Understanding Communications

Standard Comments

Civic Platform associates comment groups with record types and makes all the comments in the associated group available to appropriate processes related to the record type. Comment groups consist of comment types and individual comments of a particular comment type.

Civic Platform provides standard comments for use when updating workflow tasks, entering inspection results, or placing a condition on an object. These standard comments comprise a list of pre‑defined comments that improve comment consistency and speed of entry.

To make standard comments available for a particular form, you assign individual comments to a comment type, assign the comment types to a comment group, and associate the comment group with the appropriate record types. You can select the comment types included in a comment group, with the specific standard comments they contain, when you work on a form associated with the comment group.

Example Use Case

A user is completing an inspection form that has an assigned comment group; a data picker appears beside the Comments field. The user clicks this data picker to see a drop-down menu of standard comment types assigned to the inspection type. When the user clicks the hyperlink of the desired comment, Civic Platform enters the comment text in the Comments field of the inspection form.

Standard Comment Types

Comment types prescribe groups of related comments. You associate comment types with comment groups and assign comment groups to record types. You can then choose from all the comments types and comments contained in that comment group.

Example Use Case

You create two comment types, one for code enforcement and one for inspections. The code enforcement comment type includes the following two comments: “Overgrown vegetation,” “trash/junk/garbage and/or debris visible from public views and/or other properties,” and “mattresses visible from public view and/or other properties.” The inspection comment type includes the following two comments: “excavations abandoned or left in a state of partial completion and visible from public street,” and “construction materials and/or tools visible from public view and/or other properties.”

You assign the code enforcement comment type and inspection comment type to their respective comment groups and you associate these comment groups to the code enforcement record type and inspection record type. Users working with code enforcement records and inspection records use the appropriate preloaded comment to complete the comments field for the record.

Spell Checker

Civic Platform provides a spell checker to allow users to identify and correct the spelling for comments. The Spell Checker displays under all text area fields in Civic Platform and in the public user experience in Citizen Access.

Civic Platform provides a dictionary field for every language the Spell Checker supports, including United States and Australian English. The standard language is English. The dictionary used depends on the language selected when the user logs into Civic Platform. For example, if the user logs into Civic Platform with the AU English language, Civic Platform searches for words in the Australia English dictionary. If the user logs in with an unsupported language and clicks the Check Spelling link, Civic Platform displays an alert stating that the Spell Checker does not support the language.

Administrators and users cannot modify the dictionary files by adding new words to the dictionary.

Alerts

Civic Platform allows you to create alert messages that communicate critical information throughout your entire agency. Civic Platform automatically generates these alerts upon completion of specified events.

You have the option to post alerts at the agency, module, department, user group, or individual user level so that each user sees only alerts that pertain to them.

You can set up rules that cause Civic Platform to send alerts upon satisfaction of certain conditions. For example, you might want to alert a manager when a workflow task status changes or if an item experiences no activity for a period of time. You decide the conditions you want to use as the basis of your rule and the type of system response.