BasicGov / BLOG

As of last week, the new BasicGov Citizen Portal is now available.  The Product Development team at BasicGov been hard at work on the portal over the summer, and we are looking forward to implementing it, and seeing how it is used in action.  Our Implementation team is hard at work preparing for upcoming implementation as well, to make sure that this transition is as fast and easy as possible for our customers.

The Portal allows citizens to apply for permits, register complaints, submit planning applications, apply for licenses, request inspections, and download documents, online over the web.  The Portal directly interacts with the BasicGov system, so that as soon as citizens or developers apply for permits (or complaints, planning applications, or licenses) on the Portal, this information is immediately reflected in BasicGov, so that the city users can immediately see the permit, schedule inspections, and update the citizen on the status of the permit.  The Portal is a fast and easy way for citizens to get information to the city, and it is a great way for the city to immediately let citizens and developers know when the permit information has been updated.

The Portal is configurable for each city as well.  Each city can work with BasicGov to configure the information that is displayed for permits, complaints, licenses, and planning applications.  This means that the fields on each screen are configurable, as are the header information, and the messages that appear on each screen.  The technical architecture for the Portal enables BasicGov to configure this information quickly and easily for each city.

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Here’s my story about developing our new Parcel Updater for municipalities and going from Intern to Product Development Specialist.

I joined CloudBench Applications (BasicGov) in July 2009 as an Intern while wrapping up my Bachelor’s degree in Applied Science from the University of British Columbia. Before being promoted to Product Development Specialist in October, I was responsible for a variety of tasks the most critical of which was building a tool that would help our clients load their data into our systems within a few button clicks. This tool, which was later dubbed the “Parcel Updater“ took 3 weeks of intense development and captured the interests of several existing and new clients after its release.  I really enjoyed being able to put my 5 years of programming experience to work on this project.

The Parcel Updater has some interesting features; for example it can load thousands of data within a few minutes, it takes few steps to run, it can send email notifications, it does not require Microsoft Access or Excel to be installed, and it is compatible with Microsoft Windows’ XP and Vista. So far many of our local government customers are finding this Parcel Updater tool really helpful.

CloudBench Applications has a small but excellent and easy to work with team, deals with very interesting technologies and frameworks, and has great growth potentials. 
Besides that, they believe in the “work hard play hard philosophy” ;)

As such it was not difficult for me to make a decision when I was offered to stay with the company late September.