Team Account Updates: Sub-Teams & Events

CalTopo Teams allows organizations to connect all their members in a single platform, promoting the seamless sharing of information. As CalTopo team accounts have been increasingly adopted by a wide variety of organizations (including search and rescue, wildland fire, SWAT teams, public land management groups, and guiding companies), we have seen a greater need for the ability to customize the platform for different use cases.

We’ve been working hard to improve team accounts and we are excited to announce the latest team account updates!

First, there is a new feature available to all team accounts: Sub-Teams! Sub-teams allow you to organize your team membership into distinct groups that make sense for your organization. For example, a sheriff’s office may want to create specialty sub-teams (such as a canine sub-team, evidence sub-team, etc) to more accurately reflect their organizational structure. Individual members can be assigned to a single sub-team or multiple sub-teams, depending on their role in the organization.

You can also set visibility between sub-teams and the main team account. This allows you to control the flow of information, providing or restricting access to team or sub-team data as needed. For example, a sheriff’s office may want to provide a canine sub-team with upward visibility into the main team account, so that they can view maps for incidents that they are asked to respond to. However for an evidence sub-team, they may want to prevent any member who is not part of the sub-team from viewing evidence sub-team maps or data in order to protect any potentially sensitive information.

Check out the Sub-Teams page in our user guide to learn more about creating and managing sub-teams on your team account.

Second, Events are now called Mutual Aid Incidents and are no longer a separate tab on the team admin page. Sub-teams and mutual aid incidents (formerly called events) are essentially the same thing except mutual aid incidents (1) are temporary groups for responding to a large complex incident, (2) have an expiration date, and (3) can include people from outside your organization. For example, a search and rescue team that is coordinating a multi operational period search may create a mutual aid incident to rapidly onboard mutual aid from outside their team.

Check out the Mutual Aid Incidents (Formerly Events) page in our user guide for more information on how to create and manage a mutual aid incident. 

Finally, you may notice that there is another new feature on the team account admin page called Collaboration. At a high level, Collaboration allows teams and organizations that frequently work together to create a shared workspace for sharing maps and data. For example, a fire department that often works with a sheriff’s office could create a shared workspace that they give the sheriff’s office access to. While the feature is live on the site (and you are welcome to play around with it), we aren’t quite ready to officially roll it out yet- we’ll save that for another blog post soon!

 

Not familiar with CalTopo Teams and want to learn more about how a team account could help your organization? Visit the CalTopo Teams page or email us at help@caltopo.com for more information.