Software We Own: Introducing Echo and YouIZin

Most of what Innova Group does is delivered as a service: managed IT, cloud work, security assessments, applications built for one client and handed over. Alongside that, we build and own a small amount of software outright. Two of those are far enough along to talk about, so this is an introduction to both — including, in each case, exactly how finished they are.

Echo is a security operations dashboard for Microsoft 365. It came from a familiar frustration: the information needed to understand the health of a Microsoft 365 environment is available, but it is spread across multiple administration portals. Answering “is anything wrong today?” means opening several consoles and holding the answer in your head as you go. Echo runs a collection against the tenant and puts the whole picture on one screen.

Echo is a working Innova Group product and is used in our own Microsoft 365 operations. It brings secure score, incidents, risky users and sign-ins, device compliance, email threats, control coverage and Microsoft 365 service health into one view. The public demonstration uses fictional data because it is not connected to a live tenant, but the application itself is functional and actively used.

YouIZin started with a practical requirement: provide one place for staff, visitors, contractors and deliveries to sign in, while maintaining an accurate fire register even when the internet connection is unavailable. It handles all of them through one kiosk, prints visitor badges on arrival, and keeps a live register that reception can see at any moment.

The part that matters is the fire register. Everyone signed in appears on one roll call — staff, contractors, deliveries and visitors together — rather than a paper book by the door that was last correct at half past eight. Sign-in keeps recording with no network connection at all and uploads when it returns, so an evacuation during an outage is not an evacuation without a register. There is a working kiosk on the product page, and you can set the fire alarm off yourself to see what happens.

YouIZin is a working product designed for deployment on a supported Android tablet or Apple iPad. It can support touchscreen entry, card readers or NFC depending on how the organisation wants people to check in. Records can remain within the organisation’s own Microsoft 365 environment and the system can be configured around its branding, locations and evacuation process.

Neither product changes what the four practices do. They exist because the same instinct sits behind both: take something fragmented, manual or awkward, and make it clearer and easier to operate. That is the same instinct we bring to a client build — these two just happened to be problems worth solving more than once. If either describes something you recognise, we would rather hear which part of it matters most to you than tell you what we think it should be.