Corvus

the platform for policing

Corvus is our award winning, patented framework and platform for delivering great solutions. Corvus provides core capabilities to almost all of our solutions across desktop and mobile. But Corvus isn’t a ‘big’ or disruptive change. And that’s the really big difference for Police IT.

Go Beyond the RMS with Corvus – fast, flexible, powerful

The Record Management System (RMS) is a well known mainstay for Police IT. Your Force will also have a number of specialist systems, for example serving Forensics disciplines, HR, administrative systems, Command & Control (C&C) etc. Every Force is different, leading to a need for configurable and customised IT, but making custom changes to mission critical systems like the RMS can be disruptive and risky for day-to-day police operations, with a wholesale change in RMS itself being an especially thorny proposition.

Corvus opens up the possibility for Police Forces to solve more problems with innovative IT, while avoiding high risk changes. Here’s how:

1. You can start small, light, fast

Corvus can be used as a basis for individual targeted solutions, in support of your core RMS. Although the Operational Data Store is capable of integrating data from a wide variety of sources, there might be no compelling driver or budget to engage with a larger integration project. Perhaps you came to this website looking to solve one specific problem, for example Reporting or the adoption of AI… Read about our approach to bespoke and customised solutions and our agile collaboration with our customers.

2. Seamlessly grow without disruption

Corvus fulfils its maximum value as an integration point for data from across the organisation – serving tactical operations alongside strategic decisions and management information. By providing more data sources to Corvus, the benefits increase exponentially across desktop and mobile platforms and at all levels of the organisation.

Enhance your IT

Corvus is different, because it works with your existing systems, supporting for example an agile developed ‘point solution’ while providing a foundation for delivering strategic aims. It is typical to start with a data feed from your existing RMS system – and we have expertise in integrating with the three leading RMS solutions currently being used in UK Policing. By combining data from multiple sources, then optimising and indexing, Corvus gives you the Single Enterprise View and the freedom to do so much more with your data. See our Corvus application solutions below, and our Data Warehousing page.

Applications

The following application solutions are founded on the Corvus platform including the Corvus Operational Data Store and Single Enterprise View (SEV).

(See a little further on for a description of the core capabilities of the Corvus platform).

Core Capabilities

Usability

The Corvus platform provides a reusable set of user interface components that we use in the majority of our applications, giving a consistent look and feel, and helping us to deliver new functionality rapidly. This applies equally to web-app ‘desktop’ applications and mobile capabilities.

Auditing

Advanced auditing is supported, where every user action is recorded. In addition to recording what the user does, the auditing framework captures the data at the time the action took place. Hidden audit groups are supported, so the auditors can follow a user’s actions through the system, without leaving a trace for a normal user to follow. Auditor actions are still audited, but only other auditors can see them.

Security

The Corvus platform provides a comprehensive and extensible security module with an advanced configuration engine allowing Corvus applications to be tailored to each customer’s precise requirements, while still remaining a secure system. The flexible security engine provides a very fine graded set of permissions on each application. These can be managed internally within Corvus, or they can be mapped on to your existing user repository or HR system (for example Active Directory) so all your user access controls can be managed in one place. Record-level and attribute-level access controls can both be applied, allowing sensitive data to be hidden from the general user community, without the need for separate record and search functions.

High Availability

The Corvus platform is built to support a highly available, ‘shared nothing’ architecture, with redundancy built-in at every level. In the event of hardware failure, Corvus automatically switches to secondary nodes in order to avoid interruption to the service. The system can be deployed on 1 or 100 servers allowing capacity to expand as usage changes. An internal data organisation engine means there is no need for all servers to hold all the data as hardware ages it can be placed into different roles allowing the maximum return on your original investment.

Configuration

Corvus provides an advanced configuration engine which can tailor the way each application operates. This is also linked into the Security Engine, meaning that differing users profiles can have very different views of the same application, each one geared to the users specific job role. The configuration system means that each Bluestar application can be changed to exactly fit your requirements, its possible for the same application to be unrecognisable between customer installations.

Self Monitoring & Alerting

Corvus has a monitoring engine built in. This means that Corvus monitors the status of its own background jobs and will report failures automatically. Bluestar provides an array of background jobs which enable the automatic collection of data from source systems – providing management information, generate reports and much much more. Rather than having a requirement to check these jobs on a daily basis Corvus can email you directly if there are problems or exceptions. Corvus even monitors its own hardware, raising alerts when disk space is running low or if there appears to be a hardware problem.

Data Loading

Corvus comes with a framework for loading data from other systems (known as CRP). This framework makes Corvus the extensible data warehouse that it is, allowing vast quantities of data to be loaded from a huge selection of sources. Corvus can happily load data from any SQL compliant database, CSV files, XML files, Word documents, PDF documents, web services, custom binary formats and many more. The load processes are so simple, many of our customers find they need to justify to their users why data is not in Corvus, rather than why it is!

Total Data View

Many of our solutions are most powerful when they are built on a foundation of integrated data from across the organisation. Corvus allows you to build a ‘total data view’ of all the enterprise knowledge. For example, providing a daily briefing makes the most sense when you have a wide range of relevant information available.