Post Install
After you finishing running through all the installation, you should be able to load the home page in your browser. It should look something like this:
You should have already created an administrator account for yourself, and be able to successfully login to your new system.
Once logged in, on the Admin screen, you'll find links to User Accounts, Departments, Categories, and more.
Users, Departments, Categories, and Actions are all inter-related, so there is a fair amount of switching back and forth. For instance, you cannot completely set up a department until you've entered the categories that department will work with; and you cannot provide complete information for a category until you've created the department. So it is a little bit of chicken-and-egg problem.
While any person with a "Staff" user account can add and edit People. However, only an "Administrator" user account can add and edit other user accounts. User accounts are attached to people in the system, and creating new user accounts is creating new people in the system. As an adminsitrator, you can also look up existing people in the system and create a user account for them.
The system comes with an example department already started. You can edit the name as well as add some other departments. Right now, these departments will be empty. Once you have some departments in place, you can start assigning user accounts to departments.
You'll need some departments in place before you can assign user accounts to their departments. After we've set up some user accounts, categories, and actions, we'll come back to the departments list and update them with more information.
A department's default person is the person who is assigned new cases that are not assigned to anyone else. These are usually the cases that arrive from the Open311 clients. When a city staff member creates a new case, the staff member must choose who to assign the case to.
uReport will always assign a case to someone. There has to be someone accountable for each and every case in the system.
Categories define what reports are available to be posted. Example categories would be "Potholes", "Graffiti", or "Street Light Out". You are defining what types of reports you want to receive.
Categories are organized into Groups, to make it easier for citizens to browse and find the category to report. The system starts with a few example groups already defined. Most likely, you will want to set up your own groups, organizing whatever categories your city will have.
For example, see Bloomington's groups and categories: http://bloomington.in.gov/uReport. The first thing you see are the groups. Selecting a group will show the categories in that group.
When adding or editing a category, you must choose the department that is primarily responsible for handling cases in that category. You must have already created any departments you need. The existing departments will be available in the drop down.
Now that you've entered some categories, we can go back to editing the departments.
City staff will be able to add new cases to the system, and must choose what category they are entering. Once you've started adding several categories, the full list becomes cumbersome for city staff to pick from. Staff members typically are only entering new cases for their own department.
On the New Case screen for city staff, they will have a short select list of categories for their department to pick from. Once you've added categories, you can go back and edit the departments again, this time assigning some quick pick categories to each department.
Actions are what city staff do to cases over time. uReport comes with a small set of system actions that are already defined and available for all cases: (Open, Close, Assign, Refer, and Update).
In addition to these system actions, you can also define custom actions. These provide a way for city staff to record any special steps they want to keep track of while resolving reported cases. Note: the system does not enforce any particular workflow for these actions. In other words, you cannot require that the actions on a case take place in any particular order. Even without workflow, actions can still be useful for record-keeping.
After creating some actions, you can go back and edit the departments you would like to have those actions.
Giving each department its own set of actions keeps a small manageable set of options for city staff. If no actions are selected for a department, when a user of that department is logged in and looking at a case, the action form will not be displayed.
You might take a look at the rest of the settings available in the admin screen. The system comes with some example settings already populated. These should be fairly self-explanatory, you can edit values for these, as well as add your own.
- Substatus
- Contact Methods
- Issue Types
You can create labels to be used as a tagging system for cases. They just provide an additional way to organize and search for the cases.
This is where you issue api_keys for any applications you wish to allow access to post reports via Open311. Open311 clients require an api_key to be allowed to post reports. In order to provide access to client software, you'll need to generate an api_key here, then give that api_key to the developer of the software.
The City of Bloomington has a few open source clients available that can be used to interact with uReport via the Open311 api.
- https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/open311-proxy
- https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/open311-mobile
- https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/open311-android
We also publish a generic version of the open311-mobile and open311-android as GeoReporter. The GeoReporter app is available in Apple's App Store as well as Google Play.
If you would like, once you have a copy of uReport up and available to the public, we can add your city to the generic mobile apps. Just create an api_key in for us in uReport's Applications and let us know. We'll add the api_key to the mobile apps, and your citizens will be able to use one of those mobile apps to report to your city.
Of course, you can write your own custom mobile app client, or use any other Open311 capable client for your city.