Updates

While there were a number of hurdles over the course of this semester, our team was able to make steady progress and identify what needed to be done moving forward. Our main focus was automatically sending a follow-up email after the case in Insightly was moved from opportunity to investigations, as this would allow the person making the allegation to sign the form in DocuSign. Unfortunately, we ran to some issues while attempting to do this. Specifically, Zapier was unable to automatically detect the email address of the person the email needed to be sent to, despite the fact that the address was listed in Insightly. We reached out to Zapier support, but weren’t able to get their response immediately, as it was sent to Alia’s (our project partner’s) email.

Once we did receive the response, we were told that this was an issue that we would need to contact Insightly about. Following this, we continued trying to solve the issue internally, and found that the reason Zapier did not detect the field is because it was a manually added custom field, rather than one automatically included. To resolve this issue, we would likely need to make a new section in Insightly, but this is something we would need to consult with Alia about.

While we were unable to fully accomplish the goals we set at the beginning of the semester, we have been able to make steady progress. Given the unforeseen problems that we had, we believe that our progress has been reasonable and beneficial for teams moving forward.

This month saw steady progress being made throughout and the development of a path forward for future developments. A plan was made and approved detailing the main tasks we wished to accomplish, a general timeline, and the distribution of work. We’ve had regular meetings each Wednesday with the project partner to discuss progress made and address any issues faced or requirements from our team. More recently, internal meetings have been held on Sundays to work on the project as a group. Using this structure, we were able to resolve an issue in the intake form that resulted in errors once the form was sent to Insightly. There was some delay in addressing this bug, as we did have to get the credentials for Squarespace in order to edit the website where the form was being hosted. In the meantime, we began to familiarize ourselves with the operations already existent in Zapier and what needed to be done in order to complete the first point of automation.

The first point of automation involving setting up an appointment with the person who filed the report for an initial interview ran into some difficulty. There was a degree of confusion in terms of what field needed to be changed in Insightly and how the person would go about selecting a time for the appointment. Once this was clarified however, we were able to set up the system which would automatically email the person after FACE decided to move forward with their case, providing a Calendly link to set up an appointment.

Now that this is complete, we plan on turning our focus to using Zapier to fill out documents in DocuSign with information already gathered in Insightly. This should cover initial intake automation, which means we can then turn our focus to automatically creating a findings report with information gathered over the course of the investigation. This will likely be the most involved task, as it requires working with a variety of different file types (text documents, video, audio files). As a result, this task will likely be broken down into a number of subtasks. Should additional issues arise that require information not immediately available during the completion of these tasks, there were also minor errors encountered that could be fixed while we await response.

Overall, while there were issues with the setup of this project, progress made over the course of this month has been promising. Delays have put us slightly off track, but we should still be able to complete the planned tasks by the end of the semester.

The beginning of this month involved forming teams and learning about how the EPICS program functions. Once this was done, we began to review materials left by previous teams involved with this project, as a way to get an idea of what the partner needs and what we can do to work toward that. After this, we were able to meet with our partner in FACE, Alia, in order to ask further questions and learn directly what needed to be done. Based on this information and these discussions, we formed a plan on what we expect to get done during the semester. Now that all of our members have signed the necessary NDAs, we have access (in a limited capacity) to Insightly, Zapier, and Docusign. This allows us to move forward and begin working on streamlining the intake and communication between platforms used by FACE. Expectations and a plan for regular meetings with the client for feedback have been formed.

During the month of December, we made notable progress, we are closer than ever to finally converting the allegations received on the client’s website. In addition, the process of conducting intake is almost fully automated with a few steps left to go before the semester ends. We will be presenting our detailed progress throughout this semester during the upcoming EPICS exhibit. This will be the last month for our group on this team, and we can only thank the EPICS team and our client for the amazing opportunity this semester where we were able to gain a lot of technical and personal experience.

During the month of November, we had thorough meetings with our client and project manager to help identify the exact objectives for the second requirement, and distribute the workload between all the team members. We continued the integration of the task that will create an event in Insightly when a web user creates an event related to an investigation in Calendly. We also started working on converting the allegation forms where a “what to expect guide” is sent to the user via email when triggered by Calendly. Finally, we are working on a progress report to activate texting & Calling features.

This month was interesting, to say the least! We started off the month by researching different methods to approach automating the workflow needed between the various platforms used by FACE, and after identifying our client’s exact needs, we decided to proceed with Zapier which was cost-effective, fulfills the expectations, and is familiar to the client. After that, we attempted to enforce consistency across all the platforms to help eliminate the problem of having different design forms.

Towards the second half of the month, our team was given access to most applications used by FACE to test the software and we moved on to start working on the second task of this semester. Using Zapier, we integrated a repetitive task that will create an event on Insightly and notify a responsible employee via email, whenever an intake appointment is scheduled by a web user. We also started working on activating texts and calls to be able to log all types of communications (i.e. Emails, texts, calls) with sources using Insightly

Howdy! We are excited to be working on this project for the Fall 2021 semester, our team is super inspired by the amazing work done by the partners (FACE), and can not wait to hop on board. After a few meetings with the project partner, we are researching different ways and tools to transfer data from the forms used in the website to their current database, we will also work on adding checkboxes in specific sections of the database. Currently, we are planning on meeting a representative of “Zapier” to determine if it offers all the features that our partner is looking for and if it does, how to add them to their current database.