Enhancement for Managing Alerts

ePermitting has developed an optional enhancement for agencies to better handle Alerts for online activity.  This enhancement was developed because Alerts no longer persistently display nor are they easily reviewed in the New UI.  Another one of the primary and long-standing issues with Alerts is that if you completed an Alert and deleted it from your Alerts list, it was only deleted from your view.  It was still listed as potentially outstanding for any other user with access to Alerts.  This issue is resolved with this new option.

The enhancement allows us to configure Alerts to also send to an external email account.  Alert notifications would still display in Accela in the Alerts page, however they would also all be emailed to a mailbox that you designate.  We highly recommend this email be a group/shared email where more than one person has access to review incoming emails.

A few benefits:

1. Email can be a much more proactive approach to being notified of online activity, which is very helpful regarding the nature of alerts.
2. You can often tell if the email has been read or not and/or can leverage various email functionality like ‘checking off’ something as complete.
3. Once processed, the person that handled it can delete it from the shared mailbox so that no one else monitoring alerts reviews the same alert, taking care of our age-old issue with deleting Alerts within Accela.  

Several agencies using this option have been delighted with the ease of use and the ability to more easily manage online applications.  If your agency would be interested in this enhancement, please submit a help desk ticket to ePermitsHelp.BCD@oregon.gov.

In addition to the email option, we also have a new custom filter called, “ACA permits opened in the last 180 days but not issued.”  This filter shows you all the online permits that have come in with the “App Submitted” status which is another way of online seeing the ACA applications that you need to work on (since they didn’t auto-issue).