Smart Notifications: The Best VMS Live Health Monitoring Notifications for Milestone XProtect
Learning that your cameras are down is stressful enough. You need live monitoring notifications that bring you clarity, not chaos. Smart Notifications, the newest feature in The Boring Toolbox, give you a snapshot overview of your camera and server health in one simple, easy-to-understand email. With Smart Notifications, you’ll never need to sort through hundreds of emails again trying to make sense of events on your VMS. In this blog, you will learn how to read your Smart Notifications like a pro and how you can activate them on your Milestone XProtect VMS today.
Milestone XProtect R1 2021: New Features, Insight, and Real-Life Applications
Milestone XProtect R1 2021 is solving more problems for VMS admins than any release before. We’re detailing all of the need-to-know updates, insights, and real-life applications of R1’s new features to ensure you can make the most out of your surveillance system.
3 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do in Milestone XProtect (2021)
We’re covering three things you didn’t know you could do in Milestone XProtect. Continue reading to learn how to configure anti-virus software to work for and not against your VMS, how to enable the AXIS S3008 Recorder in Management client, and how you can logically combine events using AND/OR functionality in XProtect.
The Boring Lab Releases Three New Features to Help Milestone VMS Admins Fight Email Fatigue
Email Fatigue Is Real. The pandemic has hit a lot of us hard, physically, mentally, and emotionally. The movement to remote work, while necessary to keep us safe, has stirred up more feelings of burnout, exhaustion, and dissatisfaction in our work lives. Due to shifting communication channels to solely virtual, email fatigue is one of the primary drivers in discontent and work-related stress. According to a recent survey from Superhuman, 30% of remote workers claim that an overflowing inbox and endless new emails are causing the most distractions in work productivity. This data begs the question: why would any company want to continue contributing to burnout, exhaustion, and frustration with an outpouring of email notifications? With more and more of our clients and employees working in this new remote reality, our mission is to make your life and communications with us more simple and stress-free. Note to Self: Don’t Bore Customers With Too Many Emails In thinking about how else we can help our customers to eliminate boring tasks from their workload, solving for email overwhelm was at the top of the list. We realized that we might be contributing to the problem. We put on our thinking caps and came up a plan that will set a new standard for how VMS admins receive system-related updates forever. We’re gearing up to release a new email notification strategy in the coming weeks that not only limits the amount of emails our clients receive from us, but consolidates all of the most crucial information regarding your VMS and camera health in a digestible and concise format. Our goal with these updates is to keep you informed and aware of everything going on with your VMS, without overwhelming your inbox. “Smart Notifications!” — Coming Soon to Boring Toolbox Near You The days of one email per camera error are over. Stay alert for the release of our new “Smart Notifications,” an update to our system health notifications that consolidate email alerts about camera errors into ONE, clean, simple summary email. New Health Notification Management Features Now Available For The Boring Toolbox You have already come to love our notification thresholds, which when set correctly, greatly reduces the number of notifications in your inbox. As a Boring Lab customer, you now have access to two more features in the Boring Toolbox that will give you more control over how, why, and when you receive notifications about your Milestone VMS. Maintenance Mode The Boring Toolbox’s newest feature release, maintenance mode, gives you the power to mute all notifications for a selection of cameras or recording servers and remove those devices from the live monitoring dashboard, thereby eliminating any unwanted alerts. You can schedule recurring maintenance modes for entire servers up to twice a week, for up to one full calendar day at a time or if you need more time, then Maintenance mode can be enabled manually on individual devices or entire recording servers. Critical Mode Critical mode is a global setting that is designed to only send live monitoring notifications for devices marked as critical. When enabled via the managed site configuration, critical mode mutes all live monitoring notifications system-wide. The Milestone administrator can manually select one or many hardware devices or recording servers and mark them as critical devices. Standard live monitoring notifications are then enabled on those devices marked as critical. In conjunction with Boring scheduled reports, Critical mode for notifications allows Milestone XProtect administrators to set a different level of importance to the devices in their VMS. By doing so, they can receive instant alerts when a critical device has a health issue and then review the health events of less critical devices once a week using our scheduled reporting functions. Download the latest version of Boring Toolbox and get started with these new features today! Update Your Toolbox Get Started With a 30-Day Free Trial
Troubleshooting Intermittent Camera Connectivity Issues on a Security Network with Boring Toolbox, Slack, and Axis Network Switch
Solving for intermittent camera connectivity issues can feel a little like a never ending game of I Spy. Follow along as I troubleshoot a flapping camera issue on network with the Boring Toolbox, slack, and an Axis Network Switch.
The Boring Toolbox Releases Maintenance Mode for Milestone XProtect
Take back control of your inbox with our newest updates to The Boring Toolbox. Introducing Maintenance Mode, a solution to inbox overwhelm that allows VMS Admins to manually or automatically mute all system health notifications for the selected cameras or recording servers while making updates within Milestone XProtect.
Using Milestone Centralized Search for License Plate Recognition – XProtect 2020 R2 Release
Video surveillance teams often need to find specific video clips at a moment’s notice and Milestone’s new and improved XProtect Centralized Search framework makes that easier than ever. We will walk you through the basics to get you set up for success in using Milestone Centralized Search and then show you how to use it with our favorite use-case: license plate recognition.
Boring Toolbox April 2021 Release
We’ve been busy since. the start of the year and are excited to tell you about everything we’ve been working on that will enhance the user experience and usability of managing Milestone XProtect system!
The Best of: Milestone’s Tips, Tricks, and Little Known Features in XProtect
We’re recapping our 9 favorite Milestone time-saving tricks from Milestone’s MIPS 2021 on-demand session: Tips, Tricks, and Little-Known Features of Milestone XProtect.
We’ve condensed this 37-minute video into a super skimmable and searchable format. Learn how to embed custom HTML code, enable a diagnostic overlay in the web interface, create simple keyboard shortcuts, and more.
MIPS 2021: Everything You Need to Know About Milestone’s Conference About Video, on Video
About MIPS Milestone Integration Platform Symposium, fondly referred to as MIPS 2021 was a virtual conference showcasing the future opportunities within video technology and how the Milestone Community can seize them. MIPS is where the Milestone Community comes together to share insights, experiences, best practices and the latest innovations. While this was the 16th annual MIPS conference, and my 12th, it was the 1st time it was offered totally virtually. There is no doubt that MIPS 2021 felt a little different this year. While I was bummed that I wasn’t going to get to see all of my colleagues and friends from within the industry and Milestone itself in person, I was excited to see how the Milestone team would translate their elaborate, giant event into a virtual experience. Much to no one’s surprise, the pivot masters over at Milestone did a great job creating a seamless experience and engaging content. Who knew that a virtual event would require just as much production effort as the in-person ones? That’s at least what it seemed like from where I was seated… at my kitchen counter. I never knew I wanted the ability to to pause, rewind and replay but now I’ve seen the light and I’m never looking back. As you know, I’m not about wasting time with the boring stuff so I’ll jump right in to the good stuff. All of the keynotes were great but something about Peter Hinssen of Nexxworks’s talk really stuck with me. The way he articulated the need for continuous change in life and business resonated with me on a deep level. This idea of constantly evolving to improve and innovate is not new to me. It’s actually a core driver of mine and something I have been working towards for the past 20 years. Hinssen’s keynote reinforced my belief that change is the only way to maintain relevance in our, or any, industry and more importantly, with clients The biggest takeaway from Hinssen? Instead of fixating on the idea of ‘old normal,’ which will never return, and “new normal,” which will constantly be changing, we must move forward and prepare for the “Never Normal.” I took that to mean, when you are light on your toes, you can walk confidently into the future. If you are a Boring newsletter subscriber, you already know that I am infinitely both amazed and skeptical about all things AI. If you’re not, sign up here. So, when Milestone CTO, Bjørn Skou Eilertsen, took the virtual stage to speak on ethics in business and technology, I was intrigued. In Eilertsen’s keynote he noted that we, as technology and security professionals, are responsible for both establishing and upholding a code of ethics for this evolving technology. Ultimately, his emphasis on using AI responsibly and calling for a mindshift left me feeling a sense of pride: proud to have aligned my company with another forward-thinking, value-driven company, like ourselves and proud to be part of the Milestone community. His talk also left me thinking about Tom Cruise…Check out this scary real deep fake video that made its viral appearance just a few days before the conference. Read more here. @deeptomcruise Sports! ♬ original sound – Tom As much as I like the mind-boggling, big picture content, I loved seeing Day Two’s schedule packed with more technical information that I could dig into and geek out on. There are few things that I love more in this world than an informative tips and tricks video and the one from Jason Wallace and Alex Laffrenier was perfection. They even dropped a few tips that even I, after 12 years working with XProtect, wasn’t familiar with! I’m already planning an upcoming blog post recapping their great tips since it is available on-demand! Woo-hoo! A few other highlights: Christian Morana discussing the lost art of hardware specification for video. He and his team have tested over 100 different scenarios to give us, the community, benchmarks on how to build tailored XProtect solutions using the right hardware. Finally we had a really great breakout with Matt Fishback, Jared Tarter and an integrator, John Kostelac from NWOSS, discussing deployment options for XProtect in AWS, what it looks like and how to get started. This was great because it clearly outlined the value proposition and the path to get there. Given the unique circumstances that made this event so different from the previous MIPS events, I thought the Milestone team did a great job putting together an engaging virtual event that left me feeling excited about our Boring future with Milestone. Although next year may look “never normal,” I miss my friends and colleagues and hope that they will find more ways to integrate networking into the experience. In closing, MIPS taught us about XProtect, Milestone as a company, as a community, and opened our eyes to the future of innovation and our role in paving that road.
