Citizen Services 1.3.1 represents a number of high-value features that expand the capabilities and enhance the flexibility of the platform. The release is about helping customers dial in those specific, granular settings that speak to their unique business processes.
Smart Forms
One of the features customers love about Citizen Services is the “WYSIWYG” form editor. Even users with no technical skills are able to design and create forms that their constituents use to submit service requests. Well, those forms have just gotten smarter in two important ways!
Conditional Logic to Show/Hide fields
Conditional logic can be added to the form so that certain fields on the form will only appear if specific conditions are met. For example, a form for reporting abandoned vehicles may have a field to indicate whether the car has a license plate. If the user selects “yes”, a new field can appear where the user can enter the license plate number, and conversely, that field will disappear if the user selects “no.”
This capability makes for much more usable forms by hiding irrelevant fields, and opens opportunities for previously unsupported use cases.
Cascading Dropdowns
In many situations, it’s useful for drop-down fields to be related to each other. For example, for a form requesting maintenance in an office, there may be a drop-down list to select which floor the office is on and another drop-down to select the room number. A cascading drop-down would allow you to configure the form so that only the relevant room numbers are loaded in the second drop-down once the floor is selected in the first drop-down.
Not only is this a useful capability in general, but specifically, it makes it easier to configure Citizen Services for use cases like building maintenance.
Export Service Request Data to CSV
Those familiar with Citizen Services know we provide an out-of-the-box dashboard with analytics derived from customers’ service request data, providing a rich, interactive tool that automatically surfaces insights, as well as the ability to export the data.
Customers can now export their service request data into a CSV file and work with it in their favorite spreadsheet or BI tool as often as they’d like. This provides a tremendous amount of flexibility in allowing customers to easily run ad hoc reports on their service request data.
Simply select a date range (and other filters if desired) and export the service request data into a CSV file. In most cases this will be a very quick operation, but if the number of records is very large, or their network bandwidth is insufficient (causing the operation to take too long) they can choose to receive an email with a link to the exported CSV whenever it’s ready.
Expanded Field Service Integration
In our previous release, we added the database version of the solution (prior to that we only had the Dynamics 365 version). As stated in the last update, only the Dynamics 365 version included integration with Dynamics 365 for Field Service. With this latest release, Dynamics 365 for Field Service integration is available to all customers.
Spanish Chatbot
Say “hola!” to our new Spanish chatbot. In prior versions, our chatbot was only available in English. In this release, the chatbot is now also available in Spanish. More languages coming soon!
As always, check back on this site soon as we’ll be posting more feature updates in the coming months!
During his tenure as Director of Product Strategy, Paul helped evolve AvePoint's market and product strategies as well as product marketing with focuses in sales enablement and product innovation for the Business Productivity portfolio. Paul has been dedicated exclusively to SharePoint since 2006 and has a special interest and deep expertise in Enterprise Search. Paul helped clients worldwide solve business problems by leveraging SharePoint and Enterprise Search, and shares his experiences with the greater SharePoint community by contributing to books, blogging at olenicksharepoint.com, and speaking at industry events worldwide.