The Digital Platform is where people come to engage with your organisation. At it's core is a powerful content management system you can use to publish multiple websites; a wide range of flexible templates to layout your content and create interactive elements; forms and workflow process designers that deliver interactive services; powerful APIs and integration End Points; and all of the tools you'd expect to manage users, schedule tasks, generate reports, capture logging, and more.
Products like Case Management and Bookings, built with and running on the platform, extend the core functionality, meaning that just about every service you can think of can be delivered in a consistent and integrated way.
Content Management
One of the core features of the platform is a powerful content management system you can use to publish websites and portals. It has all of the features you'd expect from a leading CMS, including the ability to publish multiple websites and subsites, create and manage articles, media, forms, search, users and security, external links, metadata, site styles... The list is so long it's easier to take a look at the Websites and Content documentation.
Websites
The platform's content management system, iCM, can manage an unlimited number of websites from the same admin interface.
To get you started our out of the box installations include one site intended for public access over the internet and a second secured site for your staff, which could become your corporate intranet or be used as a portal for carrying out staff actions and tasks in the platform (or both).
Websites can be set up with their own URLs, IP restrictions, security settings, content and style. They can be completely segregated or share content and settings, depending on how you want to use the platform.
The Subsites documentation explores sites in more detail.
Articles
Articles make up the pages of your website. An article might contain text, images, downloads, forms, videos, or any other content you can think of. Articles also have security applied to them, restricting who can see them. There is very little that will appear on your site without being published as part of an article.
There's a guide to setting up key articles and templates used by the platform in the Building the Platform section. Full documentation, including the editor, security, publishing, approval workflows and version history is in the Articles section.
Templates
Each article you publish will use a template. The template will control what your article looks like and the additional content it displays.
Most articles you create will use the Default template, which simply publishes the content in the way you tell it to. Other templates include the Forms Service (for displaying forms), List (for displaying a list of other articles) and Search (which automatically includes a search box).
All of our current templates are described in the Templates documentation.
Workflow and Case Management
The platform includes a business process modeller and case management engine. These features let you deliver services via your site quickly and flexibly.
Case Management
Case Management delivers case handling and CRM capabilities via your website. It integrates with other elements of the platform, allowing your users to track their cases via My Account and User Requests, and your staff to work on cases using the Self Service template.
Cases are active workflow processes. When a user raises a case they are able to track its progress, respond to questions from the case manager, be notified of appointments, and add notes that will be logged in the case history.
Case managers can review all of the details submitted by the user, see and manage SLAs, assign tasks to other teams, log appointments, review and add notes to the case history (which can be flagged as public or private), manage files attached to the case, contact the citizen, and assign the case to another staff member or team.
You can build your own forms to raise cases and use the extensive configuration options to control exactly how a case behaves.
Workflow
The workflow process modeller lets you design and implement your own workflows. These might plug into Case management, or could be completely stand-alone.
Business process models manage the workflow of tasks and interactions that make up the services delivered by your site. This allows work to be passed from user to user, data to flow back and forth between systems, notifications and tasks to be sent and assigned to users, and timers, sub-processes, gateways and events to automatically control how a job progresses.
Self Service and User Requests
These two templates display tasks and requests to your users.
Self Service is designed to be used by your staff members. It displays lists of workflow tasks they can carry out. You can use a range of filters to control the process that will be displayed by the template. From that set of process users will see lists of the tasks that are assigned to them, or that they are eligible to claim (ie they are a candidate for).
User Requests is part of the public My Account. It's intended to deliver a single view of all of the activities a user has been involved in, with activities displayed on a series of cards. Each card includes information about a request, followed by buttons for the tasks and activities the current user can perform.
Assisted Service
Assisted Service lets one user act on behalf of another. It is designed to be used by customer service agents working with a user, perhaps over the phone, to help them complete tasks on your website. Tasks are recorded against the user being assisted, as if they had completed them themselves.
Users and Accounts
Users can create an account directly with your site or login and create an account using third party providers like Google, Facebook or in the case of staff, your corporate directory services. Once they have an account they can track all of the services they have engaged with.
Users are organised into groups, and the platform's security settings control what users in a group can see and do.
The Website Users and User Management section looks at users in a lot more detail.
Forms
Forms are one of the main ways users engage with your site. A form submission might start a case in Case Management, book tickets, reserve a room, display data in dashboards or on maps, or look up information in third party systems.
The forms designer includes over 80 different field types ranging from simple text inputs through to integrations with mapping services and payment providers. The designer's drag and drop interface and Blockly script editor makes building powerful forms quick and easy.
Take a look at the growing collection of Form Tutorials to get started.
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