A number of user-focused enhancements recently have been made to the Haystax system’s mission-focused applications, as well as to the back end of the system. Here are some highlights, focused on changes to our Assessments app and single sign-on capabilities.

Assessments

Several new features will help users more efficiently conduct threat, vulnerability and other types of assessments on any physical facility or individual.

Many of our users schedule safety assessments once each year, and sometimes even more frequently than that. Now they can automatically import entire question templates and even completed answers from prior assessments – say, from a 2019 building assessment into a fresh 2020 assessment – a particularly useful feature for enterprises whose assessment templates remain relatively consistent over time.

Although all auto-imported answers still should be reviewed and verified, this new feature will save assessors a significant number of hours since they won’t have to reenter answers that have not changed since the previous assessment.

Next, two new assessment template configurations have been implemented to support particular post-assessment workflows. First, assessment questions can be marked with a destination asset attribute, allowing that particular attribute to be updated once the assessment is submitted and approved. For example, if the answer to the question “How many cameras are installed around the building perimeter?” is a higher number than what is currently listed in the asset attribute, that asset field will be automatically updated with the new number of cameras.

Second, events within the system can be automatically triggered by answers to selected assessment questions. For instance, if a supervisor answers that an employee had a negative performance review, it can be marked to create a Performance_Review_Needs_Improvement event. All of the potential events are collected and presented for review in a new section at the end of the assessment. Once it’s been submitted, the assessment administrator can review the events and choose to create some or all of them in the system as the basis for further analysis and action.

Finally, there are new column and filter attributes in the Assessments list view to help users search, sort and filter, including the addition of a Data Groups column. This is especially useful for states and large enterprises that conduct thousands of assessments using Haystax and need a way to review or generate aggregated reports on selected subsets of them.

SSO

Another major Haystax effort has centered around implementation of additional single sign-on (SSO) capabilities to support large enterprise users. In the last few weeks we have rolled out two new SSO modes – one to accommodate SSO-only login and another to accommodate a single site-wide “Log In With Single Sign-On” button. These will require activation in each tenant.

The latest SSO features are on top of earlier development work to build out LDAP authentication and authorization support and SSO user profiles for role assignment, along with support for a larger number of SSO providers within individual tenants.

#   #   #

Note: Assessments are the best way of understanding an organization’s threats and vulnerabilities. Want to know how the Haystax assessment tool can help you? Click here for a demonstration.