Firehouse Solutions - Recent News

Release of AI Writing Tool and Two-Factor Authentication

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:12:00 GMT

Rewrite with ChatGPT: Professional News Stories at the Click of a Button

Firehouse Solutions has released a one-click story rewriting tool powered by ChatGPT, built directly into our platform's news publishing workflow. Department personnel are firefighters before they are writers, and this tool helps bridge that gap.

Authors can click the "Rewrite with ChatGPT" button directly within any news story to instantly sharpen its grammar, clarity, and professionalism before it goes live, whether that's a call recap, a milestone announcement, or a public safety update. The result is content that represents the department the way it deserves to be represented to your community.

Two-Factor Authentication: Strengthening the Security of Your Department's Data

Firehouse Solutions has also introduced Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), which brings a meaningful upgrade to our platform's account security. By requiring a second form of identity verification beyond a password, 2FA significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access to department information.

Administrators can choose to enforce it across the entire organization or leave it as an option that individual members can enable on their own. Contact us at support@firehousesolutions.com to implement enforcement.

Setting up 2FA is simple. Members will find the new 2FA Settings link prominently displayed at the top of our Members Area, where they can verify or update the SMS phone number and email address tied to their account.

Schedule News Posts for Automated Go Live and Come Down

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 23:42:00 GMT

We’ve just made managing your news a whole lot easier. You can now schedule when your news posts go live and when they come down. All in one simple step!

Here’s what’s new:

Set a Publish Date & Time: Plan your news posts in advance and let the system handle the rest.
Set an Unpublish Date & Time: Automatically remove or hide news posts when they’re no longer relevant.
Hands-Off Automation: Keep your news feed fresh and timely without needing to log in and update manually.

How it works:

1. When creating or editing a news item, look for the “Schedule” option in the Status dropdown.
2. Choose your desired publish and unpublish dates and times.
3. Save, and we’ll take care of the rest!

Your content, your timing - perfectly in sync.

But that’s not all! Don’t forget to take advantage of our other tools designed to make managing your members and organization easier than ever:

Members Area – Connect, collaborate, and share resources with your membership.
Display Boards – Present Weather, Announcements, and Integrate with Active911 in your station.
Databases – Organize and track your organization’s information effortlessly.
Sign-Up Sheets – Simplify event registration and allow your members to choose.
Duty Scheduling – Keep staffing organized and generate monthly hour reports.

…and so much more!

Light and Dark Mode, Calendar Email Reminders, Emoji Support, and Video Galleries

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 20:32:00 GMT

The Members Area now features both light and dark mode options to reduce eye strain and enhance visual comfort. Users can easily switch between modes using the sun/moon toggle located in the top right corner of the Members Area, next to your logo. This update includes a carefully designed, consistent user interface, including for mobile devices, to ensure a smoother and more visually appealing experience.

Users can now set 24-hour email reminders for calendar events by selecting "Set 24-Hour Email Reminder" in the e-Alert email message received. This one-click feature sends an automatic reminder exactly 24 hours before the event, allowing users to choose which events are important to them.

Additionally, a new functionality has been implemented to send email reminders to users one day prior to the event date on a sign-up sheet. Users have the option to enable these reminders during the sign-up process.

We have introduced full emoji support across the Members Area, allowing users to incorporate expressive digital icons into their communications. Emojis are small graphical representations of emotions, objects, or symbols. They are used to enhance digital interaction by adding a layer of personalization and clarity to messages. This update aims to foster a more engaging and dynamic user experience within the platform.

Finally we’ve introduced video galleries, extending the familiar functionality of photo galleries to video content. This means you can now embed and group videos in a clean, organized layout, making it easier for users to navigate and engage with your content. Video galleries can be deployed Publicly or in the Members Area. Members Area video galleries are ideal for private content such as training, committee material, incident debriefs, etc.

Why Your Organization Needs Email Archiving

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 12:27:00 GMT

At Firehouse Solutions, we are committed to helping public safety organizations protect and manage their email communications. That's why we're proud to offer email archiving through SmarterMail—a solution that ensures all email traffic on your domain is captured, stored, and retrievable. With this system, your organization’s leaders can review, download, and restore important correspondence, even from deleted user mailboxes.

Here are some key reasons why email archiving is essential for public safety organizations:

1. Transition Management

When critical positions, such as treasurer or officer, change hands, continuity can be a challenge. Email archiving ensures that all previous correspondence is preserved, allowing new personnel to easily retrieve and restore emails that may no longer be in the mailbox, helping them quickly get up to speed.

2. Safeguard Against Malicious Deletions

Unfortunately, there are times when a member leaves on bad terms and attempts to delete their entire email history. Whether it's the inbox, sent items, or deleted folders, email archiving gives your leaders the ability to recover all correspondence, minimizing the risk posed by such actions.

3. Protect Your Intellectual Property

While members use email for daily operations, the content belongs to your organization. Email archiving helps secure and protect this intellectual property, ensuring that valuable information isn’t lost and can be retrieved when needed.

4. Compliance and Legal Requirements

Email archiving also assists in meeting state and federal regulatory requirements, which often mandate the retention of electronic records, including email. Here are some email retention guidelines for specific states:

Maryland: Retain emails for 3 years based on state guidelines.
New Jersey: Retain emails for 1 to 20 years, or permanently based on the content as per state law.
New York: Retain emails for 7 years as per state guidelines.
North Carolina Retain emails for 10 years as per state law.
Pennsylvania: Retain emails for 1 to 7 years, or permanently based on the content, as per state law.
Virginia: Retain emails for 30 days to 10 years based on the content, per state guidelines.

Cost of Email Archiving

The cost of Email Archiving is $20 Monthy for 10 Years of Rotational Storage. This means at any given moment, your organization can review all emails back for 10 years.

To protect your organization and ensure email continuity, compliance, and security, sign up for email archiving today using the form below.

Sign Up for SmarterMail Email Archiving

Introducing Upgraded SmarterMail and firehouse.email

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 17:29:00 GMT

In the next few weeks, the Firehouse Solutions web team will be upgrading SmarterMail to the most recent version.

To review all new features of SmarterMail, feel free to review them here:

https://www.smartertools.com/smartermail/business-email-server

In this upgrade, SmarterMail has developed full integration with emClient. emClient is comparable and arguatively more easy to use than Microsoft Outlook, both desktop and mobile apps. Plus, it's FREE with up to 2 email accounts.

To read more about this exciting new partnership with emClient:

https://www.emclient.com/blog/em-client-and-smartermail-team-up-for-enhanced-email-experience-635

Furthermore, the webmail URL of SmarterMail will change from https://mail.firehousesolutions.com to https://firehouse.email. This will not affect any device or smartphone settings which should remain mail.firehousesolutions.com. The new official Firehouse Solutions SmarterMail URL is https://firehouse.email

Finally, we will automatically redirect all web browsers to the new URL. Note: Users may need to re-enter any saved usernames and passwords on their web browser after the switch.

As we continue into 2024, our focus will be making our tools easier, expanding new high tech offerings, building an API (Application Programming Interface), and continuing to upgrade and streamline each of our current features.

Deprecate TLS 1.0/1.1 Security Protocols

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 16:42:00 GMT

As of January 1, 2024, Firehouse Solutions will no longer accept connections to our infrastructure that use older Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions. Moving forward, all browsers, devices, and others systems will need to use TLS 1.2 or higher. This includes our web and email servers.

The deprecation of TLS 1.0/1.1 is not unique to Firehouse Solutions. Technology companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple, as well as financial and governmental institutions have either already removed support for these encryption methods or have plans to deprecate support for them shortly.

As for the impact of the deprecation of TLS 1.0/1.1, the only real risk is communication failures if you don't update your browsers, operating systems and devices with the latest security and software updates. Likewise, older devices and software environments that can NOT be updated will also run into trouble trying to communicate with additional internet systems that have removed TLS 1.0/1.1 support. Below is a list of some of these operating systems, browsers and environments:

Windows Server version OLDER than 2008
Android 4.3 and earlier
Firefox version 5.0 and earlier
Internet Explorer 8 - 10 on Windows 7 and earlier
Internet Explorer 10 on Windows Phone 8
Safari 6.0.4/OS X 10.8.4 and earlier
Chrome 72 and earlier

This deprecation of encryption protocols, across various industries and by all technology companies, is just another example of why it’s critical for you to keep Maintenance and Support active and stay up-to-date on every piece of software you use. The internet is constantly changing. New threats and new vulnerabilities are found constantly. At Firehouse Solutions, a good amount of our time is spent staying on top of these threats, improving our products and introducing new ways to keep you and your users protected.

SmarterMail Software Upgrade and Welcome to firehouse.email

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 01:34:00 GMT

On Friday, August 4, 2023 at 1100 hours, our software team will be upgrading SmarterMail to the latest version (Build 8601). We anticipate approximately 10 minutes where email accessibility may be intermittent.

During the upgrade, all incoming and outgoing messages will be queued and sent once complete. No user updates are required for computers/devices that connect to SmarterMail via IMAP, POP3, etc.

SmarterMail Domain Admin upgrades can be reviewed here:
https://www.smartertools.com/blog/2023/02/next-smartermail-domain-admin-benefits

SmarterMail User upgrades can be reviewed here:
https://www.smartertools.com/blog/2023/03/next-smartermail-user-benefits

Note: This release includes a brand new user interface. There are spacing changes, light/dark improvements, and modern design updates to make the user experience flow quicker and easier. Our team has found the new interface upgrade to be subtle and nicely built.

Finally, we wanted to let you know that users can now log into their SmarterMail account via https://firehouse.email.

We encourage you to share the new URL with members. https://firehouse.email is very easy for firefighters to remember and it can be typed into a web browser really quickly.

We will continue to support https://mail.firehousesolutions.com for the long run to ensure all user bookmarks remain in tact.

Introducing New Emergency Alert Screens for Display Boards

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 06:30:00 GMT

We're excited to announce over a dozen new emergency alert screens, which are easy-to-use and customizable. Currently, the alert screens require an ActiveAlert refresh token and a Google Maps API key.

Activated by ActiveAlert, our display board alert screens provide pertinent information to first responders, including mapping, directions, Google Street View, responding members, incident details, timers, and more. We also support embed code. Thus, you can customize information on the emergency alert screen, such as traffic cams, hospital status, hydrants out-of-service, etc.

The maps are built zoomed out and at street level. Maps can be customized to show roads, terrain, hybrid, and satellite. Street level maps will render ActiveAlert map data, such as hydrants, water supply sources, hazards, or other data you entered in ActiveAlert.

Display Boards are electronic bulletin boards designed to run 24/7 on a high-definition television. They are used to assist first responders with helpful, life-saving, and real-time information from your Members Area.

The new emergency alert screens can be reviewed here:

https://www.firehousesolutions.com/content/services/alertscreens.cfm

We have a tutorial on how to integrate your display board with ActiveAlert:
https://support.firehousesolutions.com/kb/a33/how-to-integrate-your-display-board-with-active911.aspx

Our display board technology is outlined here:
https://www.firehousesolutions.com/content/services/display.cfm

Facebook Auto-Pull, New Database Access Level, More Disk Storage, and Google/Microsoft Single Sign On

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 01:14:00 GMT

Firehouse Solutions clients can already auto-post news stories to a Facebook page. Now, clients can auto-pull news stories from a Facebook page. The Facebook Auto-Pull connection can be made by Website Administrators or News Managers in the Members Area > Website Management > News. When creating Facebook posts that are pulled into your website, the post will automatically be parsed to create a news headline. A news headline is created from the beginning of a Facebook Post and ends with a period, question mark, exclamation point, or carriage return. Once parsed, the rest of the Facebook Post is deployed as the news story.

We have also added a new Database access level called Updater. Updaters are members that can add records, view records they have created, and edit records they have created. This new access level works well for collecting information from your membership and allowing them to update that information without it being viewable by other members.

Since switching to Microsoft Azure Cloud, Firehouse Solutions has taken advantage of competitive disk storage pricing. Our team has decided to pass this savings along to our customers by increasing disk storage space to 100 gigabytes for Email Disk Space and 100 gigabytes for Website Disk Space. We hope these new limits will provide plenty of room for your organization to grow.

Finally, for those customers who use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, Firehouse Solutions now provides Single Sign-On (SSO) for your members so they do not need to enter a username/password when logging into the Members Area. Please email Support@firehousesolutions.com for the steps required to establish this for your solution.

Facebook Auto-Post Now Available

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 23:42:00 GMT

Firehouse Solutions is excited to announce a News to Facebook Auto-Post feature.

This can easily be setup under News Management by clicking "Auto-Post News to Facebook" and following the prompts to authenticate. You must have Admin rights to your organization's Facebook page to establish an Auto-Post connection.

Once established, every news story and all photos will deploy to Facebook immediately once approved. Please keep in mind that per Facebook guidelines, if you do not use the Auto-Post connection for 90 days, you must create a new Facebook connection.

We hope you enjoy this new social media feature. We also wish to let you know that our team is coding an Auto-Pull from Facebook feature as well.