Recent News

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...

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...

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...

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...

Firehouse Solutions has learned that Aladtec recently made a new API available to their customers. The costs for the new API are the same as the classic API. For simplicity purposes, we would like for our customers to begin using the new API.

However, our current Aladtec display board widgets utilize the classic API. Therefore, our Aladtec display board widgets will require using a new API key on July 19, 2021. Customers with a current classic API key should contact Aladtec, obtain a new...

Firehouse Solutions is proud to announce our latest display board weather technology, provided by Microsoft Azure Weather Services. Microsoft recently partnered with and pulls data from the leading worldwide weather provider, AccuWeather.

Our team has built display board widgets around this technology, including Current Weather, Weather Forecasts, and Radar/Infrared Maps. To use these widgets, simply log into the Members Area > Website Management > Display Boards. Note: you must obtain...

Firehouse Solutions is pleased to announce that we have partnered with Microsoft Azure to expand our network. This partnership will provide all customers with better security, reliability, redundancy, speed, and expandability. Our team has designed a network infrastructure within Azure (East US) that is load balanced. This means that we have multiple servers online and can take them offline, one at a time, to perform updates without interrupting website connectivity. This move will put...

Firehouse Solutions is pleased to announce the launch of several new tools and features. First, we have fully indexed all of your meeting minutes and documents in the Members Area so they can searched by keyword. The search tool supports the following file formats: doc,docx,ppt,pptx,xls,xlsx,pdf,htm,html.

We are also happy to introduce rotating display boards. A rotating display board can be created to transition through information from multiple display boards at a set increment. A...

Effective January 1, 2020, SmarterMail Enterprise passwords must include a special character. This policy change will help us to reduce spam and viruses from attacking our system.

If your password already has a special character, no action is required. If your current password does not have a special character, you will be forced to update it during your next login to SmarterMail.

Therefore, new passwords should have:

- At least 8 characters - At least one number - At least one...

Firehouse Solutions will be conducting server migrations on the following date/times:

Friday, September 6 from 2300 hours to 0200 hours - SmarterMail Server

Saturday, September 7 from 2300 hours to 0200 hours - Web Server

During these maintenance windows, web access may become unavailable or intermittent. While we anticipate the task to take just 1 hour, the maintenance window is 3 hours just in case any issues must be corrected during the upgrades.

We will be upgrading from...