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Chronicler Has Had A Huge Update: Here’s Everything You Need To Know

It’s been nine years since Chronosoft first launched our flagship incident management software, Chronicler. In that time, we’ve helped hundreds of venues of all sizes address thousands of tasks, emergencies, and communication pipelines. At the beginning of 2023, after nine years and 23 unique versions of the software, we knew it was time to start looking at a larger-scale rewrite. That upgrade has arrived. Let’s take a look at how we got here, what’s changed, and why.

Where Did Chronicler Come From?

Chronosoft co-founder Edward Swete Kelly began his career as security guard before getting paramedic qualifications, and then eventually moved to managing control rooms for large-scale events. As a controller at an outdoor music festival in 2014, Ed saw first-hand the results of poor documentation and information sharing. Chronosoft was founded a year later as a way to solve these problems for every control room, by creating a solution that’s scalable for any team size, any budget, and any situation.


Now, Chronicler has grown, updated, and expanded. Chronicler is used by venues to manage security, medical, and operational issues at all scales: from the London-wide coordination of the 1 million attendees to the Queen’s Funeral, to 50,000+ capacity stadiums with hierarchical command structures, to smaller teams managing a shopping centre.

What’s New With Chronicler?

Chronosoft has facilitated some particularly large-scale events in the past few years, including the Queen’s funeral and King’s coronation. At Chronosoft, we value continued learning, development, and growth, even after successful deployments and positive feedback. Nine years of experience, as well as academic principals, customer feedback, and expert design advice, has led to us transforming Chronicler into a whole new, highly usable, highly understandable system. Here’s what we’ve improved:

  • User Experience & Workflows: The active job list is the beating heart of the Chronicler dashboard, showing you what is currently happening and what needs your attention. That means that one screen needs to show a huge amount of information in a way that can be read at a glance. We thought the old job list was great at this, but we also know there’s always room for improvement. We went and researched information presentation theory and looked for real-world examples of how to showcase the dense information summaries we needed. Ultimately, we found powerful inspiration in the hectic world of Air Traffic Control, where controllers need to maintain complex models with the ability to quickly reference key information. We took these ideas and re-engineered our job list to be even more readable and easier to parse when hundreds of jobs are needing your attention and prioritisation.

  • Accessibility: Accessibility has always been at the core of what we do at Chronosoft, but alongside our UX upgrades we knew we could go even further to boost clarity for all users. This included building a fully adaptive interface that scales across devices and configurations, implementing adjustable colour settings for all system objects, word and/or symbol descriptors, and even more assistive technologies to allow anyone, of any capability, in an incident management role to use our systems effectively.

  • Multi-lingual Support: In a similar vein, we’ve added support for a huge number of languages, as well as multiple languages simultaneously. Are you running the Football World Cup and need two dozen multinational security and medical teams all speaking different languages to be on the same page? We’ve got you covered.

  • Scalability & User-based Customisation: Chronicler scales completely naturally with the number of users within an instance (a.k.a. an event or location), meaning that a stadium can use the same management systems and have a single point of truth whether they’re fielding a 75,000 person concert or a 15 person training day. In addition, our flexible permissions allow each user’s experience and access to be tailored to their job roles and responsibilities. Need some more water in a conference room? Only the executive assistant needs to know, and the security team doesn’t need to be bothered by it.

  • Computed Elements: Chronicler’s highly customisable job forms were one of the features we were proudest of in previous versions, and now we’ve taken this technology even further. All key fields are now completely configurable by accounts with admin access, meaning managers can add and remove fields and adjust job layouts to match their own needs. We’ve also added a suite of new controls to support the ever-growing scale of Chronicler’s usage, including multi-currency controls, timezone controls, and computational controls that allow complex form inputs to generate simple, single-display outputs perfect for risk and hazard assessments, intelligence scoring, reporting, and more.

  • Layout Engine: One of the key pieces of feedback we heard from our clients over the years was that some screens were user-adjustable, while some key screens were not. We’ve built an entirely new layout engine to let users design the dashboards that work best for them. Need a job list next to a map? You can do that. Need to see exact data on security incidents alongside the event runsheet? We’ve got you covered. Not quite sure what you need yet? We’ve also put together a convenient range of pre-built dashboards and layouts based on our most-used features and configurations.

  • Mapping, Locations, & Visualisations: Chronosoft partners with Esri ArcGIS, OpenStreetMap, What3Words, and Cesium for Chronicler’s general mapping capabilities. This way, we’re able to provide layers like live traffic, road details, and building information to all parties who need it.  We also offer high-fidelity 3D mapping and can integrate 3-D models, or digital twins, to allow rich visualisation of complex spaces that allow response teams to operate faster and more efficiently.

So Why Did Chronicler Change?

We were already proud of where Chronicler was after nine years of continued development. But we also knew that Chronicler was capable of looking, feeling, and operating at an even higher level. We had arrived at a natural point where we knew we had the resources and capabilities to grow Chronicler from great to fantastic. With so many new and unique clients finding use cases that we’d never considered during initial development, we needed to have a system that could adapt to their needs. We’re always aiming to put our best foot forward and create technology that helps teams create truly meaningful impacts across a diverse range of industries.. And with this improved Chronicler, we think we’re getting close to that goal.


If you’re interested in trying out Chronicler and seeing how it could streamline your venue or event’s control room processes, take a look at our full offerings over at https://www.chronosoft.com.au/ and click Book A Demo for a free, personalised demonstration of Chronicler and our full suite of tools.


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