bar. It returns you to wherever you normally land.
• FixedThe "Operational Edge" link in the page footer now goes to www.operational-edge.ca. If you had set your own link text or address in the platform console, yours is left exactly as it is.

Downloadable role guides in Help, and the lost-person profiles rebuilt from the published data.

• NewHelp now has a downloadable guide for each role — Searcher, SM / IMT, and TechAdmin. Open Help, pick your tab, and download the PDF to read offline or hand to a new member.
• ChangedThe lost-person behaviour profiles have been rebuilt from the published data: 59 profiles across the source’s own seven categories, replacing the older hand-written list. Profile names now include the terrain they were measured in (for example "Hiker — Flat, Dry"), because different terrain means genuinely different search distances. Operations you have already run keep their original profile.
• NewEvery profile now shows its sample size (N) — on the intake cards, the operations page, and the deployment wizard. A profile built from 336 cases and one built from 6 draw identical-looking rings on the map; now you can tell them apart before you plan around them. Where the published data has no distances, the profile says so rather than showing an invented ring.
• ChangedChoosing a subject profile is now a single grouped drop-down instead of a wall of options, at both Call Intake and on the operations page. With 59 profiles the old card grid ran several screens deep — awkward when you are taking the call. Picking one still shows its full details underneath.
• FixedCorrected the Operational Edge web address shown in the footer and in the licence, EULA and Terms — it was missing a hyphen and pointed nowhere. Because the EULA and Terms text changed, you will be asked to accept them once more the next time you sign in. Nothing in the terms themselves has changed.

Self-hosted licensing: organization limit, and the expiry notice now actually appears.

• FixedOn a self-hosted deployment, the licence notice explaining that the app has gone read-only now appears at the top of the page. It was being drawn behind the header and sidebar, so nobody could see it.
• NewA platform licence now covers a set number of organizations (one by default). The platform console shows how many are in use against the limit.

Build fix.

• FixedInternal packaging fix — no changes to how the app works.

Groundwork for running SAR Manager on your own servers.

• NewOrganizations that run SAR Manager on their own infrastructure can now install a platform licence, and see its status and expiry date in the platform console. Nothing changes for teams on the hosted service.

A clearer board card, and times that read the same everywhere.

• ChangedOn the board, each person is now on two lines instead of one: their name, drop-dead time and last radio check on top, with qualifications and status underneath. Names were being squeezed to an ellipsis and the badges ran into each other — everything is readable now, and the two times are labelled so they can’t be mistaken for one number.
• ChangedTimes now read the same way everywhere in the app — days, hours and minutes, longest unit first. Some screens used to show only minutes, so a searcher out overnight showed as “1043m” instead of “17h 23m”. Overdue drop-dead times still show with a leading “+”.
• FixedMobile: on Android, buttons at the bottom of a pop-up panel — signing out gear, returning gear, publishing a team risk assessment, cancelling the QR scanner — no longer sit underneath the phone’s navigation bar where they couldn’t be tapped. Requires the next app update from the store.

User and roster management: safer deletions, no accidental lockouts, and a check-in fix.

• FixedRemoving a user from the platform admin console no longer risks deleting their roster record along with them. The person is removed, but their history on the roster and on past assignments stays intact — the same way it always has when removing someone from the Users page.
• SecurityAn emergency contact’s phone number can no longer be used to sign in as the member they are listed for. Check-in now only accepts the member’s own number.
• FixedThe app now stops you disabling the last person who can manage users, the same way it already stopped you deleting them — so an organization can no longer accidentally lock itself out of its own user management. Disabling someone also asks for confirmation now, and tells you if it didn’t work.
• FixedPeople added on the Users page now get their phone number and email onto the roster, where callout and check-in actually read them. Existing members are backfilled automatically. Editing a user also no longer overwrites the emergency contact that came from D4H.
• ChangedThe Roster link now appears for anyone whose role includes roster access, and “Create Searcher logins” is only shown to people who can actually create accounts — it used to be offered to everyone on the page and then refused.
• ChangedChanges an administrator makes to accounts from the platform console — creating, re-roling, changing an email, or removing someone — are now recorded in the audit log.

Email problems now announce themselves instead of failing quietly.

• ChangedOutbound email now runs on a single mail provider. If the platform email key is ever missing, the app says so plainly — on the super-admin test-send screen, on a failed expense claim, and in the escalation result — instead of quietly switching to the older provider and appearing to work. Nothing changes for day-to-day use; this only affects what you see when something is genuinely misconfigured.

Manage IPP/LKP/PLS points after intake, roster emails, and Searcher role assignment.

• NewPlanning points: Edit Operation Details can now add, replace, or delete LKP, PLS, and custom IPP points after intake. A replaced point stays on the CalTopo map relabelled "(outdated)"; a deleted one is removed. When the IPP moves, the app offers to update the map so the probability rings re-centre on the new point.
• NewRoster: manually added members can now include an email address (add and edit forms), so "Create Searcher logins" can invite them like D4H-synced members.
• ChangedThe Users page can now assign the Searcher role directly — previously searcher accounts could only be created in bulk from the Roster page.

Maintenance release.

• ChangedInternal documentation and developer-tooling updates. No changes to how the app works.

Search-manager highlighting fix, and no more login-screen flash.

• FixedSearch Managers are now highlighted correctly on the board. The default rule now recognises the SARVAC qualification name “Search Mgmt — Managing Search Operations”, so a search manager no longer shows up as a team leader (and a medically-qualified search manager now correctly shows pink).
• FixedThe sign-in screen no longer flashes for a moment when you open the app on a cold load or after clearing your browser cache — you now see a brief “Loading…” splash instead of the login form before landing in the app.

Command-role highlighting on the operations board.

• ChangedQualification highlighting now also colours people on the On-Scene board (not just the unassigned bar), and applies command precedence: someone who is both a Team Leader and a Search Manager shows as Search Manager, and anyone medically qualified who is also a Team Leader or Search Manager is highlighted pink so they stand out.

Automatic database backups.

• NewThe platform now takes an automatic, consistent snapshot of every organization’s database daily (and keeps two weeks of them), so an operation’s data can always be restored. This runs quietly in the background — nothing to configure.

Equipment inspection sync to D4H fixed.

• FixedCompleting equipment inspections (including “complete all”) now syncs to D4H again. D4H changed how it accepts the inspection status, and the app was sending the old format — so every inspection update was being rejected. Fixed.

Special resources become first-class, mobile check-in polish, and a team radio-check fix.

• NewSpecial resources (K9, drones, mutual-aid teams, ATVs, boats, etc.) can now be assigned to a team and show on the operations Board for accountability — and they can be signed in from the web check-in, not just the mobile app.
• ChangedA team’s radio-check “heard” status now turns current as soon as ANY member is heard from (a message or status update), instead of staying overdue until every member has checked in.
• FixedThe field-reminder bar is now readable in dark and high-contrast / colour-blind themes.
• FixedMobile check-in: the on-screen keyboard no longer hides the field you’re typing in — the form scrolls to it and Enter jumps to the next field. The “Update your status” card now shows your current status, and being assigned to a team or made team lead appears live without leaving and re-opening the operation.

Team chat channels, team pulse, and team-assignment push notifications.

• NewEach team now has its own chat channel. People are added automatically when they join the team and drop off when they leave — on the mobile app searchers get a “My Team” channel, and command can open any team’s channel from the operation.
• NewCommand can pulse a team — a custom message or a one-tap preset (Report in, Radio check, Return to IPP). The pulse posts to the team channel and sends a push notification to every current team member.
• NewWhen someone is added to a team they now get a push notification telling them which team they are on and who their team lead is.

Field reminder banner for searchers, and sign-in for special resources.

• NewCommand can set a Field reminder on the operation board (radio-check cadence, a safety note, anything all-hands); it pins to the top of every searcher’s status page in the mobile app.
• NewSpecial resources — K9, drone, ATV, boat, mutual-aid team, equipment — can be signed in from the mobile check-in flow (type, name/callsign, agency, count, contact) and appear on the operations board for accountability, with a check-out when they leave.

Search type on assignments, and qualification-based highlighting of unassigned people on the board.

• NewAssignments now carry a Search type (Hasty, Type I–III, Grid, Purposeful). Set it on the assignment card in Teams & Assignments; team leaders see it on the mobile app for their current assignment.
• NewOn the operations board, unassigned on-scene people can be colour-highlighted by their qualifications so you can spot key roles at a glance. Configure the rules under Settings → Operations → Qualification Highlights (defaults: purple = Search Managers, blue = Team Leaders, red = Advanced First Aid / Paramedic).

The app is now branded “SARManager”.

• ChangedSAR Manager is now written as “SARManager” throughout the app — the navigation, footer, sign-in, About, Privacy Policy, release notes, system emails, and the installable app name. This is a branding change only; nothing about how the app works has changed.

Every page header now has a consistent icon and short subtitle.

• ChangedPage headers are now consistent across the app — each has a title icon and a short subtitle. The Operations, Roster, Equipment, Users, Settings, Logs, and Help pages gained the icon/subtitle that the module pages already had.

Consistent sub-tabs — one tab style and placement across Equipment, Settings, Help, SARConnect, and SARDrone.

• ChangedSub-tabs now look and sit the same everywhere: the Equipment, Settings, Help, SARConnect, and SARDrone pages all use one shared tab-bar style, positioned directly under the page title, instead of four different placements.

Operations board shows only the active operational period; assignment status colours are configurable.

• ChangedThe Board's Assignments panel now shows only the active operational period's assignments (earlier periods live in Operations → Historical). Assignment status dot colours are now configurable per organization under Settings → CalTopo → Assignment Status Colours — defaults are red = not started, yellow = in progress, amber = pending review, blue = complete (also applied to the Teams & Assignments view).

Equipment Registry groups can now be collapsed to tame long lists.

• NewOn the Equipment Registry, click any group header (e.g. a container or vehicle like the tech truck) to collapse it. Long lists that ran off the page can now be folded away for readability — selecting a whole group with its checkbox no longer collapses it.

Interface polish — clearer button labels, consistent empty states, and tidier list-page actions.

• ChangedRemoved the top-level "IMT Checklists" sidebar item. IMT role checklists remain available as a tab inside each operation.
• ChangedCSV buttons now clearly say "Import CSV", D4H sync buttons use consistent names ("Sync from D4H", "Sync D4H Quals"), empty states share one consistent look, and the Equipment "+ Add" button moved to the page header to match the Roster and Users pages.

Readability: formatted phone numbers, humanized role names, and one consistent date/time style.

• ChangedPhone numbers now display as +1 902-394-3969 (Roster, Users). Role names are humanized — e.g. "Tech Admin", "IMT · Drone Operator" — instead of raw keys. And absolute dates/times now use one consistent format across the app: "Jul 18, 2026 · 8:04 PM". Live elapsed timers (e.g. an operation's running clock) stay relative.

Consistency polish: unified status badges and page titles that match the sidebar.

• ChangedStatus badges now share one consistent style and colour meaning (green = active/available, amber = warning/pending, grey = closed/inactive, blue = neutral, red = alert) across the Operations, Users, Roster, and Equipment pages. Page titles for Roster, Users, and Logs now match their sidebar labels.

SARDR training deployments (safe drills, no real alerts) and distinct purple evacuation markers.

• NewYou can now create a SARDR deployment as a Training drill. Training deployments send NO real alerts to members — a single "[TRAINING]" text echoes to the dispatcher instead — are clearly flagged TRAINING on the board and detail, and do not send real expense-claim emails. Everything downstream (the linked operation, callouts, CalTopo, D4H) also runs in training mode, so you can run a full exercise safely.
• ChangedEvacuation door-knock addresses now drop as distinct purple markers on CalTopo so they stand out from other map features.

IMT Checklists is now a top-level item in the Operations menu.

• NewThe Operations section of the sidebar now has an "IMT Checklists" entry. Pick a running operation and it opens straight to that operation's IMT Checklists tab. (IMT checklists remain per operation.)

SARDR evacuation mapping now groups CalTopo markers into a folder per neighbourhood.

• ChangedWhen you push evacuation-zone addresses to CalTopo, markers are now grouped into one folder per neighbourhood — named "Evac - <neighbourhood>" — instead of a single "Door-to-door" folder. This makes it easy to hand a whole neighbourhood to a crew. Addresses with no neighbourhood go to an "Evac - Unspecified" folder.

Quality-of-life: pick an org to share with from a list, Check-in under Operations, and select-all assignments.

• ChangedSharing an operation with another organization now uses a dropdown of organizations instead of typing the slug by hand.
• Changed"Check in" now sits under the Operations section in the sidebar (it is about checking into an operation).
• NewOn Teams & Assignments you can now "Select all" assignments in the active operational period at once — handy for the SAR104/Team Log pack or carrying assignments forward.

The Historical tab now traces an area across every operational period again — as a select-and-read view.

• ChangedOn the Operations → Historical tab, selecting a past assignment now opens a reading pane on the right with its full detail AND the same area followed across every operational period it was carried through (e.g. 101 → 201 → 301, including the current one for context). This restores the cross-period area tracing that the new operational-period view had dropped, so you can see the cumulative effort in an area over time and jump between its periods.

Open-source license notices now reflect exactly what the app ships; unused build/image libraries removed from the distributed app.

• ChangedThe distributed application no longer bundles development-only or unused image-processing libraries, and the open-source license notices (About → Licensing) now list precisely the packages the running app actually includes. No functional change for users.

Operational periods now scope the Teams & Assignments board — advance a period without recreating assignments.

• ChangedThe Teams & Assignments board is now scoped to the active operational period. The Current view and each team's tasking list show only the active period's assignments; earlier periods move to the Historical tab (grouped by period). A new "Advance to next operational period" action lets you pick which assignments carry forward into the new period and clears all team taskings so you re-task fresh — you no longer have to recreate assignments by hand when moving from one period to the next.

Three fixes: reliable Close-out Forms loading, instant assignment-to-team, and incident reports for everyone but viewers.

• FixedThe Close-out Forms selection page now loads reliably. It could previously fail to load (showing a 401 / "couldn't load") right after signing in or on a hard refresh, because the request went out before your organization context was ready. This is fixed for every page that loads data on open.
• FixedOn the Operations → Teams & Assignments page, a newly created assignment can now be assigned to a team immediately — you no longer have to refresh the page first.
• ChangedFiling an Internal Incident Report is now available to every role except Viewer by default (this now includes the Tech Admin role). Viewers still cannot file. Organizations can still adjust this per custom role.

Fix: the Close-out Forms selection checklist now loads reliably instead of getting stuck.

• FixedThe close-out form selection under Settings → Close-out Forms could get stuck on "Loading…" and never show the list of forms. It now loads reliably, and if anything does go wrong the page shows a clear message instead of spinning indefinitely.

Pick exactly which forms your close-out package includes — any mix of your own forms and the ICS Canada forms.

• ChangedClose-out form selection is now a single checklist under Settings → Close-out Forms. Tick exactly the forms your organization files at close-out — any mix of your uploaded custom forms (SAR 104, Team Log, your own ICS 204-AH, etc.) and the app-generated ICS Canada forms (ICS 201, 202, 204-AH, 206, 214). Choose all of one kind, or any combination. This replaces the previous either/or "form set" dropdown; organizations that had not customized it still offer all their uploaded forms until they make a selection.

Fix: uploading a large assessment roll for disaster-response evacuation mapping no longer fails.

• FixedUploading a large PDF - most often the municipal assessment roll for SARDR evacuation-zone mapping - could fail with a generic "upload failed" message. Files above 10 MB were being cut short before the upload was processed, so the roll could not be read. Large uploads (up to the 60 MB limit) now go through correctly.

Choose an ICS Canada close-out form set - the app fills the standard ICS forms from your operation.

• NewOrganizations can now pick a close-out form set under Settings -> Operations: "SEASAR Standard" (unchanged) or "ICS Canada". With ICS Canada selected, the close-out package includes app-generated, fillable ICS 201 (Incident Briefing), 202 (Incident Objectives), 204-AH (Assignment List, one per team), 206 (Medical Plan), and 214 (Activity Log) - pre-populated from the operation (incident name, operational period, teams and members, assignment locations, the activity timeline) and still editable to complete by hand.
• NewThe ICS forms need no template upload - the app draws them. Your uploaded custom forms (including a specific SAR104 or ICS 204-AH) remain available regardless of which set you choose.

Fix: the QR gear-scan and other public check-in links now work correctly for organizations sharing the platform.

• FixedCompletes the multi-organization check-in fix: scanning a gear QR code at base, and other check-in actions that do not require signing in, now always reach the right organization. Previously, once a second organization existed on the platform, these could look in the wrong place and fail to find the operation.

Fix: opening a check-in link in the browser wrongly reported "no active operation" for organizations sharing the platform.

• FixedOpening an operation's check-in link in a web browser could report "no active operation" even when the operation was live. Once a second organization existed on the platform, the check-in page was not telling the server which organization to look in, so it checked the wrong place. Signed-in check-in now always uses your organization. (Checking in from the mobile app was unaffected.)

Team leaders can file an internal incident report from their phone during an operation.

• NewA new Internal Incident Report can be filed from the app at any time during an operation - near miss, injury, property damage, or occupational illness. Link the people involved (injured party and first-aiders) from your team, set the location by typing it or picking one of your team's assignments, and record first-aid and hospital details.
• NewSubmitting fills your organization's incident-report form, emails it to the safety/OHS addresses configured in Settings, and attaches it to the operation's close-out report. Search Managers and IMT can view and download filed reports from a new Incident Reports tab on the operation.
• ChangedSet the safety/OHS recipient addresses under Settings → Operations before your first report - submitting is blocked until at least one is configured.

Disaster-response alerts now sign you in like the check-in link, and close-out forms fill in far more of their fields automatically.

• ChangedResponding to a SARDR disaster-response alert now works like the check-in link: tapping it signs you in and takes you straight to your alert, instead of an open link anyone with the URL could use. Your responses and expense claim are tied to your own account.
• SecurityThe member response page is no longer a public page. Everything a responder does is now behind sign-in, so an alert link can only be acted on by the member it was sent to.
• NewClose-out and custom PDF forms can now auto-fill many more fields from the operation: coordinates and UTM, last-seen / reported / PLS times, the subject category, gear and description, the operations chief, the operational period, mutual-aid agencies, safety concerns, and the current assignment location. Map these once in Settings → Close-out Forms and they populate on every operation.

One email system for the whole platform: a single verified domain, and each organization set up with just a name.

• ChangedAll of the app's email - acknowledgements, escalations, expense claims, and inbound dispatch - now runs through one platform mail service on a single verified domain. This ends the per-address verification that used to fail silently, and improves whether your mail reaches the inbox rather than the spam folder.
• ChangedSetting up an organization's email is now a single field: the platform administrator types a short handle (for example "seasar") and the organization can both send from and receive dispatch at that one address. A reply to your outbound mail lands right back in your intake queue.
• FixedThe About page no longer shows a stale version number - it now reads the live version, like the footer.

Inbound dispatch email goes live on per-organization intake addresses, and an incoming dispatch can become a normal operation or a disaster-response deployment.

• NewYour organization can now receive dispatch emails at its own intake address (for example yourteam@intake.operational-edge.ca). The platform administrator connects the intake domain once and gives each organization its unique address - after that, an email from an approved sender lands as a draft on the Operations page, exactly like an inbound text.
• NewAn incoming dispatch now offers two doors: Accept it as a normal operation, or - for organizations with the SARDR module - Start DR deployment, which opens the deployment wizard with the dispatch message already filled in. Whichever door you take, the other side shows the dispatch as underway so nothing is handled twice.
• ChangedThe Operations page now has a single Drafts section: incoming dispatches and your saved intake forms live in one list, each with its own actions.
• FixedAccepting a dispatch that had already been taken forward elsewhere no longer sends a duplicate "new operation" alert to every device - it now tells you it is already underway.

SARDR - a new disaster-response module for POG deployments - plus closed operations stay listed, and profile changes can update the map.

• NewSARDR is a new add-on module for Alberta POG disaster response. Dispatchers run staged callouts - pre-alert, standby, deploy, stand-down (stages can be skipped) - and every member gets a text with a personal respond link: acknowledge, confirm standby, confirm deployment (which delivers the mobilization map), and report safely home after release. A live board tracks everyone with time-since-contact warnings.
• NewA SARDR deployment can hand off to a real operation: create a draft, promote it to standby, and the Deployment Wizard shows responders as already pre-alerted - no duplicate callout. Members who check in through the operation are recognized on the tracking board automatically.
• NewEvacuation-zone mapping: upload the municipal assessment roll, pick the affected neighbourhoods and streets, and every selected address is geocoded and dropped as a door-to-door marker on the operation's CalTopo map.
• NewExpense claims: when a member reports they're home, they're prompted to complete an expense claim (mileage, meals, accommodation). Each claim fills the RCMP expense form and is emailed to your response coordinators, and the operation's close-out report includes an expense summary with every form attached. Set the coordinator emails in the SARDR admin tab before your first deployment.
• NewThe mobile app gains the full member side of SARDR: alerts, stage-by-stage responses, the mobilization map, and the expense claim - visible only when your organization has the module.
• FixedClosed operations no longer vanish from the Operations page the moment they close. They now stay in the Closed section - where their report can still be downloaded - until you archive them.
• NewChanging an operation's ISRID profile now offers to update the CalTopo map: confirm, and the old probability rings are removed and new ones published for the new profile.

Google and Microsoft sign-in work reliably, equipment-damage emails no longer fail silently, and admins can prove the sender address works.

• FixedWhen damaged gear is returned, the maintenance manager's notification email could silently fail to send if the organization's sender address was never verified - and nobody would know. Failures are now recorded with the exact reason, so a missing email is diagnosable instead of invisible.
• NewThe system administration console can now send a test email from an organization's configured sender address. Use it right after setting an address up: saving an address only checks its shape, and a test send is the only way to prove emails will actually go out before an incident depends on one.
• FixedSign in with Google or Microsoft now works reliably. The first sign-in through either provider could get stuck in a loop and end in a security block: the sign-in page's security policy was blocking the CAPTCHA that the bot protection needs. It is now allowed, so bot protection and Google / Microsoft sign-in work together.
• FixedSigning in with an account that isn't set up in any organization no longer strands you on the organization picker. You are signed back out with a clear message to contact your administrator - and the picker now only offers the organizations you actually belong to.
• ChangedThe user manuals and in-app Help have been brought fully up to date - they now cover drafts arriving through SARConnect, module licensing and its expiry warnings, multi-role users, per-user themes, and two-factor resets.

Incoming taskings show on the Operations page, and you can acknowledge the sender - manually or automatically.

• NewA tasking arriving through SARConnect now appears on the Operations page in its own Draft operations section, visible to the whole team. Drafts are inert - no check-in, no callouts - until a Search Manager accepts one, which promotes it to a standby operation ready for the Deployment Wizard.
• NewAcknowledge a tasking with one click: the sender gets a templated reply (a text for SMS taskings, an email for emailed ones). Or turn on auto-acknowledge in the module admin and every accepted sender is answered the moment their message arrives. Unknown senders never receive anything.
• NewRe-import any draft as a new operation - even one already accepted or dismissed - when an operation was archived or dismissed by mistake.
• NewThe audit log can now be filtered by action type, including per-module families like SARCONNECT - new modules become filterable automatically.

SARConnect channel setup moves to the platform administrator; org admins manage the filters.

• ChangedConnecting SARConnect channels (the inbound email address, webhook credentials, and text-message wiring) is now done per organization in the system administration console. Your module admin screen keeps what belongs to the team: who is allowed to send you taskings, and whether Search Managers get a text when a draft arrives.

SARConnect - dispatch texts and emails become ready-to-review draft incidents.

• NewSARConnect is a new add-on module: when your tasking agency texts your team number or emails your intake address, the message lands as a draft incident with the details already parsed out - coordinates, file number, officer in charge, subject description. A Search Manager reviews the draft and accepts it into a real operation with one click; nothing is ever created without that review.
• NewOnly senders your admin has approved are accepted - anything else is rejected and recorded in the audit log. Optionally, every new draft can text your Search Managers so nobody has to watch the queue.
• NewDispatch software can deliver taskings directly through a secured web endpoint - the same drafts, no email required.

Admins can reset a locked-out member’s two-factor sign-in.

• NewSystem administrators can now see whether each user has two-factor authentication enrolled, and reset it for a member who lost their phone — they sign back in with just their password and can re-enrol. Every reset is recorded in the audit log with exactly which factors were cleared.

One broken write was silently killing every D4H sync partway through - fixed, and the first-login flicker is gone for good.

• FixedD4H sync now completes. A database write error was aborting the sync midway on every run, which is why emergency contacts never filled in, expired qualifications lingered, and on-call status went stale. One successful sync now updates all of it - emergency contacts land in the roster contact field.
• FixedImporting from D4H now brings each member emergency contact in too.
• FixedThe sign-in and organization-picker screens no longer re-render repeatedly for first-time users. The root cause survived the earlier fix; this one removes it.

The phone tells you when your profile fails to load instead of hiding menus, and emergency contacts fetch member-by-member when needed.

• FixedOn the phone, role-based menus (like New Call) no longer vanish for a whole session after a failed start-up. If your profile cannot load, the home screen now says so and offers Retry.
• FixedEmergency-contact sync: when the D4H member list omits contact details, the sync now fetches each linked member individually. The sync result also reports exactly what D4H sent, for support.
• FixedThe Ops back button on the phone is properly tappable.

Field-test fixes: check back in after checking out, emergency contacts really sync, and expired qualifications drop off.

• FixedAfter checking out of an operation, opening it again now takes you to check-in — and checking in again genuinely puts you back on scene, so you can draw gear for a second operational period. Before, you landed on the full operation screen but every gear action refused you.
• FixedEmergency contacts now actually sync from D4H (the previous fix shipped in code but had not reached the servers). Run one sync and your roster's emergency contacts fill in.
• FixedExpired qualifications no longer appear on the roster or in the D4H import. A qualification with no expiry date is kept.
• FixedOn the phone, the New Call entry no longer disappears for Search Managers.
• ChangedThe operation board's old inline deploy panel is fully retired — deploying an operation goes through the Deployment Wizard, via the new button in the operation header.
• ChangedThe Open-Source Licenses page now updates itself when the licence inventory is regenerated — unless you have hand-edited it, in which case it is never touched.

Pick exactly who gets the callout, wear several hats at once, make the app look the way you want — and emergency contacts finally sync from D4H.

• NewCallouts are now sent to exactly who you tick. The Communications tab shows the roster as checkboxes — everyone on call is pre-selected, off-call members sit in their own section behind an explicit "Include off-call" switch, and quick-select buttons grab Everyone, Operational, IMT, or a whole D4H group in one tap. The send button tells you how many people it will text before you press it.
• NewA person can hold more than one role. Pascal can be a Search Manager and a Tech Admin; a searcher can also be a drone admin. Their permissions are everything their roles grant, combined. Assign multiple roles from the Users page or the admin console.
• NewTheme and text size are now yours, not the organization's. Set Dark, Light, High Contrast, or Colour Blind Safe — plus text size — from the menu on your name, and it follows your account to any device. Previously the theme was shared: one member switching to light mode switched it for the whole org.
• NewNew org setting: "Allow searchers to respond directly to the IPP" (Settings → Operations). Turn it off to require everyone to muster at base first — the direct option disappears from check-in and the server refuses it, except after vehicles have already departed.
• FixedEmergency contacts now sync from D4H. They never did — the sync was reading field names D4H doesn't use, so nobody's emergency contact ever updated after import. If a contact changed in D4H, run a sync and it will come across now.
• FixedThe IMT quick-select in the D4H import now actually selects your IMT members. D4H marks IMT as a custom status on non-operational members; the button was looking in the wrong place and matching nobody.
• FixedThe admin console's Manage Users role list now shows your custom roles and edited role names, not just the built-ins.
• SecuritySARDrone: two cross-organization gaps closed. Telemetry sync-health no longer exposes other organizations' aircraft serials, and a drone's stream path can no longer be pointed at another organization's video feed.
• ChangedSARDrone has a full setup guide in Help — permissions, registering an aircraft, connecting the Pilot 2 controller, and what to do when the feed doesn't appear (including the manual-stream fallback). The dashboard now walks you to it when no aircraft is registered, and the whole module matches the app's look, including your theme.
• ChangedOn the phone, someone whose Search Manager role is a secondary role now sees the New Call entry.
• ChangedBoth code repositories now carry a security policy (SECURITY.md) with a private disclosure channel, and the open-source licence inventory was refreshed and verified — every shipped package is properly licensed.

SARDrone — watch your drone's position, camera and thermal feed from the operation, and put it on the CalTopo map alongside your teams.

• NewSARDrone is a new add-on module. When your organization has it, a SARDrone item appears in the sidebar: a live fleet view of your aircraft with battery, height above ground, heading and grid reference, updating every few seconds.
• NewThe drone's live video plays in the operation, and you can switch between the standard camera, the zoom camera and the thermal camera without touching the controller. Thermal is one button — useful at night or in heavy cover.
• NewThe drone appears on the CalTopo map as a live track, next to your ground teams, so the whole search picture is in one place. You choose the callsign it shows up as.
• NewThe pilot connects the controller by scanning one QR code from the SARDrone Admin tab — no manual set-up on the aircraft side.
• NewThree new permissions can be granted to any role: SARDrone — View (watch the feed and telemetry), SARDrone — Flight Ops (switch cameras and start/stop the stream), and SARDrone — Administration (add aircraft, set the CalTopo key, issue the pilot QR). Search Managers get all three; IMT can watch and operate the cameras; a "watch only" role is now possible for an agency liaison.
• NewHelp now has a SARDrone section — how to set it up, connect the controller, fly with it, and what to do when the feed does not appear. It only shows for organizations that have the module.
• FixedA module's permissions can now actually be granted. Once an add-on module is licensed to an organization, its permissions appear in the role editor immediately — previously they existed and worked, but no tick-box was ever shown for them, so there was no way to give them to anyone.
• SecurityA drone's telemetry and video are visible only to the organization that owns the aircraft. Another organization cannot watch your feed, follow your drone, or claim its serial — even if it knows it.

Signing gear out is now select → quick check → assigned, and a kit already checked this operation is not re-checked.

• ChangedSigning gear out on the phone is now two clear steps: pick the gear you are taking, then run the quick check. Before, the item list and the checklist ran together in one scroll and it was hard to tell what you were selecting from what you were inspecting.
• ChangedIf a container has already been quick-checked on this operation, you go straight to signing the gear out. The app shows who ran the check and when, so a kit that has been opened and checked once is not re-checked by every person who draws from it. You can still re-run the check yourself if you want to.
• ChangedEach container now shows its quick-check state before you open it — checked, needed, or failed. A failed check is called out in red, telling you to inspect the gear yourself before taking it.

Searchers are now tracked by who they are, not by how their name is spelled — plus item-level gear returns and a rebuilt admin console.

• FixedChecking in again after you have checked out now genuinely puts you back on scene. Before, the board never showed you and every gear screen refused you with "You must be checked in to this operation first" — which made it impossible to draw a radio for a second operational period.
• FixedTwo people with the same name are now two people. They no longer collapse into a single check-in record where one of them is invisible on the board and untracked in the field.
• FixedA callout sent to "everyone on scene" now actually reaches everyone on scene. Anyone whose check-in name was spelled differently from their roster name was being silently skipped — including on a safety recall or a stand-down.
• FixedThe "Not checked in" chase list no longer hides a genuine no-show just because someone else with the same name did check in.
• FixedTeam members other than the team lead now appear under their team on the board.
• FixedChecking a searcher out now always warns you if they still hold equipment. For some searchers that check was being skipped entirely, and gear left the site unrecorded.
• FixedTwo searchers can no longer both sign out the same physical item. The second sign-out used to succeed, and then blocked the first searcher from demobilising over gear he had already returned.
• FixedReplying to a field message that arrived without an identity no longer looks sent when it was delivered to nobody. Those messages are now clearly marked as un-repliable.
• FixedImporting from D4H no longer greys out a member because someone on the roster shares their name. A second "John Smith" can now be imported.
• SecurityThe vehicle pre-departure safety checklist can no longer be marked complete by someone who is not the searcher. It also no longer silently fails — if it cannot record the inspection it now tells you, instead of showing a green tick for a check that never happened.
• SecurityMessages in the shared operational channel can no longer be posted under someone else's name. The sender is now taken from the roster, not from whatever the app was told.
• SecurityClaiming a vehicle now requires being a checked-in member of the operation. Previously a stray claim could lock the real driver out of their own vehicle with no way to release it.
• NewGear returns are item-level. Tap "Return items" to see exactly what you have signed out — everything is ticked by default, so handing the lot back is one tap, or untick to return only some of it. Damaged something? Return the good gear first, then do a second return with just the broken item ticked and describe the damage: maintenance gets a report naming that item.
• NewVehicle claims can be released. If you claim the wrong seat you can now hand it back yourself.
• ChangedThe check-in board refreshes on-scene searchers automatically every two minutes instead of waiting for you to hit refresh.
• NewThe super-admin console is rebuilt around tabs — Organizations, Platform, Legal, Audit — so it is no longer one endless scroll. An organization now opens onto its own settings, users, messaging, modules and roles, instead of hiding them behind "Manage users".
• NewOrganizations can be renamed. The short key stays fixed (it identifies the org's data), but the display name is now editable.
• NewBuilt-in roles (Search Manager, IMT, Tech Admin, Searcher, Viewer) can now be tailored per organization and reset to their defaults at any time. Search Manager always keeps User Management and Org Settings, so an organization can never lock itself out of its own role editor.
• FixedSigning in no longer bounces between the home page and the login page. Previously the screen flickered between the two until you hit refresh.
• FixedThe organization picker no longer re-renders repeatedly right after you sign in.
• FixedOn the phone, a gear list that fails to load now says so. It used to fail silently — which simply hid the Return button with no explanation.

Manage your own account, and D4H keeps your contact details current.

• NewClick your name in the top-right → My Account to change your password, email address, or set up two-factor authentication. Searchers can reach it from the check-in screen too.
• FixedA D4H re-sync now updates phone numbers and email addresses that have changed. Before, a member who changed their number in D4H kept the old one here — which meant callout texts went to a dead number.
• NewEmergency contact and emergency phone now sync from D4H.
• ChangedTo be clear: a D4H re-sync only ever updates members already on your roster. It never creates new people.

Call Intake reorganised around how the call actually arrives.

• ChangedCall Intake is now six steps: Dispatch → Who → Where & When → Urgency → Safety → Notify. Everything the police tell you about the subject (circumstance, medical, lost-person profile) is on one screen, so you are not paging back and forth while on the phone.
• ChangedPriority is no longer picked by hand — it is set by the Urgency Analysis, which is where you can actually judge it. Very High urgency creates a priority-1 operation.
• FixedThe privacy policy page is now readable (it was rendering dark text on a dark background).

Configurable roles, and CalTopo maps straight from the board.

• NewCustom roles: an administrator can now define a role from a list of 14 permissions instead of being stuck with the five built-in ones. The built-in roles behave exactly as before — nothing to change.
• NewOn the board, an operation with no CalTopo map now offers "Create map" (confirm the LKP/PLS/IPP, and it plots the IPP marker and probability rings) or "Attach existing map" (paste a CalTopo link).
• NewCoordinates can be entered as UTM, latitude/longitude, or an address that gets looked up for you.
• SecurityA read-only role can no longer delete the audit log it was only meant to read.

Call Intake and Deployment are now separate — a call can be taken by one SM and deployed by another.

• NewCall Intake: document the call (or paste the dispatch text verbatim and skip ahead), then notify the other Search Managers with one tap. The operation is saved on Standby — deployment can happen later.
• NewAssign an Ops Chief: hand the deployment to any SM or IMT member. They get a text with a direct link to the Deployment Wizard.
• NewDeployment Wizard: if the call was pasted in, the details are extracted for you to confirm, with the original dispatch text pinned beside every step.
• NewOrganizations can switch off features they do not use (Risk Assessments, Equipment).
• NewFile to D4H: attach the close-out report and documents to the D4H incident from the close page.
• FixedThe board now lists only searchers who are actually participating — responding, on scene, staging, on task, or returning to base.
• FixedD4H whiteboard posts that were quietly failing now either succeed or tell you why.
• SecurityA training exercise can no longer page the whole roster: the server itself now redirects every drill callout to the person running it.