Setting Up A Work Queue

Charitylog allows users of the system to send actions to any other user. However, sometimes users want to have somewhere generic they can send work. This might be because;

• When sending actions, the user wants to send them to a team rather than to a specific person
• The user sending the action doesn't know the specific person that should pick it up, so they want to send it to a department (this often happens in large organisations)
• The action could be done by various part-time staff depending on who is in the office first, so the user sending the action wants to have the outstanding action displayed on more than one person's Action List

There is a way that this can be done. There are two steps:

1. Set up a user account for the department or team that you want to send work to
2. Configure the default Action Lists of the people in that department or team that will be notified, so that these people see the work sent to the department or team as well as their own specific actions

Example scenario

Suppose that the TLA Community Project runs a telephone counselling service. There are two members of staff that deliver this service, Kiersten Denmann and Colin Snider. However, they both work part time. The receptionist at the TLA Community Project takes incoming calls, so when people want to access telephone counselling, the receptionist sends an outstanding action to ask Kiersten or Colin to call the client back and arrange a session.

However, the receptionist doesn't know whether it will be Colin or Kiersten that needs to do this, because they both work part time and the receptionist doesn't always know who will be in the office next. Therefore, the action needs to be sent to both Kiersten and Colin, so it can be picked up by whoever sees it first.

Setting up the user account for the team or department

Click on Administration > Security > User Settings > Users. This will display a list of all users of the system (Colin and Kiersten's user accounts are boxed in red - we'll come back to them later). Click on "Create New User".

You can now create a user account for the team. Set the user up as follows:

General Details tab

• Full Name: can be anything you like. Using capitals will make the user stand out in the list on Record a Contact screen.
• Username: required, can be anything
• Password: