Most of us will have a difficult time forgetting the year 2020, no matter how much we might want to forget it, but that does not mean all of it was bad. For us at Neoweather, 2020 had its ups and downs like most years but the biggest upset was the cancellation of trade shows. It’s always a pleasure to be able to get out and meet our current clients as well as make connections with future clients.
With all this extra time at hand, we focused further on what we could do to make our service even better. Here we will highlight some of the biggest changes you will see this upcoming winter season.
Weather Portal
Many of you were with us for the start of the 2019-2020 winter season when we introduced a client portal system to deliver forecasts, message our staff and a few other features. You witnessed how it ended up not working well (despite extensive testing) and we found that some of the issues users were experiencing were not able to be replicated or a fix for the issue was going to take a lot of time. In short, that system flopped like a fish out of water. OUCH.
So, we went back to the drawing board. Our initial portal system was a third-party system that we could manipulate the look and feel of and then make it work for our purposes. It was not perfect, but we knew many changes were coming that would give us further control over what we could do. While some of those changes came when we cancelled our subscription to that system, we felt that we would still run into some of the compatibility issues users were experiencing. Further, it was not easy on our end to add additional data that we wanted to add.
We turned to our website, which got an overhaul over the spring, and determined that we could create our own system that had some of the features of the previous portal system but functioned more efficiently and provided better support across multiple platform types. We spent much of the spring and summer designing the system and extensively testing it. Our Weather Portal is now up and running and we’ll launch it this winter season!
Weather Portal Features
- All forecasts will be posted to the Weather Portal and all past forecasts will be available for your reference as well.
- Various weather updates will be posted to the Weather Portal. Most of the time these will also include images to help you better visualize what to expect.
- You can ask questions through our Weather Support system.
- Our Interactive Radar is available for your use.
- Other various weather data is available for viewing.
- You will be notified by email when new forecasts or weather updates are posted to your account.
- You can also receive text message notifications of new forecasts and updates!
One of the really nice things about transitioning our portal system to our own website is that we will be able to add new features to it more easily. We do have a few things planned down the road that we are hoping to launch in the next couple of years.
Each member of your staff will have their own account. Your staff members will begin to be added to the Weather Portal starting in late September. We will email you 1-2 days prior to creating your account to expect an email from us that your account has been created. It will contain your username and a temporary password. When first logging in, you will be prompted to change your password.
We’re excited to bring you our new and redesigned Weather Portal. Watch for the setup email in your inbox!
