2011: What A Year (In Review)!

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve and if you're like me, you're wondering how 2011 flew by already! In roughly 36 hours, we'll be living in 2012 and if you're still like me, "2012" sounds like the distant future. I can even remember sitting in a classroom in the mid-90s thinking to myself, "It'll never be the year 2000...that sounds so far away!" But all joking aside, I think that when a year feels like it flew by, if you take the time to look back upon it, you'll realize that so much actually happened.

2011 will be remembered by stories of Mubarak, Gadhafi, Kate & William, Whitey Bulger, Casey Anthony and Charlie Sheen. And we'll never forget the tsunami in Japan, flooding in Thailand or the tornado in Joplin, MO. And what about the Occupy movement? Herman Cain? How about the death of Bin Laden by our own Marines coupled with the 10 year anniversary of 9/11? Oh, and we'll be sure to never forget that our Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl at the beginning of the year!

For Aladtec, 2011 was a big year too. Our company grew which allowed us to ramp up development for EMS Manager, FIRE Manager and Zanager, which we released this year. With new faces in our development team, we pushed out new features such as:

• required messages for improved communication
• time off accrual for increased personnel data management, 
• schedule editor enhancements to speed up workflow, 
• system log filters for greater control over data and accountability,
• consolidated views to increase speed and agility in workforce management

We traveled a bit and got to meet many of our users in Milwaukee, WI at WEMSA, Baltimore, MD at EMS Today, in Miami Beach, FL at Pinnacle EMS and in Las Vegas, NV at the American Ambulance Association Convention.

Some of our users even had stories featured in major publications:

• An Easy Solution to Employee Scheduling Woes - Captain James Limerick, Liberty Township Fire Department, Liberty Township, OH. As seen on firerescue1.com, posted on April 13, 2011.
• Never Too Late For New Technology - Former Chief James Rattunde, Necedah Fire & Rescue, Necedah, WI. As seen in EMS PRO Magazine, Vol. 3 Issue 5.
• Scheduling Software Can Make EMS More Efficient - Cassie Palmer, First Call Ambulance, Nashville, TN. As seen on jems.com, posted July 8, 2011.
• Goodbye Paper Schedules...Hello Web-Based Scheduling - Stephanie Fowler Burt, Lifestar Ambulance, Salisbury, MD. As seen in EMS PRO Magazine, Vol. 3 Issue 8/9.

In 2011, we expanded our customer support efforts by launching this blog for tech tips and news, hosting support videos on our YouTube channel and keeping our users up-to-date over facebook and twitter. We continued providing support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for over 750 unique customers.

And largely in part due to our wonderful customers' word-of-mouth, over 200 new public safety agencies and companies switched to scheduling their employees and managing their workforce online with EMS Manager, FIRE Manager or Zanager this year. We are incredibly humbled by this and promise to continue improving our products to help you and your business run efficiently. Here's to an exciting 2012!