Whether your organisation has just signed up to the platform, or you are a new user joining an existing team, these FAQs should help get you up to speed with all aspects of the platform, our hosting infrastructure, and the systems we use at GOSS.
Hosting
Where's my email?
All non-public facing environments (ie development, test and pre-production) are prevented from sending email. This is to prevent emails being sent accidentally to "real" users. Instead email is captured by an email testing tool called MailHog. We host dedicated MailHog instances for each of your environments which will allow you to see all emails sent from the platform. See Emails from Non-Production Environments for more information.
In production environments email is sent using AWS SES. As part of your platform setup we will help you with Email Security - Using DKIM and SPF Records and Verifying Sender Email Addresses.
Why isn't my environment available?
To reduce the environmental impact of our hosting infrastructure we have implemented policies that will power-down servers when they are not being used - primarily overnight.
See Environment and Infrastructure for the power on and off times. You can request that these times be extended.
What is your backup policy?
The Backup & Restore section of the Hosting Manual cover all of our policies.
What monitoring and alerting do you have in place?
This is described in the Monitoring & Alerts section of the Hosting Manual.
Platform Management
iCM users and passwords
The easiest way to manage your iCM users is to have them synchronise with your corporate domain accounts, like Active Directory or Azure AD. There's more information about setting that up in iCM Single Sign-On.
If you have separate iCM logins, you can use the "forgotten password" link on the login screen (you'll need to set up your security questions first). Otherwise you'll need to contact an iCM administrator at your organisation.
The support team will not reset passwords or change security settings in your systems.
File sizes
If you have a form with file upload fields which also get attached to an email sent by the form, the maximum total size of the email plus all attachments is 40MB.
At a server level the limits depend on the technology your site framework is using:
- iCM4j - 1GB limit in Apache
- iCM.NET - 500MB upload limit in IIS, but a maxRequestLength set in the site's Web.config will likely be lower
You can also (and should) set file size limits on the File Upload form field to prevent people uploading unnecessarily large files.
Article preview isn't working
Article preview, and the WYSIWYG editor, are designed to work from the URL of the subsite you are using. For example, if you are working on www.mywebsite.com, you should use iCM at www.mywebsite.com/icm. The enterprise URL is designed for management and reporting tasks across subsites, and while you can still work on articles, subsite dependent features will not work.
The following templates have limited or no preview functionality:
- Blog - The blog can be previewed but comments won't be displayed
- Browse - This template doesn't display any content of its own so there isn't anything to preview
- Document - The parent document can't be previewed, because it doesn't display any content of its own, but individual sections can be
- Event and Location - The body text of these templates will appear in the preview, but events instances won't appear. That does mean the map displayed on an event won't appear as this is stored in each event instance
- Redirect - This template doesn't display any content of its own so there isn't anything to preview
- Templates related to workflow functionality, like Assisted Service, Self Service, Task Management and User Requests - Without the context of a logged-in site user, preview cannot fetch workflow tasks or history records
Accessibility
What accessibility features does the platform have?
The platform and the sites it powers create accessible content as standard. There's a description of the behaviour and main accessibility features in the following articles:
Support and Project Development
How do I get support?
Support Operations covers all of our support processes.
For the systems we use to raise issues, see Support and Project Development Systems.
How are updates and deployments managed?
We have two processes for deploying updates:
- Updates to the core platform (ie iCM, the API Server etc) are deployed automatically alongside other server application level changes. These deployments follow the maintenance schedule described in Scheduled Maintenance. If your platform installation is also using the Standardised Site Release Notes collection of products, these updates are deployed at the same time
- Updates that are part of project development or support fixes which fall outside of the core platform and standardised site are deployed according to our change control process described in our Support Operations
Forms
Can we implement a progress bar?
There is no progress bar form field. Progress bars often cause more confusion than help users. How will you indicate progress if there are optional pages in your form, or answering a question in one way adds a new section to the form? What if a page repeats because a user can enter an unknown number of details (family members for example)?
The gov.uk design system talks a little about the problems in implementing progress bars and generally recommends not using them. See https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/question-pages/#using-progress-indicators
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