Thank you to all of you who attended the Oregon ePermitting Regional Training and User Conference. We had a great turn out at both the Happy Valley and Astoria Conferences. Below are a few quotes from attendees.
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"Thank you for being such wonderful presenters at the ePermiting Regional Conference in Astoria. I really had a good time there, I know that it is hard to be in front of a group all day long and talk about computer stuff and keep them energized and active all day long. I think you did a great job!" - Matt Laird, Columbia County

"Thank you! We thoroughly enjoyed having everyone and it was very informative!" - Lisa Ferguson, City of Astoria

"Thank you for having us!  And a big thanks to YOU, and everyone else who was there for putting together a great conference.  It was so nice to meet everyone in person and to be able to put a face with a name."
​- Marcey Crowell, City of Forest Grove

Need to request a fee update? Ever wondered what your active fees are? You can run a report that will compile all of your agency's active fees into one report that can be saved as an Excel spreadsheet. You can even mark up the spreadsheet and send to ePermitting for your next fee schedule update. To run this report, simply click on the four-square Launchpad icon, scroll down to Reports, click on the Building Reports page.

A new enhancement was just released and available for your use.  Now, you can elect for Commercial Alarm or Suppression System records to be automatically closed out with a status of Finaled once the 8999 Final Fire inspection is positively resulted and there are no outstanding fees or inspections on the permit.  This is an optional feature and is disabled by default.  If your agency is interested in enabling this feature, please submit a helpdesk ticket by emailing ePermitsHelp.BCD@oregon.gov.

The new Oregon ePermitting Inspector App will be released early 2020. This is a list of new features that you will find in the new Oregon ePermitting Inspector App as compared to the existing Accela Inspector App.  The Oregon ePermitting Inspector App will be available for iPhone and iPad devices at launch with an Android version to be available at a future date.  The existing Accela Inspector App will remain available as well.

We will send out an announcement as soon as the app is available for download from the app store and will also have training materials available.  Please send us an email at ePermitsHelp.BCD@oregon.gov if your agency is interested in in-person training.

Inspection Details:

• Fees. 
• Schedule, Reschedule, Reassign, Cancel, or Delete inspections directly from Inspection Details.
  
  

Record Details:

• Activities.
• Conditions of Approval.
• First Issued Date.
• Expiration Date.
• Related Records.
• Internal Comments – only displays those comments where “Apply to Inspections” checkbox is checked from the back office.
  
  

Inspection Summary Report:

• Pictures taken on the job site will be attached to the end of the report.
• Pictures can be renamed and reordered for the report.
• Enhanced annotation available for pictures.
• Date/time stamp embedded in the upper right corner of each picture attached to the inspection result.
• The email subject and content is more clear.
• Inspection Summary Report will include the date/time stamp and automatically attached to the record when submitting the inspection (doesn’t require multiple steps like the Accela Inspector App).
  
  

Searching:

• Ability to search for Scheduled, Pending, or Completed inspections.
• Ability to search for Records based on Status.
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Other:

• Reference Conditions (Address, Parcel, Owner for example) now display in the app.
• Pending and Scheduled inspections can now be deleted for users with the correct permissions.
• “Remember Me” option on the login screen. 
• Easier to understand screens when Scheduling or Rescheduling inspections. 
• Result, Reschedule, and Reassign one or multiple inspections from the Job List. 
• All inspections from the Job List now plot on the map (this has been an ongoing issue in the Accela Inspector App). 
• Block Out dates on the inspection calendar are honored when Scheduling or Rescheduling inspections (this doesn’t work properly in the Accela Inspector App). 
• Condition banner displays more prominently. 
• Easy to see login information across the top (logged in user, agency, environment, app version). 
• Ability to review inspection details that were submitted to Accela database. 
• See the last inspector to result an inspection on the record. 
• Photos, Combined PDF, and the Inspection Summary Report will now attach to the “Record” instead of the “Inspection” so this allows these files to be available to the customer through Citizen Access. 
• Only a small amount of data can be modified through the app (Inspections, Contacts, Description of Work, Internal Comments, Documents).  This will resolve some of the ongoing issues we have seen with the Accela Inspector App.

A new enhancement to the courtesy expiration letters was just released and available for your use.  Currently, courtesy expiration letters are automatically sent to the Applicant and/or Owner by email first and if none exists, then a physical letter is generated for the agency to send in standard mail.  Now with this new feature, you can elect to send courtesy expiration letter manually in standard mail only. The letters will never be emailed.  This selection is turned OFF by default for all agencies and all modules.  If your agency is interested in enabling this feature for any module, please submit a help desk ticket by emailing ePermitsHelp.BCD@oregon.gov.

On December 4, 2019, we made some minor corrections to the ACA permissions for certain document types for all OSM agencies.  You can find a list of all Document Types and their ACA permissions at this Knowledgebase Article.  The cells highlighted in blue were recently updated.

As a reminder, Super Techs and higher have the ability to override and modify ACA document permissions on a case by case basis.  This Knowledgebase Article describes how to use this override feature.