Modern FOIA Solution Webinar (DEMO Only)

Okay, thanks Jane. Alright, so before we actually get into is there’s a lot we want to cover for ArkCase FOIA. Yeah but I do want to give you kind of a high-level story of what we’re actually going to show today.

We’re going to show a specific use case. That use case is going to be submitting a new request, we’re actually going to send it out the customer today is going to be myself. We’re going to send it through the web portal and then we’re going to actually see and process it right through the actual different cues in the ArkCase FOIA system.

We’re going to make it very simplistic, it’s going to be all done in this short period of time during the demo from intake all the way through a release or distribution. We’re going to show you some of the things that you can do as you process it through the different cues like redaction will do the fill step, we’ll probably read acts something and then in the approve step will actually burn it.

Once again this is a very simplistic workflow that you’ll see today but just think about how you can compound that over days or multiple users and we’ll talk a little bit about that. So this is a high level flow you’re going to see portal all the way through the ArkCase through the service api’s and then we’re actually in a process it is the workflow and then distribute to the portal. And we’ll spend a little bit of time on some of the other bells and whistles like the reporting module, the search module and definitely the admin to show you some of the configuration that drives this.

But before we do this actual workflow let me jump out to the application and let’s go ahead and jump into the application. So when I login, I’m actually logging in as my personal user what you’re going to see here on the screen is my view and when I say my view this is our case handles everything with role based access control. The login was a manual login as you can see there but once again you do have the ability out-of-the-box to do single sign-on so integration with kevro’s, sam’l any CAC or authenticate or pivot occation that is available out of the box that just needs to be configured.

Today what you’re seeing here just from a high level to get you used to what you see on the screen and how the navigation works before we do the actual overall workflow is you have your navigation your modules on the left-hand side. Once again role-based access so who ever had access to these modules obviously that role dictates it so I logged in as someone like a supervisor or even just a basic day-to-day analyst they may only see say two Queues module in their dashboard.

They may not see all the other modules that we’re seeing today. Also at the top you do have global new we won’t need to create any of these we’re going to create a request from the actual web portal and automatically will ingest, but you also do have your simple search that leads in your search module and then your internationalization up at the top. Once again the landing page is the dashboard page this is kind of your jumping-off location and we’ll use this as part of the workflow.

So let’s go ahead and get into what that workflow looks like and then we’ll come back to some of these other modules and talk about them after the workflow. So as I transition we’re going to transition over to the sample web portal and as you can see here we’re going to go ahead and just submit a FOIA request. I’m going to say that I want to know the 2016 federal budget. Not all of these fields are mandatory but as you can see here there are some that you must you know you have to enter specifically name and email address that type of thing and we’re going to populate that.

Some of these other fields are obviously configurable whether they’re minutes were optional all the dropdowns are controlled through the admin module which will show up in the look-up tables later. Once again this overall view or form this angular form is also configurable, so once again out-of-the-box that provides some of the main pieces of information that most businesses need to collect from a FOIA perspective but once again this can be configured to meet your requirements.

Some of these other fields were just going to lead blank anything from expedite or how much you’re willing to pay so on and so forth so I’m going to go ahead and enter in my information and I’m going to submit this request.

So a couple of things are happening at this point not only with this ingestion method specifically the lead portal, but whether it was email ingestion that creates a request or fax ingestion we’ve had clients using fax with a drop folder and ingesting. No matter what option you utilize as it pertains to getting the for your request into the system you ultimately are seeing that were verging the open wrestle api’s of ArkCase FOIA and at the same time when we’re taking this information not only are we putting it in the actual application persistent in the database, we’re also utilizing out Fresco’s document management to store all of the actual files and when I say the files on creation of a request we actually take the metadata that’s collected and we create an actual PDF file. We place all the information in the right location and that becomes your quote unquote request document.

So it’s actually in document form and has been being saved out on the alfresco document management section of share which you’ll see a little bit later. At the same time we are also taking this through the process we’re going to leverage the document throughout the process that’s going to be channeling all the versioning control and then when we move to a state of release we’re actually going to use alfresco as records management to seamlessly move this document into making it a record and moving it to the file management plan which you’ll see here in just a minute.

So with that being said we’ve already submitted an actual request. Let’s go ahead and jump into the intake you. All I did was actually click on the actual bar from the actual widget right there on the home screen and as you can see I when I open up 137 which is request 137 it’s going to populate the information of the 2016 federal budget as you can see here. Not only are we loading actual data, but we’re also loading the actual view of not only the request form as you can see in the first tab but also the acknowledgement letter.

The acknowledgement letter is just a correspondence template that actually populates the information these are just sample templates that can be used out-of-the-box or can be configured to meet specific requirements or leverage forms that you are already use. So once again just acknowledge meant letter by default in this in the out-of-the-box FOIA sends an email to the end user as you can see here we said we’d send an email that’s the email of the acknowledgement letter okay.

With that being said let’s talk about some of the information associated to the actual request. First off we have the request or information that came in as an intake person some of the main things that you’ll have to do is obviously pick a request track is it simple complex expedite these are specific things that have to be tracked and say and persisted so you can report on them on the DOJ reports that we’ll talk about a little bit later and the report module.

Additionally to that you can add additional information may be that all the populated information wasn’t populated or someone called in and gave additional information you can actually add that. You also have the ability to dictate maybe the the spelling of the request surname was wrong or the address is wrong you can update that information okay. So once again to accelerate this due to time we’re going to go ahead and just move this on in the in the overall path but. Before I do that I want to point out the buttons at the bottom that allow you not only to send this maybe over to the whole queue, maybe you’re waiting on something, maybe all the information is not there maybe you need to delete this because it’s a duplicate maybe you need to send this on to maybe the next queue and continue to work on it or you can actually send it on and queue up the next individual request in the queue and that’s what that next buttons for.

So for instance I am an actual person that works all day on intake that’s my only job I process intake and I make sure that moves on into the next queue. I can do that by just basically looking at these individual intake you like we’re seeing now and populating the information and hitting next, it’ll just queue up the very next request in my intake queue. But because I’m an admin and we want to see this single request go through the whole process I actually had the access to complete this by hitting this complete button. It’s actually going to update my status and it’s going to actually ask me specifically about my category.

So I’m going to go over here and actually show you a different views so one of the things that we have to update is the actual category. If the end user populates it which I forgot to do on the web portal if you populate it here you’re you’re actually able to see that it’s authentic eighths it gives the metadata. So if we go back into this specific request and go ahead and try to complete this you’ll see that it actually will move on no problem so once I actually open up this request again in the actual and take you we’ve already got all the information populated here. So I’m going to go ahead and complete this and move this on into the next queue.

Once I complete it You’ll see that the actual status is now moved to in fulfill, so at any one time the end user the person that submits the request, they can come in and check status of their request and see where it is in the overall process if you scroll down 137 is currently in fulfillment okay.

You’ll see some of the other requests that they’ve actually done in the past and we’ll talk a little bit more about that here shortly. With that being said let’s switch gears now we’re no longer taking the intake of this request we’re actually starting the process or fulfill it. There’s many ways to fulfill this request but we’re going to use the most simplistic way today just due to time.

The folder structure you have within the actual request view we have a working request folder which is these two documents that automatically get created and stored in the alfresco document management, you can see them both loaded here. We also have a working folder and a response floor. The working folder allows you to upload as many documents as you want whether it is from a network drive, maybe you’re searching a system outside of alfresco maybe you want to search just alfresco there’s many different ways to upload documents into your working folder.

You even have the ability through the Outlook or the alfresco outlook connector if you have it tied to your Outlook you can actually drop files directly from your email into this folder. So there’s a lot of different things that you can do if you decide to configure and leverage those.

So let’s go ahead and just look at adding real quickly from my network drive we’ve got some sample files I’m going to add four files that cover the 2016 budget maybe these are the file that will fulfill this response so once these have been added to the actual folder. The actual folder will actually show you some information not only the title and what kind of documents but who uploaded them that they’re active they’re not actually records so they actually can be worked on and what version there are.

Let’s just say that as the person is doing the fulfill they have to go through each of these documents and make sure one there’s the right document. So as you can see if we’re going to go ahead and lo just in the tab the document you can move through the different pages make sure that everything looks good.

You even can search for keywords so maybe you’re looking for SSN or something that you may need to redact, you do have the ability to do a quick search and then you can redact all matches or redact one and move on or you can do what I’m going to show you now, which is just be able to redact a single area.

I’ll go in here I’ll go ahead and read Act once you redact an area this is just what we call an overlay so it can still be moved around but I can actually tag it as a specific exemption code so let’s just say that due to national security we’ve got to protect this area okay. With that being said you can still add any other types of annotations at this time you can add rubber stamps which are configurable maybe it’s a signature, maybe it’s a line to underline a section, maybe it’s a note to the next step in the overall workflow that you want them to look at something, maybe it’s something you want to note to say that you need litigation to look at it.

Whatever it may be you can add that right here to the actual physical document. So we’re going to go ahead and save this so basically what it’s doing is it’s saving as the current version but just an overlay when we burn this in the next step you’ll see how it version controls the document. So with that being said this is a very very simplistic story this may take hours and hours or days of researching and finding documents it may take many hours of looking at each of these documents and redacting the key sections out that you need to read that to make it a final document.

Maybe you actually have multiple tasks that need to be sent out to many different users and as you can see here’s a start basic task we can fire a task directly from the request and say hey Sally please go ahead and look for this set of documents. Whatever it may be you can do that very easily, specifically if your workflow dictates you having automatic tasks sent out on every single request to a set group for them to do certain pieces of the step of the workflow through configuration we can change your workflow, we can use this out-of-the-box workflow we just add some automated tasks that fire when you hit say the fulfilment to you whatever it may be. Really depends on your requirements but our case is flexible in the raishin that it allows.

So with that being said, let’s go ahead and move this on the overall workflow. We’ve gone through the intake, we populated the basic information, we’ve now done some fulfillment by finding the documents and actually ended up weird acting something. We’re going to go ahead and send it on to be approved so it can be finalized so it can be burnt and then it can be placed in the actual response order.

As you’ll notice here we’re still on the same page I haven’t the roles of admin to complete this and moving on, as you can see here we’re now on the approval state. With that being said I can go in here and I can go ahead and just burn this actual version one. The great thing is here is that I’m accelerating this overall path you know there may be a lot of other things that have to be done by the approver himself, the reality is he can go back in here and look at the updated document if he wants to look at the updated document as you can see we are on version 2 of one like I told you earlier when we were in act something it actually shows the original and then it burns the new version so it does not affect the original version.

As you can see here the new 2.0 version has now burned the redaction you can see the exemption code on top of that. Not only that but we also populate and capture all the exemption codes on every single document. The reason we do that is once again for the exemption report the DOJ extension report to give you counts okay.

So once again just to summarize we’ve taken something from intake we fulfilled it very quickly we then approved it everything is copasetic, everything is good there’s a couple of things you can do at this point for you out of the box allows for the ability to move this through what we call litigation queue.

When I say litigation I mean like general counsel or some form of hire supervisor approval. You do not have to send it through this general counsel queue you can’t send it if you decide to check the box with litigation according to the out-of-the-box workflow, but some specific businesses may need it to go through general counsel or a request to go through every single day and if that’s the case we can actually set the workflow up to do that and you would never have to hit litigation you just go on through.

We’re now going to go ahead and just skip that cue though due to time purposes and go ahead and move it on in the workflow.

So this is another step in the overall workflow which is as you see here billing. The billing queue, the billing queue is very specific to depending on what type of payment processor that your specific business wants to use. You may already currently have a payment process or maybe your payment process is peg of we have this demo set up to just mock that but once again we can integrate with any payment processor once again we just use the RESTful API as to communicate, send out invoices, have the invoices paid and then we actually process that automatically by automatically checking the paid checkbox.

But since this is a demo environment we don’t have that set up to process payment we’re going to assume that the actual customer paid their invoice and we have been notified that it’s been paid. Until it’s been paid it cannot move out of the billing queue so per out-of-the-box rules or configuration rules it has to stay in the billing queue until it’s paid.

Once it’s paid that they can move on to be released in the release queue okay. So before we do that I want to show you a couple of things, before you move it on to be released you have to move the documents, the final documents you want in the actual response folder so that way that they’re the response documents are delivered.

So I’m going to go ahead and show you that this is a full-fledged document management which means I can make my own subfolders if I decide I wanted subfolders just so you can see that when we actually submit this out we will actually deliver each of these documents in the order structure that we have here. So I’m going to go ahead and move all four of these documents I can either drag and drop like I’m doing I can do a massive drag and drop I can copy and paste I can do a lot of different things associated here so if I wanted to go ahead and you know cut this and paste it into that folder I didn’t have to pull everything over if I didn’t want to pull everything over but I decided to just go ahead and pull everything into this folder okay.

So once I’ve done that once again this can be done at really any process depending on if you want to make this the billing step maybe you want to make this the approve step at this point you can do it in many different ways.

But let’s go ahead and complete and have this move on to the final step. The final step is essentially is going to release this there’s a couple of things that are happening at this point we’re taking all the final documents or any documents in the response folder and we’re essentially marking them as records and moving them over to the records management plan.

So this is the alfresco records management plan so we’ll work within records managers to set up their file folder structure and actually show you how to basically build out your your retention policies and we’ll go from there and essentially this will be a seamless connection what’s the the actual setup for the RM is done and configured this will be a seamless connection between ArkCase FOIA and the records management file plan.

So before we go out and show you where those documents live in alfresco let me show you the end result of that specific request we took through the overall workflow.

So as you can see here 137 has now been released and we actually can see that the actual request idea is an actual download and as you can see, you can open up the zip file it did maintain the folder structure we gave it and as you can see we’ve got all of our different documents that are available to us and I can’t remember I apologize I’m not sure which one that I actually marked but once again they would get all the final documents which would be your burn documents things along those lines okay.

All right well with that being said we’ll come back to the alfresco share I just wanted to show you where the end result documents were living. So, essentially the anyone outside of a Records Manager really won’t need to worry so much about where the documents live that’s going to be a seamless thing you’ll notice that in our case everything can be done here in our case just understand that the underlying repository is the alfresco DM and RM and once again it’s seamless once it’s been configured and set up initially okay.

All right so let’s kind of switch gears I want to go back into the request module real quick and show you the requester you’re working today. The request module is essentially just a different view of the same request we just processed. So you may be saying hey that Hieu management is really nice but I only have three FOIA folks we don’t need to go through the cues management or anything like that okay that’s fine we have a totally different view for you folks you have the ability to use what we call the request module essentially the same request you can do all the same things like implement the collecting information you can send something through litigation you have all the ability to kind of move through the overall workflow right here within this at this location. So you can move through the individual steps by completing thisticket and move it in on through.

You also have access to the document section like we talked about earlier so here’s all our final documents. So once again as you can see or they are marked as records I do apologize I couldn’t show you and share but they are marked as record this is a seamless thing.

Additionally you can see all the different tasks that maybe a fired out for this specific request so if we had created a manual Tasker that you can see it here. So once again this is just a different view you can even see the actual person that submitted this and once again that ties into the people module and things along those lines, so once again there’s a lot of functionality that can be used and just depends on how you want to leverage it queues and requests module are essentially the same thing just different views for the request.

The task module also once again is where it stores all tasks that are in the system so this would be maybe you needed a new global task you wanted to create a task maybe I needed to meet with James about something, maybe I wanted to tie a specific task to an actual request this is how you can see that it’s linked. So once again you can process these requests or these tasks at any time so as you can see or if I move down to a specific task like the approval of a cost sheet so we talked a little bit earlier in the introduction that you can tie a lot of things to an actual to an actual request.

So we can track cost and time associated to request whether it’s my Matt the user that’s logged in or maybe James has logged in working on the same request finding documents he can also charge Tomic. This is just a process in which the individual cost sheet goes to the workflow.

So once again there’s a lot of tasks that will be fired, any task that is associated to step in the workflow will have a process diagram so you know where in the overall process it is. Jumping down into time and cost this is what a cost sheet looks like each person can create their own cost sheet and time sheet and they can actually tie it directly back to a specific request so I can see how much expense is associated back to this request I wanted to jump back to the request and take a look at the request and look at the cost or time associated I can actually see that information right here within the actual within the actual request okay.

Time is the same thing you can track the hours associated and you can tie the actual hours to an actual charge, charge roll and very quickly I’ll show you by editing the timesheet. I can show you what a charge roll looks like as you can see here if I go in here and say I needed an investigator who was looking for something and I spent they spent two hours on Monday you can see that it costs $300 an hour.

So this is a configurable value in the actual admin module so once again a lot of other bells and whistles where you can track time and cost associated to a specific request. All right so let’s switch gears once again, we are able to now processthe request and there’s many different ways to process a request but how do you find your information.

Well the first way is just our advanced search. The advanced search can find the information that we’re looking by using keywords or as you can see are we going to type ahead and what this is doing is they’re searching across all of the metadata are all the persistent data but it’s also searching across all of the documents that have been ocr’d and index. So we are searching full text and on metadata here.

This search result is fully configurable these are the a debauch columns and the out-of-the-box facets or the categorization so maybe it’s one of the singing things been released about budget you can see that narrows down that information. Maybe I wanted to see anything about the you know something that’s specifically in the intake you like an air leak. Now once again these are all hyperlinks that will actually redirect you out to the location so you can see the detail.

Maybe you were looking for a specific file you could actually see that there’s you know a way to narrow down by an object type like a file, maybe I was looking at a specific document wanted to download I can actually download a native format and show you what that looks like very easily. You can jump out to the viewer jump out to the parent to get where that document is. There’s a lot of flexibility and not only finding the information but then navigating to see the details okay.

There’s also another way to search utilizing tags this is a very focused search so you can add tags to really any layer of object when I say an object I mean a request, the document, a task whatever it may be so you can categorize things with tags so it’ll help you find the information much much more quickly so you can see all of these things have to do with a budget tag.

So if I was to go out to any of these locations you would see that either the document or the request is tagged so. Once again just another way to search but has the same look looking field has the search results and has the fastest on the right-hand side.

So I’m going to jump over and show you real quick where the tags live as you can see here this is where the tags live I can add tags not only on the request level but I also can add them on the document level. So it’s pipe ahead it’s are you going to tell me that it’s already a tag and it’s going to let me add a tag there so I can add a tag here or I can even go in and add a tag and on a document or something like that okay.

So once again very easy you can add multiple tags at any one time so if I want to need a tag one, it’s a new tag maybe I want to tag two I got as many tags that want on each individual request or document. Once again just another way to categorize things be able to search and find them.

So let’s jump into the canned reports. So I’ve got some of the sample reports in here and I’m going to run it for the last couple of days you do have the ability to leverage all of the out-of-the-box DOJ reports this happens to be one of those samples. There are 32 DOJ reports that will be available to you out of the box but you do have the ability through the admin report designer to create your own one-off report so we don’t limit what we provide you have the ability to build your own. So this is just some of the canned reports that you can see the exempted codes we talked about earlier and how we categorize those and as you can see here these are these are laid out after the example of the DOJ reports.

We also have an audit report the audit report actually is running against all system audits and manual audits that are actually happening on the front end. So basically anyone that logs in it basically performs really any type of search or viewing or opening it will actually log the information here what IP address is coming from. So just another sample report that’s available to you now.

Transitioning to admin, admin is really the brains behind the overall system obviously our case for you out of the box will work for pretty much any business but once you get to the point where you want to start configuring the application to best meet your requirement. Whether it’s terminology like labels or drop-down changes or maybe it’s around security.

So security we talked about we do offer syncing with Active Directory we do provide a single sign-on but since this is implemented with Active Directory we do have the ability to sync Active Directory groups, but once those are synced we actually have to tie them directly to what we call a functional access control.

The functional access control is the actual role that we talked about the admin role. That role is actually tied to many specific privileges you can see her they’ve got a lot of authorized privileges for the administrator group but as you go down to the different groups or roles or see the roles you have different privileges.

Out of the box you can utilize these, you can leverage these, you can tie these roles directly to your your groups in Active Directory and you can use the system essentially the first you know the first second you have it downloaded. So if you decide you want to build this out and modify these roles by editing them or changing the privileges or even creating your own roles, just create the role here in the the actual create role privileged config configuration and then tie that functional access new role to the group’s you want to have that access.

You can tie a role one group or many groups there’s no restriction. They’re moving on insecurity you also have the ability not only to drill down into privileges but you also have the ability from a higher level to restrict an entire module.

So for instance maybe I want to restrict the subscription. Subscription module as you can see here we have the subscription module available and is actually available to the role administrator that happens to be the actual role that’s tied to my group. I’m going to go ahead and remove that and as you can see real-time it successfully updated okay. So basically anybody that’s utilizing that or has access to that now no longer has access to it so that’s real-time.

The same way with dashboard configuration and reports you do have the ability to control which reports are associated to which group or role I should say.

Additionally within the configuration you have things like label configuration I’ve talked about dropdowns maybe you decided immediately that the file types that we’re leveraging request document an audio and video these are not doc types that you want. Well it’s very easy for you to come in here and delete that information. You can delete it you can even edit the information maybe you want to drag and drop the location of where these things are in your actual drop-down. So you have full control on what is shown in your actual table and what order is in.

And once again this is pretty robust pretty much any drop-down you have in the system is available in this lookup table. You also have label configuration so label configuration is extremely robust. So let’s spend just a minute talking about this so this is not only just like navigation labels or table labels it’s actually down to the individual columns of a table. So basically any button or column anything along those lines you’re able to modify the actual label within the actual application.

So out of the box it may work for you but you may decide you want to change some labels you can go in here and basically click on any label you can change the label and update it. If you want to reset to the default you can reset and then as you move through the different modules you can change these labels freely and easily so we put the power into the in users hand, so as things change make terminology changes, you do have the ability to update pretty much any label change or lookup drop-down within the application on your own.

Now we’ll train you how to use this once again will be available for support if for some reason you need help utilizing that. We also allow you to handle your own logos whether it’s the header logo at the top left or even a login logo once again out of the box we provide the ArkCase FOIA logo but you can update that with your personal logos.

If you have someone on staff that can handle custom CSS you can change the look and feel of the overall application, so a lot of things we’re putting it back in the hands of the end-user.

One item that we didn’t talk much about today but was kind of implied was the correspondence templates. We talked about the acknowledgement letter that’s automatically generated and sent out by email well that is a correspondence template you have the ability to maintain your static correspondence templates and every time they’re used they populate the information like all the merge, excuse-me merge fields what we call mail merge you have the ability to build out templates and utilize them as part of your workflow, so maybe they were the acknowledgement letter doesn’t meet the standard text that you want well.

You can go into the correspondence template download your template and then update it and upload it right back into the correspondence and maybe even modify some of the data that you want to be placed on that specific correspondence template and you would then see the next time that that template is generated either automatically or manually, it would have the new information placed on there the new static temporarily be used so on and so forth.

And you can build out as many templates as you want here in the correspondence template we provide quite a few samples but you can manipulate those.

So outside of that that really kind of gives you a high-level idea of the overall process I know we rush quickly through the use case a request coming in from a web portal once again it can come in from many different ingestion places whether it’s another external system, maybe its back suggestion, email ingest and maybe it set up snail mail and scanning something in through say Epis all or some other scanning mechanism that would come right into ArkCase.

You would then take it from the intake to you these are just suggested sample queues out of the box, but they can’t can be configured to other queues that are needed and then we take it on through essentially to a release point where we actually provide the final documents to the end-user.

At the end of the day you do have the ability not only to get that information in and process it let’s go then search it in many different ways and then control the overall look and feel through your admin module. So, hopefully this was beneficial from a very quick perspective and we can go from there.

All right so I’m going to go ahead and show you one last thing I know I mentioned it since we have just an extra minute before we turn it over to Q&A. This dashboard I was talking about earlier is specific to my user which means that I have access to control the dashboard, so I can move things around, I can actually set this dashboard up any way that I want I can remove dashboards, I can add dashboards.

Once again this is high-level information that helps me as the user that logs in see what I’m actually trying to process and what I’m actually trying to do for the day maybe right here on my dashboard once again these Dashboard widgets out of the box are available to you, but you can configure your own dashboard widgets maybe you need specific metadata that you want your supervisor so your higher-ups to see every single day so you can actually use it to jump off the different locations.

As you can see here I’ve changed my dashboard, as you can see where I jump to the intake you from this widget maybe I wanted to jump right into a specific request right there from the table and as you can see it jumps you’re running the request so I can see the detailed information.

So wanted to make sure that you knew that everything in this application is role-based driven so I as this user that’s logged in has a lot of control about configuring my look and feel and what access I have throughout the application to focus it to my specific persona. So, that’s really the the nice thing about ArkCase it provides a lot of configuration right from the admin front-end to be able to make the users experience what that persona needs and only what that personsona needs.

But what that means said I’m going to turn it back over to Lauren.