Recent News

You may have seen headlines this week about a critical security flaw affecting websites across the internet. Your website is not affected.

What happened On October 20, PHP - the programming language behind WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and most e-commerce platforms - disclosed two critical vulnerabilities (nicknamed “PHP2Shell”) that lets an attacker run code on a web server with no login required. Both were rated 9.2 out of 10 in severity. Every PHP version since 2012 is affected and...

Two updates are live on your site today! A new HTML Editor for managing your web pages, and a new Firehouse Solutions API to access your department's data.

New HTML Editor

The editor you use when editing web pages has been replaced with TinyMCE. The previous editor had reached end of life and was no longer receiving security updates, so this keeps your site current. It also brings a number of improvements:

- Modern, cleaner toolbar. Fewer buttons you never used, and the ones you do...

We're excited to announce the release of our new Training Center module, now available for all Package 1 and Package 3 website clients.

The Training Center is a portal that allows your department to manage training presentations, quizzes, certifications, and reporting in one convenient location. You'll find it in your Members Area under Administration Menu → Training Management, and your members will see a new Training Center link in their Members Area menu.

Key features include:

-...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...