Datalink News

Christmas office hours and support 2009

Office closure during the Christmas period

Datalink's offices will be closed from Friday 18th December at 1pm and re-opening at 9am on Monday 4th January.   We wish you and your staff a safe and happy festive season and look forward to working with you in the New Year.

Access to support

For support over the holiday period, Datalink has a premium support service for our maintenance and hosting customers. 

If you are a Datalink customer and have a problem with your hosting service, your website or your intranet, then you can contact our support team here.  Simply fill in this form and an on-call support engineer will get back to you.

You can use the form to report system outages, and to request critical and urgent support for your Datalink-managed website or intranet.  Lithio hosting outages will be rectified free of charge, but all other support will incur a charge.

With 24 hour support covering both hosting and your website code, you're in safe hands with Datalink.

Merry Christmas

Datalink would like to wish our customers a merry Christmas and a safe and prosperous new year.

Continue reading Christmas office hours and support 2009

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MECC Presentation to Bushfire Royal Commission

A Royal Commission into the February 2009 "Black Saturday" Victorian bushfires, the worst in Australia's history, was held in April.   One of the key purposes of the Commission was to review the Government's bushfire strategy.

The MECC Central system, piloted by Alpine Shire MECC (Municipal Emergency Co-ordination Centre) was put into practice to manage the emergency as Bright and mountain hinterland was threatened by several fires which burned a total of over 30,000 hectares during the bushfires. 

While there were no deaths in Alpine Shire, there were in neighbouring Indigo Shire.  There was significant property damage in both shires.

Due to the significance of the event Datalink, with Alpine Shire, was part of a report presentation on the effectiveness of the web based system (one of the first of its kind) in the bushfire emergency co-ordination effort.

Many other MECCs operate purely using old fashioned face-to-face and call-centre type communication.  MECC operators have traditionally been hesitant to embrace technology in an area that is so hands on.  However the experience at Alpine Shire was positive and the consensus was that it complemented the traditional communication.  It may well have helped saved lives and property.

As a result, several other local councils are now looking into integrated web based solutions for emergency co-ordination in preparation for next year's bushfire season.
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Youth Portals play small but important role in bushfire relief

Datalink's Youth Portal is playing a small but important role in bushfire relief in Whittlesea, Nillumbik and the Shire of Yarra Ranges- areas where whole towns have suffered significant losses and many young people are currently in crisis.

Local councils have been very busy  disseminating information for crisis relief in their various areas, including these councils.


The Department of Human Services has released specific information for teenagers in crisis and fact sheets the Youth Portal is one of the best ways to deliver this information straight to young people in affected areas.

However reaching effected young people has been a problem. 

Some young people, their friends and families continue to use their local Youth Portals for support in these times.  Certainly the website traffic statistics would indicate this, with each of these Youth Portals experiencing an increase of over 400% in their average daily visits in the last week.

Many of the youth workers who normally run these Youth Portal websites are currently busy in the field directly assisting young people - some of whom have lost family members and homes.

These websites are important information tools.  Fortunately some of these portals have seen initiatives that have helped prepared for bushfire emergencies for some time, but not of this scale.  The Nillumbik Youth Portal website allows the general public to post expressive messages but typically requires content to be moderated.

Datalink understands this and through this crisis we have delivered website content updates and maintenance on behalf of these councils at no cost.

We like to think that with our staff volunteering some of our time we are assisting, in our own small way, the relief efforts. Comments (0)