Don’t see why not
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Will cadets be able to comment on the announcements? And will SNCOs be able to make announcements?
As an interim measure I have signed up for a Government Notify account and cadets/parents are currently opting in for updates/notifications.
That will be used for things such as “Due to snow the Sqn is closed tomorrow night”, or “Please note the following change to Friday’s programme…”
To have this functionality available from within SMS/Cadet Portal in the future would be uber helpful.
No, because that then implies a threaded chat environment which then has to be moderated and controlled which becomes an enormous, Corps-wise safeguarding risk which is why we are not looking at chat functionality at the moment. I will bring the topic up again with my project sponsor and see what he and the MOD lawyers think.
By SNCOs, do you mean cadets or staff? If the latter and they have access to SMS, then yes.
That is the plan - we need to build it into SMS first which is a reasonable sized job. We are focused on cadet (and staff) notifications at the moment and then we will be looking at SMS and Cadet Portal announcements in December.
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Wait - are individual squadrons eligible?
We’re currently using contact lists in BCC fields, but that’s a pain syncing between accounts.
I signed up with my bader email in the format adj.1234@bader.mod.uk. No questions asked.
A quick email to their branding team also brought a speedy reply. I sent them a suitable RAFAC graphic (they only had the Cadet Portal logotype) and they added that to my account.
With regards to email I think that using a contact list within bader mail is still easier - you have to log into the Notify service and upload a contact list each time you want to send; or you have to use their API and write your own code…
It’s a bit of a shame that they don’t have the ability to lodge a contact list in the account and auto forward to it when I send an email from my bader address to a dedicated mailbox such as myaccount@notify.gov.uk But if you have someone who can code that wouldn’t be hugely difficult.
Sadly their API doesn’t cater for embedded software guys like me who still write in C 
I’m told that node.js isn’t too taxing to learn, but frankly, I can’t be bothered.
But the ability to send 25,000 free text messages per year is going to be helpful to me until the feature is added to SMS/Cadet Portal.
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Ah. That’s a bit dull.
I think I’ll stick with contact lists then.
SMS is interesting though.
I’d be capable of doing that, but hosting something sounds like a slippery slope from a data protection point of view.
Yeah, it’s the SMS facility which has kept me with it.
Email is all well and good, but the immediacy of an SMS notification will be great.
Now, C is perfectly capable of making requests to a JSON API. It’ll just take you a few months
Given that it’s a government server (containing inherently personal information), anything uploaded on to there should conform to the same standards as we have to.
You’d have to host the “brains of your system” application somewhere either locally or on a remote system though, which wouldn’t be government.
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It appears that it can be done but I’m yet to find out how to as I am yet to go live with our account and can only send to my contact info or my teams.
Their features section advertises
Bulk sending
To send a batch of messages at once, upload a list of contact details to Notify. If you’re sending emails and text messages, you can also schedule the date and time you want them to be sent.
*edit * looks like you can upload bulk contact information and personalised thing such as names though a spreadsheet but it does look as though it needs to be uploaded each time.
Yeah, that’s correct.
We have just published a new parents/guardians focused video which is available internally on SharePoint at https://rafac.sharepoint.com/sites/cadetportal/SitePages/Parent-Briefin.aspx. Awaiting authorisation to share publicly.
Working on a cadet video which explains the full process of accessing their account and then the functionality which I am hoping to share internally this weekend.
Durham/Northumberland Wing deploys on Monday which is around 1100 cadets or so on top of the 633 that already have accounts for beta.
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Prayers for the IT infrastructure!
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Parent and guardian briefing video now available on Vimeo at:
Cadet focused briefing video in editing right now 
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Is the parent one shareable yet?
Yep - made public.
Cheers!
If you want to share it, it’s at vimeo.com /375107912 - I’ve put a space between the URL and video number otherwise it just embeds in the post which is good for viewing but not sharing!