As a part of continuing enhancements to improve function, prevent issues and mitigate user error, we have carried outa few changes to OneVu in this release v2.5. These are documented below.
Enhancements
The following are the functional and non-functional enhancements that have been done in this release:
1) Family and friends
In order to maximise digital usage and reflective of the fact that sometimes people care for/assist others we have provided a new function in OneVu, which allows a user to 'share' access to their OneVu account.
This is provided as a new option within 'Your Profile' as shown below:
When a user clicks to change their options on this they are presented with the following:
The top half relates to being able to share your account with someone else / multiple others. The second half pertains to those that have shared privileges with you.
So in this case Jackie Gill is sharing her account. On clicking 'Share my account' she is asked for the email address of the person that will have this access:
For the avoidance of doubt if no account is found the following will be presented:
Unable to find an account with this email address
In the above example, however, John McMahon has been found based upon the email address entered and a 'Share' button presented. Once clicked this will show as follows:
I.e. John will have to accept this access in his own account first. Right now the person will need to inform John of this but we will look to make this an automated notification in future.
When John logs into his own account and clicks into Friends and Family he sees this share request:
Once approved the status is updated and a new nav bar appears in OneVu as shown:
By default the right hand option remains on 'Viewing your own account' but this is a toggle to jump between your account and those that have shared access to their account.
The following shows the one account John currently has shared access to - but clearly if say this were a Councillor/carer they could have access to multiple accounts:
Once selected John is now able to view Jackie's OneVu account and you'll notice the Friends and Family nav bar has changed orange to highlight this with a button to go 'Back to my account':
Points of note:
1) A person accessing someone else's account cannot a) change their email address or b) for security reasons access the person's Friends and Family to share access with others
2) When a person is provided access they have access to everything in OneVu as if they were that person
If we go back to Jackie's account we can also now see that John's access is approved and Jackie can revoke this at any time:
This area is the starting point of a focus on delivering carer/social services based functions and, whilst it is already really great, it is very much going to evolve over time.
2) Electronic Notifications +
This is a massive area of enhancement for OneVu and is relevant to those councils with eNotification/eBilling functionality. Please check with your account manager/customer success manager to see if you are contracted for this functionality.
This can be broken down into the following areas:
a) Opt in to electronic notifications on sign up
b)A new 'Notifications' area within 'Your Profile'
c) A new 'Notifications' area within the back office OneVu Manage area
d) A new Contact Management function in OneVu Manage to allow a user to search notifications that have been sent electronically
e) A new function within the Data Silos area of OneVu Manage for notification configuration and creation
f) A new automatic batch program that takes daily files (of those to be sent a notification) and automates the process of pushing them securely to the cloud and issuing notifications electronically.
g) The means to automatically update the Northgate back office eBilling marker.
We will now walk through each of these in turn:
a) Opt in to electronic notifications on sign up
An update has been made to the personalisation process to ask whether they wish to receive notifications electronically as soon as they're successfully authenticated.
This design ensures users have the choice to opt in as a part of the process (thus complying with GDPR) but simultaneously maximising potential uptake.
So, as is the case now, a person personalises using the information relevant to the department which is being personalised:
But as electronic notifications are set up for this department the following is presented:
At first glance this seems a little strange as the person first opts into receive their Benefit notifications electronically and then needs to select their notification mechanism of Email.
However, subject to access and technical feasibility, we will, over time, be adding other mechanisms such as SMS (via GOV.UK Notify), WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
A user does not have to choose to opt in, again for compliance, but if they do on pressing complete this updates their notification preferences in the 'Your Profile' area.
Also, the reason why this information is asked as a secondary function is not all users will use electronic notifications and as such means it does not affect existing authentication if disabled.
b) A new 'Notifications' area within 'Your Profile'
Complementing the enhanced sign up process is a new area in 'Your Profile' which allows one to centrally manage any and all notifications they are opted in to / out of. This can be seen at the foot of this screen:
When one clicks into this area it is possible for the user to see which services they're going to receive electronic notifications for:
And also the means to opt in to some where they hadn't previously.
c) A new 'Notifications' area within the back office OneVu Manage area
To ensure that you have an effective audit of all notifications issued we have built a comprehensive function to review in minute detail all notifications that have been issued to customers.
Notifications are generated based upon files created by back office systems and so for each file imported there is effectively a log of what happened with that for each system.
When a specific row is clicked upon a log of what happened is recorded and indeed visualised in chart format. The detail is split into two areas:
- Job Processing (this covers information messages)
- Message delivery (this relates to people whom have been sent a notification)
Job processing
We can see for this specific file there are 4 information messages and 15 messages relating to no person match in OneVu from the file provided. These two values drive the pie chart shown to the left of these values:
These are expandable so if I click on the Information row I can see the messages therein:
Likewise the No person match row shows the cases from the file where no match was found for that specific case within OneVu. You can see specifically the reference it tried to use for those as well:
Message Delivery
This is area revolves around those where a match was found in OneVu and the outcome / method of delivery for the messages sent:
You can see the email address, when it was attempted, the delivery type and the current state (status).
d) A new Contact Management area within the back office OneVu Manage area
Often you will need to query the specific messages that have been sent to a customer if they send a query etc. To facilitate this we have built a whole new area that allows you to search for messages sent. This is illustrates below:
A user can simply search by status and date range. Or more likely, search by these AND the back office reference that the person is authenticated to i.e. Council Tax Account number / licence reference number etc. The following shows the different statuses for messages sent in the filter:
These statuses are explained as:
- Success = a successful response was received from the notification mechanism provider I.e. email server if email was the mechanism
- Failed = where we have a failed response from the notification mechanism provider
- Awaiting = we have sent to the email server not yet not got a response i.e. pending
- Not permitted = can't send because the person's notification preferences say no to emails for this service
- Error = unable to send because of a technical error with the notification mechanism provider
If we do a search we can see the results as follows:
And going further if one of these rows is clicked upon the detailed audit can be seen:
Including the value that was used from the file to prompt the creation of the electronic notification.
e) A new function within the Data Silos area of OneVu Manage for notification configuration and creation
Probably the most powerful new function within this release is the ability for you to have complete control over:
- how to map your file's format and content into the messages sent
- being able to create new files to be used for the creation of files
This function exists within the OneVu Manage area for each 'Data Silo' or rather council department in lay person's terms. This is shown below:
Here we can see that for Benefits within the new 'Notification configuration' area there is already configuration set up for Benefit Notifications. If this is expanded we can see:
In the above we can see there is a Name and Description. These are the internally facing name/description for the specific Benefit message type. The 'Preference Description' is what the customer will opt into and thus the one that is most important to be clear on.
The File name is the name of the file that will be used to drive the process. I.e. in the above it is example.csv but your file could be:
DailyBenefitLetters.csv
The next section 'Column mapping' is used to identify the column within the file that holds the unique identifier which should be used to search OneVu for a match.
There will ALWAYS need to be one column marked as the Key field to look for in the file.
So in this example there is only one column. The 'File will include a header row' check box is ticked meaning the file contains a header in this column. If your file does not have a header row describing the content of the column this should be un-checked.
For the Key field that you want to use as the matching mechanism you then also need to set the appropriate 'Silo data item'. This is the set of fields that are held against that person. This will very likely always be the back office reference i.e. Claim Reference for Benefits.
If your file includes a header row i.e. in our example this is 'one' this will be used to:
a) Find the column within the file with that as a header name
b) Populate the message template if so desired i.e. This message is regarding Claim Reference: XXXXX
If the file does not have a header row the purpose of giving each column a name is solely for use in the template.
To help illustrate, the following is an excerpt from the example.csv file we are using:
We can see the column has one column, the first column is titled 'one' and this contains the Key field from OneVu, which is claim reference.
Because this has been mapped in the configuration this can then be used in the templates sent. The following shows the Delivery Configuration section of the config for this specific Benefit service:
As one can see there is the ability to set:
- From Address
- Display Name
- Subject Template
- Plain text message template (useful for SMS etc.)
- HTML Message template (better for emails)
To illustrate these settings in practice the following email was received based upon the settings and the content of the HTML Message template content:
Clearly this is very basic but illustrates the point.
You will notice that in the HTML message templates there is this:
"Your Reference is @{one}"
The element @{one} is basically the syntax of a template field but dynamically generated based upon the content of the file imported. I.e. we said the first column will be called 'one' and instantly this can be used as a template field.
Creating a new notification type:
Using the above information we will create a brand new notification type which a citizen can subscribe to. This is going to be a new file with multiple columns and for a different purpose. I.e. whereas the above was about subscribing to receive benefit notifications electronically, this new file will be for claimants that want to be notified when a new benefit payment has been processed for them.
Let's say the new file, created from a payment run say, is formatted as follows:
I.e. there are five columns. We will now create a new notification and this is done by clicking the 'Add' button here:
Once done we then add the fields as outlined earlier to our new notifications configuration:
Within the column mapping we have identified the 5 columns and that which should be used for matching purposes. To add columns it was simply a case of clicking the 'Add Field' button.
We can then add the content to the Delivery Configuration area:
We're now all set!
To test this we can now go back into OneVu to see what the user sees when they personalise their account:
And once done in the Notifications area of Your Profile:
Now they have signed up to our new notification type we need to import a file that has this claim reference in it.
f) A new automatic batch program that takes daily files (of those to be sent a notification) and automates the process of pushing them securely to the cloud and issuing notifications electronically.
To complement the means to configure notifications to be sent we have created a new set of functions to import files to your instance of OneVu in the cloud. This is comprised of an application (BulkImportTool.exe) and a batch file (.bat) which can be set to run at a set interval by you each day/night.
So for each file type i.e. example.csv/benefitpayments.csv the batch program will be run separately. This is to enable files to be imported from different locations if required. When this is run for the benefitpayments.csv file we can see this has created a row in the Notifications area of OneVu Manage:
And we can see the email that was sent as a result of the file:
It cannot be overstated how amazing this function is because essentially it gives the council the means to a) notify a customer about any type of notification they can think up whilst simultaneously b) providing the customer to opt in and thus have GDPR compliance.
This same function could be used for example to tell:
- taxi drivers when their licence is due to expire
- council tax payers that pay by cash a payment is due
- housing tenants that they are in arrears
All with NO CODE.
Finally, the two files to enable the import of your files and thus kick off notification production are provided to those councils that are using this functionality.
g) The means to automatically update the Northgate back office eBilling marker
This function is, as the name implies, specific to those customers providing eBilling to Council Tax/Business Rates customers and have the Northgate back office.
When a customer signs up to receive their bills electronically we will automatically set the appropriate flag in the Northgate back office using the 'EBill Status' API.
Also if a customer changes their email address or opts out of eBillling, we will also automatically update Northgate using the EBill Status API.
Obviously it is the case that for this functionality to take effect a Council needs to be licensed with Northgate to use the EBill Status API.
Amendments
1) It was noticed that when within a 'silo' I.e. a department within OneVu if the browser back button was pressed, rather than pressing a menu option, it wouldn't actually go back. This has been modified so the functionality will function as expected when pressing the browser's back/previous button.
The following are the release versioning details: