Symposium Technologies offers the most comprehensive and flexible Dispatch solution on the market.

The Horizon Event Management Environment brings a new level of versatility, power, and ease-of-use to call takers and dispatchers, and enables an unprecedented level of information sharing between agencies, jurisdictions, and applications.

The EME incorporates an enormous wealth of advanced functionalities, which the client may activate as required, including GIS-based incident management, mobile data, GPS-based Automatic Vehicle Location, a fully customizable expert system, schedule adherence, alarm monitoring capability, and much more.

What follows is a brief overview of the EME’s many features. To download a comprehensive white paper outlining our systems capabilities, please click here.

Designed for Standard “Wintel”-based Environments

Microsoft Windows™ is the operating system of choice of both business and government. For this reason, the Horizon EME was designed to work on the Windows™ family of 32-bit operating systems (NT, 2000, XP), and therefore provides the highest levels of familiarity for operators and administrators alike.  The system is as easy for your IT department to manage as it is for your users to operate, and will stay current with updates and advances in OS technology. Just as the Horizon EME employs standard Windows™ operating systems, it is also designed to run on standard PC-based technology, without requiring special processors or hardware configurations. 

Extremely Reliable

The Horizon EME was designed for the needs of the most demanding of event management environments – public safety dispatching.  When lives and property are endangered, the systems supporting your response have to be as tough and reliable as the people responding.  The EME is extremely robust, and provides practically continuous uptime, around the clock, all year long, year after year.

Easy to Use

Optimized for speed and simplicity, the Horizon EME employs an intuitive interface designed for quick, confusion-free navigation.  Its flat, colour-coded GUI helps ensure all critical information is immediately available to the user at all times.  The customizable nature of the system also helps ensure that the Horizon EME mirrors your current workflows, thereby providing a high level of comfort and familiarity to the operators from the very beginning.

This greatly simplifies training and decreases work-up time, due to the fact that the operators are presented with a familiar and simple interface that provides them with all required information, arranged in a format that is immediately recognizable and familiar.

Priced for Agencies, Departments and Businesses of All Sizes and Budgets

Symposium differs from the vast majority of other companies in this market, in so far as our pricing structure is designed to reflect the needs and budgetary realities of small and mid-sized organizations as well as larger ones. We employ a unique scaleable pricing policy, which enables us to work with agencies of all sizes and budgets; Additionally, Symposium’s approach is based on all-inclusive pricing, providing the client with all modules of our system, as well as the implementation, training and deployment services required to get you up and running effectively.  This extends even to our service contracts. In addition to providing for 24-7 support, our all-inclusive service agreements also gives the client access to any new functionality components that we develop, as well as upgrades to system features, at no additional charge.  The result is that you get a fully functional system, and all required support and upgrades, for one all-inclusive price, without any unpleasant surprises.

Advanced Architecture

This Horizon EME is ideal for situations wherein extremely high call volumes are the norm, and is scalable to the needs of agencies, jurisdictions or dispatch centers of any size. It is also ideal for applications involving wireless data transmission, as it is designed to achieve rich functionality with the need for minimum data transfer.

Both of these capabilities derive from the EME’s advanced thin client-server architecture, which optimizes the system for deployment in high transaction environments. It supports network load balancing by enabling connection with multiple servers, and is designed to work with fast, enterprise-class databases such as SQL Server.

Fully Scalable and Open

The Horizon EME can easily support any number of call-taker, dispatcher, or combined call-taker/dispatcher workstations in any configuration, either clustered together in a single command center, or physically distributed throughout other response centers. The Horizon EME is fully ODBC compliant, and uses standard hardware and software configurations.  This enables it to be quickly and easily integrated with most modern software and hardware systems, providing seamless integration with such systems as RMS, hall management, radio consoles, digital voice recorders, billing systems, route planning software, fire and security alarm panels, CCTV, and others.

Extremely Rich Functionality

The Horizon EME provides the most advanced public safety dispatch functionality available on the market today, bar none. The EME provides you with the ability to extend your capabilities with any number of highly-advanced fully built-in functionalities, such as GPS-based AVL, mobile data, a customizable expert system, a comprehensive RMS interface, four distinct, flexible and fully- interactive GIS systems, and much more. 

Highly Customizable Look and Feel and Workflow

Every client does things differently.  That being the case, most software fails to reflect this basic fact, and instead forces clients into a standard workflow and format. The Horizon EME was designed with this in mind and, unlike most systems, enables each client to maintain their own workflows and best practices, while sharing information, resources and functionality in whatever way makes best sense for their operations.  The Horizon EME is so flexible that it can look and work entirely differently from one client installation to another.  Furthermore, the system can be re-configured on an ongoing basis to reflect changes in priorities and needs.

Advanced functionalities can be enabled as required in keeping with changes in the your requirements. Similarly, our upgrade policy is such that any client with a valid service contract has access to additional functionalities and modules at no additional charge.  The effect is that the client is buying into a dynamic and evolving system that will stay timely and modern over a much longer timeframe than would generally be the case with most other vendors.  This ensures the absolute best value for money not just today, but well into the future.

True Multi-Agency/Multi-Jurisdictional/Multi-Time zone

The Horizon EME is a highly versatile system, in that it enables each and every agency, business unit, jurisdiction or other entity making use of it to retain their own individual workflows, unit designations, response masks, call types, benchmarks, GIS views and so forth while at the same time sharing all relevant call information and situational intelligence, live time and on an ongoing basis.

This provides the best of both worlds, wherein each agency/jurisdiction can maintain its best practices and workflows, while having available to them the full range of information and capabilities to combine resources and share intelligence to optimize response and situation management.

Because the EME was designed as a fully-distributed system flexible enough to accommodate just about any need, we have also made the system fully multi-time zone, enabling centralized dispatching for any number of agencies, spread across an unlimited geographic area.  With this feature, the EME reconciles all events and incidents in accordance with their local time, enabling more accurate and simple event management and time-stamping.

Integrated, Flexible and Open GIS Component

Mapping represents one of the most important response tools personnel can have. It can also be one of the most challenging from an implementation and maintenance point of view, fraught with hidden costs, delays, and other potential pitfalls.

Symposium has incorporated a number of GIS systems into the EME in such a way as to provide you with the utmost in flexibility, control, and ease-of-use, and to ensure that maps can be converted, managed, and updated with a minimum of fuss, inconvenience, or cost.

Currently the EME incorporates four different GIS solutions (ESRI™, MapPoint™, MapInfo™ and our own HorizonMap™ system), and supports multiple concurrent map views in order to enable multi-jurisdictional map-based dispatching, as well as sophisticated GPS-based live time tracking of resources.

We support all industry standard mapping files (.dwg/.dxf) and have designed our system so as to enable straightforward conversion. The Horizon EME supports ESRI™, MapInfo™, and drawing exchange format files natively, so data conversion is often minimal, if required at all. This greatly simplifies the implementation process, and gives GIS departments full control, enabling your organization to update and manage the mapping on an ongoing basis, saving both time and money.

Wireless Aware and Enabled

The Horizon EME was designed from the ground up to provide rich data transmission capability over the limited bandwidth afforded by standard wireless networks.  Furthermore, the EME is a modular system, providing the ability to distribute various aspects of its functionality to users in the field.  This enables you to more effectively get the right information to the right personnel at the very time they need it, and to ensure improved command and control.

Integrated GPS Capability over a Wide Variety of Networks

The Horizon EME incorporates comprehensive GPS-based vehicle tracking capabilities.  This allows users to visually track the physical location of vehicles in relation to incidents on the map in real time, and to produce historical reports on their movements and positions. 

Depending on the sophistication of the GPS devices installed, the EME can also send an impressive array of commands to the vehicles (turning on/off engines, locking/unlocking doors, etc.), as well as enabling the creation of alarms and alerts, based on pre-established criteria (examples such as engine idling for more than 10 minutes, vehicle leaving a pre-defined geographical area, and many more).

GPS devices communicate with software via communications engines or Internet bridges, a middleware application that enables the end user application to send and receive messages to the on-board GPS hardware. The Horizon EME currently works with a host of such systems, and can be configured to work with many different types of bridges and hardware simultaneously, making it ideal for the management of mixed fleets.

Specialized off-the-shelf Modules for a Variety of Industries

Event Management is not just for public safety.  Clients in many different agencies and professions have an equal need for real-time management of in-field events, and the Horizon EME incorporates a raft of specialized functionality to ensure that they have the capability to put the EME to work in saving time and money, increasing customer satisfaction and safeguarding the safety of employees.

Among the many uses for which the Horizon EME was designed are:

·         Fleet Management

·         Telematics

·         Alarm Monitoring

·         Schedule Adherence

·         Military Security

Integrates with a Large Number of Third-Party Technologies

The EME was designed to fit seamlessly into your overall technology strategy.  Its openness and scalability enable it to interface easily and transparently with a wide and diverse array of third-party systems.

     These include but are not limited to:

·         RMS Systems

·         Jail Management Systems

·         State and National Crime Databases

·         CCTV Systems

·         Alarm Monitoring Receivers

·         Digital Voice Recorders

·         Hall Management Systems

·         Alarm Monitoring Systems

·         Graphical Reporting Software

·         Alerting Systems

·         Many more

Full Range of Hardware-based Fault-Tolerance Solutions Available

Data integrity and continuous system uptime are very important.  While the EME is extremely stable, hardware issues can arise from time to time. It’s for that reason we often deploy the EME in concert with fault-tolerant hardware systems designed to provide you with the fail-over protection required to ensure your ability to protect important data and to carry on operations in the case of a hardware failure.

There are a host of such solutions available, ranging from simple disk swapping to physically distributed mirrored server systems that provide both hardware and operating system redundancy.  If required Symposium Technologies’ staff can recommend a solution that is right for your needs and budget, and provide the expertise to help you integrate it fully.

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