The recent crisis has enveloped the world and has very quickly has impacted the way that we all conduct our business. Our team has been having many conversations with our Customers about how they can very quickly adapt their operations to efficiently work remotely.

We wanted to share some ideas that you might not have yet considered in order to leverage your eSCRIBE services to ease the burden on staff. If you have any questions on the details below please reach out to our team to discuss how we can best support you. For those who do not currently subscribe to the modules mentioned below, please reach out to our team to discuss how we can best support you.

For those who do not currently subscribe to the modules mentioned below, please reach out to your Account Manager to discuss how we can assist you in this difficult time.

General Staff

• Due to the fact that eSCRIBE is managed and stored on Microsoft Azure, this will allow all of your staff to login to eSCRIBE from home with minimal assistance from your IT department (all they need is an internet connection).

NOTE: staff who are not using their typical computers, for eSCRIBE to operate as normal, they might need to complete the Recommended Browser Settings

• How staff collaborate on reports remotely becomes very important. Using Report Manager to draft and collaborate on reports is significantly more centralized and efficient then emailing around many copies of Word documents among colleagues.
  

  NOTE: When working remotely it's an important best practice to leverage communication and collaboration tools at your disposal instead of burdening your email inbox.

  • Here is a help article to guide you to draft reports using Report Manager: Contributor - Creating a Draft Report 
  • If you need further assistance in getting your staff quickly on-boarded please reach out to our team. You can view the available training sessions here: Training Session Outlines
• For agenda items that do not require reports to be written for submission of the agenda item - correspondence items for example, staff can use the Agenda Requests feature to submit agenda items electronically.
  • Here is a help article to guide you to submit agenda items: Contributor - Creating Agenda Requests

Management

• When working in a remote environment, older processes such as walking around a report for approval are no longer possible, and emailing various versions of draft reports just isn't efficient. Leveraging your eSCRIBE system with even basic approval processes for Report Manager will maintain a centralized and streamlined approval submission process. It ensures that everyone knows where the most current versions of your reports are, while also maintaining the audit trail for accountability purposes.
  • Here is a help article to guide you to create approval workflows: Administrator - Configuring Workflows
  • Here is a help article to guide you how to manage approvals: Contributor - Approving a Report
  • If you need further assistance in getting your staff quickly on-boarded please reach out to our team. You can view the available training sessions here: Training Session Outlines
  • To even facilitate remote workers even more, you can leverage your Approval Manager app to make approving reports on the go even easier simply by using your smart phone
    • Here is a reference guide on how to use Approval Manager: Approving a Report using the Approval Manager App
• In times of crisis, it is often that our institutions meet more often then they did before. With the creation of task forces and increased frequency of management and staff meetings to ensure that everyone continues to be in the loop and decisions can be made quickly on the fly.
  
  In order to help you do this, we want to remind everyone that you can leverage your eSCRIBE site beyond the formality of Council/Board/Committee meetings for informal or adhoc meetings.
  • At it's simplest level all you need is an attendee group ( Creating New eSCRIBE Attendee Groups) and a new meeting type, which isn't even required to have any standard template items if it's not necessary. 
  • Feel free to reach out to our team to discuss how you can create a basic informal meeting template or review this help article for additional information: Copying a Meeting Type
  • For a complete list of steps in creating new users, attendee groups & basic meeting template please feel free to leverage the Meeting Manager Training Activities Sheet