Communications From Foothold Leadership

April 16, 2025 22:49

Throughout the year, we send many emails and messages about the AWARDS product, new features, special training opportunities, and more. Along with all of this important information, it is also a priority of the Foothold leadership team to check in with our customer community and share some of the higher-level strategic planning and work being done to continue enhancing AWARDS to better support the work you do. Below you'll find special communications from Foothold's CEO and other Executive Team members -- from quarterly check-ins to significant company announcements. Do you have questions for Foothold leadership? Email connect@footholdtechnology.com!

Cleaner Deployments > Improved Customer Experience! An Update From Foothold Leadership - July 2024

In January, we shared an update with you on the work were were doing to address the uptick in deployment-related bugs we had been experiencing. We put strategic plans and processes in place to mitigate service interruptions and include additional testing prior to any new code being released. We trust you've noticed improvements over the last few months, but we'd like to share some highlights with you! As a result of our enhanced pre-release testing processes:

Help Desk tickets that require developer intervention are down 21% from Q1.
- This decrease represents cleaner releases with fewer usability gaps and bugs.
- The less time our developers spend addressing tickets, the more time they have to work on our development roadmap.
Deployment-related bugs are down 63% from Q1.
We have seen a recent reduction in software regressions.
- A software regression is when an issue submitted to the Help Desk is fixed, but that fix unfortunately creates a new issue.

We celebrate these successes because we care deeply that our customers have a seamless experience using AWARDS. We want your work to be supported, not hindered when using our platform. We continue to prioritize the stability of AWARDS in all the work we do and new features we release. Thank you for trusting us as your EHR partner for the important work you are doing within your agency and your community.

Sincerely,

	Alyza Tarmohamed, CEO
	Sri Vijayasarathy, VP, Product & Engineering

AWARDS Enhanced Authentication Update & Preview!

I am writing to update you on the anticipated AWARDS Enhanced Authentication release. Previously, we mentioned that testing sandboxes would be available this month. However, they are not yet ready for release.

This project is crucial as it aims to increase security measures and prevent unauthorized access to AWARDS - an important focus, especially in light of recent industry cyber attacks. This project is a top priority for us, and we are fully dedicated to ensuring its success.

While we do not have a specified timeline for the sandbox availability, we are committed to giving you at least two weeks' notice for your team to prepare. More information, including webinars and guides, will be provided soon. In the meantime, please check out the video below that gives a preview of what to expect when AWARDS Enhanced Authentication is released. Note: the images in this preview may differ slightly from what you see with the final deployment.

AWARDS Enhanced Authentication Preview

Thank you for your understanding and patience as we work to enhance AWARDS for you. We value your partnership and will keep you updated on this important project.

Sincerely,

Alyza Tarmohamed, CEO

Identifying Root Causes of Issues & Refining Preventive Measures - January 2024

We want all AWARDS users to have an excellent and seamless experience in the application - an experience that enhances their ability to provide critical services to those in need. To that end, we have been dedicating resources to researching the root causes of recent issues you may have noticed over the past few months. We would like to share with you some of our findings, and more importantly, the steps we are taking to mitigate these issues and improve user experiences.

In recent months, we have released many large-scale features and enhancements, including AWARDS Redesign. Much of this work has involved changes to the technical underpinnings of the database, which can inevitably cause unintended issues despite thorough testing and preparation. Deep-dive assessments into these recent issues have helped us identify areas of the system that would benefit from some technical modifications. We have already started some of this work, and are updating our Product Roadmaps to ensure these optimization needs are successfully addressed.

In addition to responsive changes like those noted above, we have been reviewing our preventive measures including automated testing, internal alerting, and code deployment processes. In analyzing these systems, we are working to tighten our automated testing procedures and are now running more tests, more often. We have added additional logging and queries to internal alerting systems, to better identify, contain, and resolve issues before they make their way to your database. Finally, we are making changes to our deployment processes to better identify unintended issues and address them prior to code release.

We know that for some of you, the recent uptick in deployment-related issues has been challenging. We apologize for that and thank you for your patience with us as we have worked to sturdy up the foundation of AWARDS and build out enhanced processes to ensure all deployments are clean and smooth. Your partnership with us is greatly appreciated and our teams will continue to work hard to ensure all AWARDS users have the best experiences possible. We will continue to evaluate our processes and apply enhancements and upgrades wherever needed.

Regards,

	*Alyza Tarmohamed, CEO*
	Sri Vijayasarathy, VP, Product & Engineering

Letter from the CEO - Q4 2023

As we approach the end of the year, I want to express my gratitude for the opportunity we have at Foothold to partner with valuable organizations like yours and support your teams as they use AWARDS to enable your services. Like all of you, 2023 has been a very busy year for us at Foothold, as the team and I have focused our efforts on building the products, services, and infrastructure that can support our valued customers more efficiently and smoothly in the future. Click to read more.

Letter from the CEO - Q2 2023

Happy spring to our entire Foothold community!

2023 is already zooming by and I hope that it has been a productive first quarter for you all. Here at Foothold, we have been hard at work charting our journey toward our 2023 and longer-term goals. I’m excited to update you on some of this progress and what’s to come. Click to read more.

Letter from the CEO - 2022 Year in Review!

The Foothold team had an exciting and productive 2022, especially as it relates to our product development. In addition to continuing to evolve our solutions and meet customer needs for today, a lot of foundational work was completed that will be the building blocks of product development goals for 2023. We wanted to share with you some of how we continued to invest in both AWARDS and FCM as modern solutions that are growing with our customers and the marketplace. Click to read more.