Clerks and agenda creators are constantly looking for ways to innovate in their roles. According to a recent article in Governing titled “City Managers on a Constant Quest for New Places to Fix,” City Managers are working harder to fill those gaps of innovation within their cities. In other words, it would seem all local government staff, from the Clerk to the City Manager to the Sheriff are being sought out to solve the issues within cities on top of their already demanding job tasks.
Granicus’ Peak Agenda Management solution was created with these important tasks in mind, and has enabled city leaders to save valuable time while managing the day-to-day functions of city government. In our continuing quest to make the jobs of government staff easier and the lives of citizens better, we have released several important updates to keep our Peak Agenda Management software up to date with what local government leaders need.
To make Peak a little more manageable for user permissions and for those in your organization who see the information, we’ve added features that allow an Admin to set tighter user group security. Once enabled, if a user is not assigned a meeting body or meeting type, they have restricted access to viewing agendas that their user groups do not own. These users also have no visibility of agenda items belonging to those meeting bodies. Meetings are still visible on the Peak dashboard and calendar for these users, but if they try and access the agenda (or meeting details, in case of an Agenda Coordinator), they will be denied.
We’ve also added a view-only role to Peak to facilitate access for users who need to view agenda items but do not need to edit anything. All access to agendas and items that have been approved are read-only for this user.
These enhancements allow for better control of an organization’s many agenda users, approvers, and anybody needing to view the agenda. It also aids in clean information so only the individuals you designate can make changes to your agenda.
Not everyone has time to browse through document after document. To make it easier for our users to find specific agenda items and attachments, we’ve added an advanced search option on the “Items” page. This search enables a user to search for data in any of the fields, whether it be custom fields they build or standard search features. And multiple standard fields can be used in combination with a custom field to further narrow a search. With nearly instant and powerful indexing of new agendas, attachments, and items, searching can return any result even if your agenda has just been uploaded.
These updates showcase the power of Peak and came as a request from several clients. The ability to instantly index and search agendas, items, and attachments allows Peak users to more efficiently locate and manage their agendas, especially in a large organization that may have thousands of agendas stored.
One of the main problems clerks and agenda creators run into is tracking down the approver — sometimes physically walking to their desk — to make sure they get their portion of the agenda approved. If you have several approvers and are waiting on information from all of them, this could take a while.
Therefore, we wanted to make it easier and integrate some new features around approvals and workflows. Now the admin just has to assign meeting bodies and types to a specific user group, then those groups and departments can be assigned an approval workflow. This allows the process to be far more automated and removes some potential confusion from users on which workflow to be working in. They will only be able to see their workflow within their meeting body.
Want to learn more about how cities are using Peak to simplify their processes? Check out our guide on 3 Ways Small Cities are Thriving with Automation.
