One of the challenges faced by small and rural towns is that they must provide the 911 services to its citizens, however, they must do so with a small budget. This means they must have a call center and all the appropriate equipment to handle the calls. Most of the PSAP (means, what exactly???) equipment is designed for large call and data centers, and appropriately costs a lot of money. Informer911 Corporation is attempting to fill the niche for the small town call center by designing a system with a minimal up-front investment while allowing to expand the system as needed. For more in-depth information, including more screenshots, please visit the website for this product. I was hired to design the software to interact with the hardware on the back end and to write an application for the 911 all takers.
One fact I learned quickly is that the national 911 system is very badly outmoded. The national phone number to address database lookup works over 9600 baud modem (!!!). In addition, because of various laws (both local, state and federal), the 911 centers must keep loads of information handy. This means that they already have a lot of existing sofware on hand to help them do that. If you can't interact with this software, you won't make the sale. Most of the existing software communicates with one another via either COM ports or TCP/IP.
The trick is to make a system that's flexible enough that it can interact just about any software, any data stream and do all this without a lot of technical expertise. The solution to this problem was something we called Visual Parser ©. It enabled the user on site to parse and map incoming data tokens to any functionality available inside our server product. On the flip side, the server package is also capable of generating outbound data stream where the same user can map various application functionality to outgoing data streams.
These challenges aside, the software manages a multitude of COM ports, interacting with hardware and software alike, processing calls, forwards requests and system state information, It helps call takers by taking care of all the nitty-gritty of their work. It provides a multitude of analisys tools, allowing support personnel to dial in and look around the system. In addition, the software offers direct access to the hardware via a terminal emulation conduit.
Key requirement for the call taker software was to make the interface customizable and morphable. Most of the time it should take up as little space as possible, while providing call takers with as much information as possible. The rationale behind these requirement is that the call takes already have a lot of software on their desktop, such as mapping applications that take up most of the real estate.
As a result, I went with a concept of "Panels". The idea is to confine each major function of the application to a panel (essentially a docked window, but within the application) and this panel can be added or removed at will. Panels allow the user to only show functionality that's necessary for the job, thus saving on screen real estate.
The application allows the call taker to immediately see the address (or location, if calling from a cell phone) of the caller. It can also transfer calls to other departments. If the call originates from a cell phone, the location of the caller can be continually tracked by a process known as rebidding. The conversations are recorded and can be replayed at will. TDD interface is provided for those who call in via this interface. The application can also take over the ringing from the phone, allowing the users to set up different sounds for landline or wireless calls. Multitude of options are available to customize the application to multi-vendor environment.
- Language: Visual Basic 6
- Serial Communications
- Data Access: ALI Link databases
- RS485 bus for Node to Node communications
