2.13 - Winter (formerly Autumn) Release

Hello,

We've been planning this release since April 2020 and so it is incredibly satisfying to be able to provide the details of it today.

This release represents a significant upgrade and provides loads of new value to our customers to help enhance their digital offerings. Particularly relevant in a year where things have changed so much.

The release notes contain a huge amount of content and for that reason, you can find short cuts to the different sections of the release notes below. Additional, chargeable functionality that has been developed during this release period is also being documented but will be done so separately.

 

OneVu (Core):

 

My Account - Dashboard

Recording to 'How to Session...' on My Account - Dashboard - accessed here

Sign up Enhancements (inc. sign up with mobile no.)

Recording to 'How to Session...' on Sign up Enhancements - accessed here

Banners

Recording to 'How to Session...' on Banners - accessed here

Citizen Timeline

Recording to 'How to Session...' on Citizen Timeline - accessed here

Progress Tracking - Notification Preferences

Family and Friends - Notification Preferences

Privacy Statements

System Audit Trail

Small Updates

 

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OpenProcess (Core):

New Delivery Methods

Two Way Communication

OpenProcess - OneVu Search using Mobile Number

Small Updates

 

OneVu (Core)

NB:  the (Core) part references that this functionality will be available to all those licensed for OneVu Core via GCloud.

 

My Account - Dashboard

One of the most powerful innovations OneVu introduced in 2017 when the first council went live was the ability to provide a cross council citizen portal providing one view of all council departments.

Since then we have added integrations to back office systems for Council Tax, Benefits, Business Rates, Landlords, Licensing, Housing, Leaseholders and Waste. Ensuring that the highest volume services for queries are covered.

However, while the citizen could access a single view, the information they'd see would be all departments (even if they didn't care about many) and within a department they'd see everything the council had set up to show them in that department (even if they didn't care about 90% of the content).

In this release we have added a function that means that a citizen can 'pin' their favourite content from any department into a single personalised 'dashboard'. For the first time there is a genuine 'My Account' function that reflects the citizen's personal choice on what they care about. This is particularly powerful in that data from multiple back office systems is being retrieved and shown to the citizen in a single view.

• Set up

Every feature in this release can be turned on/off and so upon upgrade to the release a 'flag' needs to be set to turn this function on for your council. You will need to indicate in your request for upgrade whether you want this functionality to be enabled.

 

Plus, as this is a new function no one will have any content in their 'My Account' initially. Rather than just have an empty space, following best UX / design practice, you as a council can choose what you want to present when a person first accesses this.

For example, below there is a guide to the function and some links to relevant departments to start adding favourite content:

 

Because we want you to have control over this content and to be able to iterate upon what you have here you're able to change the content within here. 

You do this using the following setting in the OneVu Control > Settings area as shown below:

 

When the setting is clicked, you can see that this is simply a holder for whatever content you want:

 

An example as shown in the screenshot above can be found at the bottom of these notes in Appendix 1. 

 

• User facing functionality

When the My Account functionality is enabled you will see the 'Add to My Account' button:

 

When content has been added to the My Account dashboard the button will update to reflect this:

 

When content is added to My Account it is shown as below. There are three buttons that enable the citizen to move content up/down and also remove it: 

 

• Linked Accounts

Where a citizen has multiple accounts linked e.g. two council tax accounts linked to their OneVu account they are able to add content from each to their 'My Account'. What this means is they could technically 'pin' the council tax summary from both of their accounts. This means they don't need to drill down into each to get to the summary (balances etc) for each account. 

 

You can see two account's mini statements for different accounts in a single view below:

• Customer Services Vu

The functionality of 'My Account' can also be leveraged by customer services staff. So, if a citizen contacts agents often with the same queries, they could pin those questions to the customer's dashboard and explain to the citizen that they can get these answers 24/7 more easily, if they log in to their account. 

 

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Sign up enhancements (including sign up with mobile number)

Increasingly messaging services are being used as the primary communication medium by younger generations.

Reflective of this, OneVu has a new and innovative function that enables citizens to create an account solely using a mobile phone number. 

So now when on the sign in/up screen there are now options to register for an account using email OR mobile phone number. 

 

 

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When the user clicks the option for mobile number they are presented with the following, which mirrors the email equivalent but with mobile phone number instead:

 

 

• Forgotten Passwords

Because a person can forget their password, and need a way to reset it even where they created their account via mobile, there is a new option presented to enable this.

 

 

• Sign up validation

When a person creates an account with their mobile number, they will be asked to provide it and confirm it as they do with email. Plus, by using the appropriate input type and regular expression to validate the format:

<input data-val-regex-pattern="^(\+44\s?7\d{3}|\(?07\d{3}\)?)\s?\d{3}\s?\d{3}$"  type="tel" >

We ensure that the user is presented with a numeric pad to enter their mobile number and that the user needs to enter a mobile phone number that conforms to the standard format:

 

 

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• Accessible Labelling

Now for every field on the registration screen there is a fully accessible label. The following are the labels:

 

 

These are accessible and follow the pattern described by w3.org here:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/forms/labels/ 

E.g. 

<label id="forenameLabel" for="Forenames" class="registrationLabel">Enter your forename(s)</label>

 

• Date of birth 

Date of birth is now optional. Meaning for those that provide it you'll have it and forms will be pre-populated with it/reporting will reflect those that provide it. 

 

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This release adds the ability for you to add a banner that is shown to citizens. Banners can be used to:

• Promote a new service 
• Provide an alert/important information notice
• Provide help/link to help/support
• Add any content you want to show above the navigation bar

The functionality to add a banner is accessed within the OneVu Control area as shown below. There is the ability to:

• name it,
• enable it,
• set the period of time the banner should be displayed for
• use the rich text editor to create the banner

 

The above banner appears as follows:

 

 

This release ensures that, like the timeline available to council staff in Customer Service Vu, citizens can see activities on their account in a single timeline. This is accessed from their profile at the bottom as shown below:

 

This timeline will show entries chronologically with the most recent updates at the top. There is the ability to filter the timeline for specific entry types and this also illustrates the different types of entry in the timeline:

 

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Progress Tracking - Notification Preferences

Because a person can now create an account using a mobile phone number, it was necessary to ensure that a person could also receive progress updates via SMS.

Going further, if a person subsequently connected their profile to Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp/Email they would then have more than one way of getting updates. 

As a result, within the Notifications section of the citizen's Profile, there is a new section that will appear:

 

 

The options a citizen will see will dynamically be updated to reflect the data on their profile. I.e. in the above case, they had an email, mobile phone number and also connected Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp to their OneVu account. With each option enabling:

• Progress updates set up as actions when process steps start/complete
• Updates that are sent when notes are added
  
  

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Family and Friends - Notification Preferences

Previously, we provided you with the ability for customers to share their account with someone else and thus ensure that a carer/family member, etc. could access their account and do things on their behalf if necessary. 

In this release, with the increase in the number of channels, we felt it appropriate to enhance the above functionality. 

So now when a person has an account shared with them they can also click to ensure notifications sent to the person they're helping are also sent to them. For example:

• David Coutts has an account
• John McMahon is elderly and David gives him assistance
• David would:
• a) using Family and Friends open John's OneVu account
• b) click on notifications 
• c) select that they also want to receive notifications on behalf of John*

*Obviously John has to have eNotifications set up on their account for at least one department for this option to be available. 

It gives them the ability to choose to do this and also shows their current preferred method of contact:

 

So, for example, if a carer was awaiting progress updates on a social care financial assessment they would be able to be notified automatically when the customer got the updates. 

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Privacy Statements

This release provides you with the ability to add a privacy statement the user needs to agree to:

1. At the point of account creation
2. At the point of registering to link to a given department

• Account wide Privacy Statement

The first of these, i.e. that which is shown to all users upon login is managed in OneVu Control > Privacy Statement as shown below. 

Because this statement maybe long there is the ability to use HTML to better layout/structure the content with bullets etc. 

Once a privacy statement has been added at this level the user must agree to the terms prior to being able to access their account:

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• Department Specific Privacy Statement

There is also the ability in this release to add custom messages for any department where the customer is authenticating. This could be useful if a department has specific nuances on data usage. E.g. Council Tax has the Local Government Finance Act and underpinning legislation which is only relevant for that department.

You can see this as a button when on the registration screen below:

Note that if you have a privacy statement present for a department, the 'Register' button is greyed out until the privacy statement is agreed to. 

To set up a privacy statement for a specific department you need to go to OneVu Control > Data silos and select the department. In the case below it is Council Tax. You can see there is a section for 'Privacy statement configuration'. 

 

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Audit Trail

In this release, we have added a new audit feature. The aptly named Audit Logs will now record the details of any changes made within OneVu Control.

 This means things like whenever:

 a user is created,

• permissions are changed. I.e. Changing the group(s) a person is associated with,
• content or settings are changed within a department and
• global OneVu settings are changed

 There is a log of what the change was and who did it.

 

You’re able to filter the audit trail by type:

 And user:

 

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Smaller Updates

• Track my Requests - Upload Button 

It was noted that this button was not being able to be tabbed/focused to with just a keyboard. A change was made to ensure this was the case and thus accessible/compliant with WCAG AA standards.

• Tab to form from search 

Within Submit My Request > Find a form it was noticed that it was not possible to tab/focus on the results from the search using solely a keyboard. A change was made to ensure this was the case and thus accessible/compliant with WCAG AA standards.

• Accordions inside FAQs 

One council was using accordions within the FAQs they were providing within the Council Tax department. It was noted that these ceased to expand within the new accessible format of FAQs. 

We enhanced our product to ensure you can now again use expandable Bootstrap Accordions inside an FAQ. 

In lay terms, a single expandable FAQ can have expandable content within it which is useful if the answer to a question/content to be shown is long/complex. 

• Northgate Council Tax

a) It was noticed that house number was not being verified as a part of the authentication. Only postcode, surname and council tax account number. This has been amended to ensure that the house number/name is also used.

b) Special Arrangement data items have been added to enable the details of special arrangements in place to be shown to the citizen. The following new data items are available:

 

Details of instalments related to Special Arrangements are also available:

c) An issue has been resolved that means that the following items are always refreshed when a customer accesses their account:

• Next Payment Amount/Date data items
• Discounts / Exemptions data items 

 

• Northgate Business Rates 

The structure of the data provided by Northgate around the rateable value is complex and was found to not provide data in any sort of order chronologically. This meant that the rateable value shown was often not the most recent value. 

We have enhanced the derivation of the rateable value data item by implementing a function to sort through all of the values passed from Northgate and filter out the most recent rateable value irrespective of the poor quality of the data sorting in the API.

 

• Northgate Benefits

a) Addition of support for the status Apprentice if passed from Northgate. This was causing authentication to fail as Apprentice was not in the schema. 

b) Added a new field for Overpayment information 

 

• Capita Landlords

We have enhanced the authentication mechanism so that if a landlord tries to query a tenant that has no payment details we don't throw an error but instead indicate there are no payments. 

 

• Northgate Housing

A change was made to the authentication mechanism to use tenancy ref (accountPaymentReference) when loading the housing data instead of party ref. This ensures that the most up to date tenancy is returned, as it was found  that party ref doesn't always get the current tenancy. 

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OpenProcess (Core) 

NB the (Core) part references that this functionality will be available to all those licensed for OneVu Core via GCloud. 

There are two significant changes within this release for OpenProcess. Namely the means to send notifications to customers via new channels and also the ability for customers to respond through those channels; with their responses automatically added to the notes area for a process. 

Both of these are reliant on knowing a customer's preferred method of contact and leverage the following area mentioned earlier in the release notes:

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VERY IMPORTANT

It is now possible to add multiple action types to a process step. But only the user's preference will be triggered. 

This is important because if a process step:

• does have an action but
• does not have the customer's preference 

I.e. only an email action is present but their preference is WhatsApp, the customer will not receive an update, as the action will not be fired.

So if you want to support user's being able to select different preferences you need to ensure each process that has an email action also has the equivalent alternative IF you also want them to be sent a notification through that delivery method. 

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New Delivery methods

Within a process it has always been possible to add 'Actions' when the step:

1. is started and
2. when it is completed

Prior to this release the only action was to send an email and this would be sent via IEG4's email service.

This is illustrated below:

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This release adds the ability to add 4 new types of action on process steps that will send:

• Text Messages (via GOV.UK Notify)
• Email (via GOV.UK Notify)
• Facebook Messenger 
• WhatsApp

We will walk through each of these now.

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Each of these needs to be enabled by IEG4 support. Please raise a help desk ticket for the functionality to be turned on. 

 

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• Text Messages (via GOV.UK Notify)

Research shows that SMS open rates are as high as 98%, compared to just 20% of all emails. And, on average, it takes 90 seconds for someone to respond to a text and 90 minutes to respond to an email.

It's why we think this new capability in partnership with the new 'Sign up with a mobile phone number' will be such a game changer. 

First things first, the text message service is delivered through GOV.UK Notify. Each council has access to GOV.UK Notify and is a best practice based service for sending notifications. 

Linking OneVu/OpenProcess to Notify

To set up the ability to send Text Message (SMS) via GOV.UK Notify you first need to login to GOV.UK Notify using your council's account and get an API key. You do this by clicking on the API Integration option on the left:

For test you only need the option option but obviously when you are going live you will need to use the Live option. When you press continue you are given the API key as shown below:

Click the 'Copy API key to clipboard' option.

Once you've done this go to OneVu Control > Settings and click on the Api key for Gov.uk Notify setting option:

 

 

Then paste the key value in:

 

You have now connected the notification services to your Council's GOV.UK Notify API.  

 

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Once you've connected to your council service you need to create a new Text Message template. You do this in the 'Templates' area of GOV.UK Notify.

 

When you create it you should literally put the following in as the content:

 

((message))

 

It should look like this when you've created it:

You'll notice there is a Template ID. Click on the 'Copy template ID to clipboard' button. 

Now go into OpenProcess and click on the process step you'd like to add an action to. You can see below the template Id mirrors what was copied from Notify. 

So the reason that the content of the template you set up is simply:

 

((message))

 

Is you will set the content in the 'Personalised Content' when setting up the action. This has the added benefit of the fact you only need to set up one Text Message template id that you can use for ANY actions for sending text messages via GOV.UK Notify. 

 

 

Once you've saved this, if a person has set their preference to receive progress updates via text message, and this process is started they will be sent a text message via GOV.UK Notify. 

You can see the text message below:

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• Emails (via GOV.UK Notify)

If you'd like your emails and text messages to both go through Notify this is possible and has the benefit of being able to reduce the likelihood of bouncing emails and also Notify provides some functionality around being able to see the content of every single email sent. 

Before you can email actions to your process for Notify you need to connect our services with your councils Notify account.

Follow the steps as outlined for doing this for SMS above. 

 

Once you've linked to your Notify service you need to create an Email template in Notify. It should look like this:

 

I.e. set the Subject as {subject} and the body as {message}. 

Once done click the 'Copy template ID to clipboard' option and add the relevant action to your process step. 

You need to paste the Template ID into the box below. We can see this id is the same as the one above in Notify. 

You then need to also provide a Subject and Body. These being automatically passed to GOV.UK Notify:

 

 

Which results in the following email being sent when the step is start/completed (depending upon where you put the action):

 

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