On Monday, March 4, Hamilton’s Library and IT Services (LITS) released a major update for the Hamilton mobile app that will make communication with Campus Safety easier and more accessible for students anywhere on campus.

This new update gives users additional ways to contact campus safety beyond the simple phone numbers list; the app now has its own dedicated section for emergency contacts displayed prominently on the home screen. According to Student Assembly’s LITS liaison Minh To ’19, the app features a “Safety Toolbox” that makes contacting Campus Safety easy and accessible straight from your pocket. With this toolbox, students and faculty can report a tip to Campus Safety or make an emergency call with the Mobile BlueLight in a matter of seconds.

The app’s “Friend Walk” feature will also allow users to share their location with a friend, who can monitor their trip real-time and trigger an emergency call if necessary. Students can send their location directly to Campus Safety with the “Virtual Walk Home” tool for late-night treks across campus. Users will also be able to live-chat with Campus Safety if they want to discreetly report a tip face-to-face.

This update will provide both students and faculty with immediate access to Campus Safety through a variety of different outlets, even if they are unable to verbally communicate at a given time. Director of Campus Safety Francis Coots, one of the main advocates for these updates to the app, says that while there are blue-light emergency phones scattered around campus, they are an “underutilized resource and they may not always be in a position that makes it advantageous to use. With the use of smartphones by nearly 100% of the population, this gives us another tool to alert Campus Safety when needed.”

The app is built off a platform called AppArmour, which Mr. Coots introduced to LITS. The platform is essentially a faster and more stable mobile framework that institutions can build and customize to suit their needs. AppArmour also has a built-in content management system that updates regularly. According to LITS web developer Jim Thomson, any small update for the old app usually meant hours of work for the LITS developers to rebuild it, followed by at least three or four days for the update to get approved and published. This whole process will soon be handled by AppArmour, which means that any changes to the app can be made and published in an hour, allowing LITS to devote more time to other tasks. The framework also provides access to features like emergency push notifications, location sharing, and live chats that were previously beyond the app’s capabilities.

Coots initially wanted to roll out the app to just the faculty and staff in order to gauge its potential success or failure, but he believes that students will most likely be the app’s largest user base. Thus, he included them in the roll out to provide the most accurate feedback on the app’s effectiveness.

Coots stresses that Hamilton’s campus is by no means dangerous — in fact, he says it is one of the safest campuses in New York. Still, he explains that while Campus Safety is committed to maintaining a safe environment, ensuring that students also feel safe is equally as important. He hopes having the ability to instantly contact Campus Safety from anywhere on campus helps make sure students feel as safe as they actually are. As with any new product update, Coots says he is “sure that there will be some growing pains with the implementation of the app,” but in the long run, the app’s versatility and efficiency will make it a “positive safety resource for us all.”