In the county in which I serve, there are 18 search and rescue teams. Most of these are geographic, and some of them are specific to a function (equestrian, canine, etc.). Earlier there was a thread regarding guest access and management functions. I have a question that expands upon this.
Nearly every mission is a multi-team mission. This means that there are members from several teams that participate in both the management and operation of the incident. At first I thought that we would have a single account for the county, and use the "unit" field to differentiate between the teams. This proved to be impractical because each team has different back-end requirements (different cert requirements, organizational structure, calendars, etc). I then thought that each team would have a separate account, but that complicates the mission management since there are issues in getting guests into the system (when offline), and guests don't have any management privs.
For example, what happens when a particular team is primarily responsible for a search. Chances are, it is their account that will be used for the management. Now, all the searchers from other teams will have to be entered into the system as guest users. This gets complicated if you are required to work offline, as there is no provision for offline guest users. OK, I could just get rosters from all the teams ahead of time, and each team could populate the other teams as guest users in their individual accounts. This could work, but guest users are not able to login and perform management functions. Now I am back to thinking a single account for the whole county.
So, what is the best way to structure MM for use in this environment? I suppose we could have a county-wide account that has everybody in the system, and use it for these sorts of events. This would allow mission management outside of the team management (certs, hours, equip, etc). Maybe some functionality that would allow some sort of sync between accounts would be helpful. I am not certain. Any ideas?
Unfortunately, web access is not available in many of our search locations, so I have to plan for an offline experience. This is one of the reasons, that I have proposed the idea of a field server model where the whole thing could be run from a central computer offline (
http://www.radishworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=80.0).
Any ideas are appreciated.
JL