Smart Communications System & v3.9 “Hawkeye”
Sam Webster
Software Developer
The Smart Communications System is here - fully customisable notifications, SMS notifications, browser push notifications, organisation wide chat and more. Let’s dive in!
Notifications
The notification system has been completely rebuilt and vastly expanded to include over 35 (and growing) specific notifications, each of which can be adjusted at an individual and organisation level to suit everyone's preferences.
Notifications can be delivered to the bell icon in the application, via email, pushed to the browser and via SMS. Individuals can decide on their preferred delivery channels, and organisation administrators can decide what channels to deliver on and also tweak when specific notifications are sent, and who they are sent to.
Chats
Messaging within Smart is now available, you can send traditional direct messages to people within your organisation and set up group chats. To access the chat system, just press the chat button on the top right of the screen.
We are also introducing context specific chats, these chats are scoped to a specific booking, and the conversation is nicely quarantined to it, so if you have specific questions about the aircraft, weather, fuel, passengers, or any requirement, they are not bleeding over into your other, more general chats and lost to the sands of time.
If you want, you can also make your Smart account “Public” from your account settings to chat with people from other organisations, this can be helpful if you are part of a consortium or larger organisational structure, industry bodies, aviation groups, and so forth.
Wingman AI
We are proud to be the first aviation learning management system (LMS/TMS) to use AI to provide rich insights about student progress. Wingman is our AI powered tool that allows instructors and staff to quickly understand where a student is at in their training, with concise information about the student’s weaknesses and strengths.
Our main goal for this tool came from a very real problem many of you have likely experienced in flight training, where you have a last minute change to a student you have never flown with before, and have a limited amount of time to try and comb through their lesson records to figure out where they are at and what their needs are - Wingman helps shorten this process, increasing efficiency and saving time.
External Calendars
You can now sync your events in Smart with your other calendars like Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and whatever other calendar apps you use. Using your agenda from the dashboard you can “Copy Calendar URL” to sync your events with your calendar of choice.
You may need to google specific instructions depending on what calendar application you use, but it is a very simple process, here is the instructions for Apple, Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar.
After Save Actions
We have had a lot of you ask to quickly access the invoice after returning a flight, or to access the studen’s lesson record. You can now pick where you need to go after saving key information across Smart and you can turn it off at any time if you don’t want it. Currently this overlay will show when you save Dispatches, Invoices & Lesson Records.
The Rest
As you may have seen, the “Latest News” is where we put key information with each release - it will automatically open when a new release is out and can be accessed from your dashboard at any time.
As always, please check out the release notes for all the details, but here are some items to mention:
- Support for the CASA Class 5 Medical
- Attach files like screenshots to feedback items & comments
- Redirect to your organisation of choice when logging in
- Flight tracking link on the event info card when on the scheduler
- Updated lesson record UI to be more tablet friendly
Wrap Up
This communication system was an essential milestone on our journey to bringing you the Smart app which the team are continuing to work on, but before we can get there the scheduler is getting some much needed upgrades (did someone say less clicks?) and performance enhancements, so our next big release will be focused on that, as well as the API for those who need deeper integration with Smart. Until next time!