OneVu 2.11

1. eNotifications - GOV.UK Notify Support

We are delighted to announce that this release contains full 'no code' support for GOV.UK Notify via both SMS and Email.

It's super simple to set up and immensely powerful. Let's walk through an example to see how to set it up and what the end result is.

Let's say I want to set up the ability to automatically alert people that are in arrears / part of a payment arrangement that they have a payment due by text message. Doing this with Notify is super simple and is a 5 step process.

Firstly - decide what information should be in the text message

Before you start you want to know what data you want to put into the text message that is specific to the customer. For example, for our use case, we might want to have:

• Customer Name
• Account Number
• Amount due to be paid
• When it is due to be paid
• Amount of their arrears

So the first thing you need to do is go to the department involved within OneVu Control, which is where you change content in a department (silo) and manage notification content/settings. In this case it is a Council tax function so we will go there.

As you can see there are already two notification types set up as they're currently being sent via email:

What we will do here is provide support for GOV.UK Notify. So if we click to expand the Council Tax Payment reminders section we can see the following. What this is saying is that the file that will contain the details of who is to be notified:

• will be called cashpayers.csv*
• will have 5 columns in it as described below and that match the bits of info we need in our text message
  
  

* The filename can be whatever you like. The content of the file and which system it comes from can be whatever you like. This provides a HUGE amount of flexibility in terms of what you can provide notifications for as in many ways the limit is what data you can get from your systems.

Second - creating a Text Message template

Now we know what content can be taken from the file we need a template id from GOV.UK Notify. To do this log in to your GOV.UK Notify account (every council has one).

Click Templates and then click new template:

Add the title of your template and some words in the message. You can add something basic at this stage, as we are doing this solely to get a template id.

Once created you will see the Template ID. You need this to do the set up our side.

Third - linking the Payment Reminder text message function to GOV.UK Notify SMS

Once you have your Template ID, you need to copy it and go back to OneVu Control. For the Payment Reminder notification type click on Delivery Configuration and scroll down until you see the option SMS delivery (Gov.uk). Tick the enable check box.

You will then see:

• Somewhere to put the Template ID you just created
• The field names you can use in the GOV.UK Notify Template (i.e. these are automatically generated based upon the column mapping done previously)

The Template ID here is one we set up earlier and simply adding this makes the connection and set up in OneVu is complete!

Notice that person_first_name and person_surname are not prefixed with the word extract. This is because these fields come from the person's OneVu account rather than the file imported.

Fourth - update the content of the GOV.UK template to reflect what you want it to say

So now we've made the connection between OneVu and the template in Notify, we need to update the content of the template. Here you can see our finished template:

We've purposefully shown you the finished template we created so you can see how it relates to the config in OneVu.  As an example in OneVu's set up it shows the following in the list of Personalisation Keys (template fields):

extract_field_AccountNumber

In order to add this to the Notify Template we needed to add it like this:

((extract_field_AccountNumber))

The ((brackets)) around words tells Notify that the content is dynamic and will be updated. What we do is import your file and for each row create the content that will go into each SMS. This content is generated in real time using the Notify APIs.

Fifth - Run the eNotification batch program

Let's say our file (cashpayers.csv) that we import contains a single row like this:

The resulting SMS that is sent / received looks like this:

Sending Notifications via Email

Setting up templates and linking them is identical for Emails as it is for SMS. You simply need to ensure that:

a) You select Email when creating your template in Notify

b) You ensure Email Delivery is disabled unchecked

c) Your ensure Email delivery(Gov.uk) is enabled and the Template ID from a) in situ

Finally

As a result of the fact that there is now the ability to receive notification via Email, Facebook Messenger and GOV.UK Notify SMS, when a user navigates to Notifications preferences in Your Profile they will see the options applicable.

I.e. As it is possible to pick and choose which notification types should be linked to GOV.UK Notify, only those which are linked to an SMS template will show the SMS option as you can see here:

Finally, finally!

I'd like to highlight the developer that did this work, as this is a phenomenal piece of functionality that enables non-developers to build integration to GOV.UK Notify.

The youngest developer on our team no less - Kenneth Tomlinson :)