Collaborating to better serve the community

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Black Marble

Since 1997, Black Marble has been providing high end software development for end customers, developing solutions across the Microsoft platform and specializing in new user experiences. While Black Marble works across various industries throughout the public and private sectors, lately they’ve been working closely with police departments. As part of these efforts, Black Marble has developed tuServ, an application that enables the police to make positive impacts on the communities they serve.

Working with Microsoft

Since 2003, Black Marble has worked with Microsoft to deliver end user software solutions. As an ISV partner, their commitment has grown over the years as they have earned 7 Microsoft gold and 3 silver competencies and were recently named a 2016 Microsoft Partner of the Year Winner in the Developer Platform category.

Black Marble is looking to expand their reach through Microsoft partnerships. The Microsoft Partner Network is a community of many talented innovators that Black Marble continues to work with as they look to expand their success with tuServ beyond the UK.

Evolving to make a difference

When Black Marble first released tuServ, about 18 months ago, they aimed to assist police forces transform through digitization and mobilization. Approached by a constabulary in the UK, Black Marble set out to create efficiencies in the day to day working lives of England’s police officers, eliminating the administrative overhead of a paper-and-pen system. By modernizing administrative tasks such as ticketing and notetaking, the original tuServ was designed to automate what tasks could be automated, reducing the time spent by officers behind the desk and maximizing their time the field.

Since its release, Black Marble has transformed tuServ to do so much more. Now running on Windows 10 and transitioning to the Azure Stack, tuServ is now a true collaboration platform for police forces. The next iteration of the application is focused on mobilizing police forces like never before, with providing automatic updates on relevant cases directly to police officers using tuServ. By transitioning to Windows 10, Black Marble has enabled a single application deployment for all platforms, providing a continuum of support across all platforms and devices, in real-time. “This is a Windows 10, enterprise solution that police officers can already see the benefit of using on the job,” says Black Marble Managing Director, Robert Hogg.

In 2016, Black Marble will be putting tuServ in the cloud on the Microsoft Azure platform. This transition will help tuServ customers saves costs and increase operational awareness. Once on the Azure platform, tuServ users will benefit from the flexibility that cloud services provide, such as pay-per-user, scaling only as their business grows, and being able to better access data from anywhere on any device.

Making Progress in less time

In the past, with several officers working the case, evidence can often take time to pull together, lengthening the time it takes for officers to brief one another. tuServ mitigates against these inefficiencies, making a major impact at crime scenes. Hogg says that “tuServ might save 10% of an officer’s time when giving a speeding ticket, but with the first roll out of the application, we saw an average of 15% time saved during larger incidents.” During the second release of tuServ, Hogg and his team hopes to see closer to 20% time savings. Hogg says that he believes this is a conservative estimate and is looking forward to seeing the progress tuServ is making in officers’ duties and in the various communities.