What are external events?

BlackBerry® AtHoc® improves emergency managers' situational awareness by providing alerts for external events that impact their organization and employees. External event categories include Earthquake, Fire, Hurricane, and Flood. To see the full list of supported external event types, see Supported external event types.

BlackBerry AtHoc

monitors external feeds and creates events that appear in the Inbox and on the live map. System Administrators can enable the External Events feature in

Settings

>

Feature Enablement

in the

BlackBerry AtHoc

management system. For more information, see Enable external events.

When external events are enabled, operators can select the locations and external events they want to monitor. When an event occurs that impacts a selected location, it appears in the Inbox in the

BlackBerry AtHoc

management system and on the live map. Operators can also receive notifications on their chosen devices (email, SMS, and mobile app) when events that impact their selected locations appear in the Inbox. These notification events include a link to the event in the Inbox. In addition, when an external layer is enabled, the notification includes a link to the live map. For more information, see Set up external events for your organization.

External events that appear in the Inbox and on the live map include the event title, description, event start time, expiration time, severity, map, and feed source (name and URL.) External events include the event geolocation and the number of impacted users. Click the

View the Live Map...

link in the event details to open the live map. The live map opens with the triggering event type selected in the External Layers panel. After evaluating the external event and its impact, the operator can forward the event as an alert to impacted employees.