Note: The new features discussed here were released to demo/sandbox sites on Sunday 11 April, to production Omnitrack sites on Sunday 25 April and to on-premise installations shortly after.
We’re giving you full control of your workflows with custom statuses and automations
Omnitrack is a flexible data collection tool which can accommodate many workflows and use cases. We’re always assessing how we can make Omnitrack even more flexible, practical and effective, and are excited today to introduce ‘custom statuses and automations’.
The ‘Edit Form’ section of Omnitrack now features two new pages – Statuses and Automations – that allow you to define your own workflow statuses and automation rules. Like all Omnitrack settings, these settings are intuitive, flexible and easy to set up with no technical know-how required.
Statuses page
You are no longer restricted to the default workflow statuses of ‘In Progress’, ‘Inbox’, ‘Register’ and ‘Archive’. Although these defaults work in some cases, they can be hard to understand and leave out critical steps in your workflow process.
For example, a Health & Safety Incidents Reporting workflow may include statuses of ‘Open’, ‘Under Investigation’, ‘Completed – reported’, ‘Completed – not reported’. Each use case in Omnitrack can have its own statuses and you can be as specific as you like to perfectly reflect your internal process.
Try it out today by clicking ‘Edit Form’ and navigating to the Statuses page in Omnitrack.
Pro tip: You can duplicate a form from the admin dashboard to create a ‘test’ version or work in a sandbox environment before editing your live forms.
By default, your existing statuses will remain and any existing submissions will still reflect their current status.
The statuses below may be a good place to start for a DAC6 workflow:
- Not Started
- In Progress
- Admin Review
- Non Reportable
- Reported
- Reported By Others
The padlock icon next to each status name allows you to set that status to ‘read only’ for end users, so, for example, you can prevent a user from making edits while a submission is “Admin Review”.
The order of the statuses listed on the page will determine the order of your workflow tabs for both admins and end users. You can reorder statuses by dragging and dropping them in the list.
Automations page
The Automations page allows you to define basic rules for automatically transitioning submissions from one status to another. Status transitioning is only the beginning for automations with many more automatic actions planned for the future.
For example, Automations allow you to specify that submissions should move from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Not Reportable’ when a user submits a form that didn’t trigger any flags.
More flexibility in other areas
Reminders
You can remind admins or users about key submissions using automated reminder emails, also found on the ‘Edit Form’ page. The new custom statuses functionality is available here so that you can choose multiple statuses as criteria for your reminders. For example, you can set a reminder to end users for submissions that are either ‘Not Started’ or under ‘In Progress’. There is no limit to the number of statuses you can select for each reminder email.
Admin view
Your can see your custom workflow in practice by navigating to ‘View Submissions’ as an administrator. The page should be very familiar but you’ll notice that your new workflow tabs across the top of the grid now reflect the new statuses you have set up.
When a new submission is created for an end user it will always start in the status you set for the ‘When a submission is created’ rule on the Automations page. Admins can manually move submissions to a different status either individually or in bulk.
End user view
Navigate to the end user view by clicking your profile icon in the top-right corner of the page and selecting ‘My forms’. Make sure you have at least one submission assigned or shared with you.
The grid of submissions for end users has been updated in two main ways:
- The tabs across the top of the grid now reflect the statuses so that end users can follow their submissions through the workflow process and easily see what stage their submissions are in. Where admins have disallowed editing for a particular status, that status tab will have a padlock icon next to it.
- The indication of whether a submission is shared or assigned to the user is more clearly displayed on the grid in a column called ‘Ownership’. Users can hover over the ownership column to see a list of shared users.
We have also rolled out a brand new mobile view for users to view and fill in their forms more easily on all mobile devices.
Public API changes
Each status will be automatically assigned a Status ID. The list of Status IDs for each form is displayed on the API Documentation page.
Instead of showing the status of a form as code such as “IN_PROGRESS”, from now GET requests to fetch submission data will show the status of the submission by ID, and the date on which that status was set, in the following format:
"statusData": {
"status": "8552418450438212",
"statusDate": "1617710570723"
}
There is a new API endpoint to set the status of a submission. It accepts the relevant Submission ID and the appropriate Status ID as parameters.
The dedicated “Archive a Submission” endpoint will continue to be supported for existing forms but is being deprecated. To change the status of a submission to archived, you should use the “Set the status” endpoint instead.
Talk to us!
If you need any assistance or would like to schedule a short walkthrough of the new functionality and how it can be applied to your Omnitrack, please contact our support team or fill in the form below.
