On August 28, 2026, City of Fayetteville staff met with Granicus consultant Sam for a virtual working session focused on Legistar pre-meeting processes, approval tracking, administration settings, email notifications, and out-of-office/alternate approver workflows. No agenda or minutes were available for this meeting; the summary is based on the transcript of the session.
Yeah, I will reach out to Marcus via Teams and find out if he's gonna be able to join us today. One moment. Sure. He's not responded yet, and it shows that he's away right now. Um so we can go ahead and get started and we can send him the recording. Um said he's just kind of gonna sit in the background to understand more last time. So yeah, and I and as always, I am recording this session. I'll be recording them all, and then similar to your initial configuration of Letastar, I'll be uploading them to your training site so you can just kind of review them as needed. Perfect. All right. So thank you for joining. Today our kind of goals are to uh kind of look at pre-meeting processes, how can we improve things such as with specifically our approvals and taking a look at administration as well. I know that was one thing that your team also wanted was to kind of better understanding or at least resource to help better utilize the administration module. We'll also be taking a look at legislate, the kind of new ver web-based version by legislate. Uh any questions about our agenda for the day. I don't think so. Okay, great. One I found if I try to share my screen and have my camera at the same time, I get laggy. No worries. All right. So as you know, all the settings related to the approval tracking are in administration. One thing uh one thing I'll be showing you today and I'll be sharing with you as part of my follow-up, is the letter start administration guide. This is a full, it's almost 60 page document with every single setting in administration and a description of what that setting does. What I love the real value I find I still use this. I use this all the time is I can say like out of office and see what settings might be related to that or thing or at least get some idea of where it is. Similarly, if I was like looking at numbering, you know. It I can then just at wait sketch the place, has screenshots, and again a description of each setting. So that's uh versus I'll be sharing with you. There are a handful of areas in administration that only Granicus has access to, so those are not included in this guide, just to prevent confusion. Okay. But it's nothing you'd ever be touching anyway. It's like report template code, you know. Gotcha. All right. So I'm gonna kind of like some of this will of course be review, but I want to start with a kind of overview of the approval tracking system and kind of like settings related to it. So of course if a what as with a lot of things in Letter Starts in people. So for each individual user, as you know, they're some mandatory settings like display name, last name. But those aren't you the only mentor, but there are other ones that you can utilize, for example, putting in their email address so they're able to receive email notifications, what their email preferences do they want to get an email every time they require one immediately? Or for users, oftentimes this will be for like county council city attorney, they'll get a daily summary because they might be a member of a number of approval sequences. Don't want to get like bombarded by emails or confused by them. Okay. And then there is also a no emails at all setting. So like I said, that daily summary, that's often out, like anyone who is a member of multiple approval tracking sequences that that's really beneficial for because again, keeps them for getting too many emails or perhaps even getting confused by them too. And can you um schedule when those daily emails will go out? Yeah, so it and the same is true, and this I'll be going to this in more detail later with email notifications if someone is out of office, unavailable, or things like that. I'll talk about that a little bit later on as well. Other, of course, really important active, because as you know, when someone leaves, you don't want to delete their whole person record because then they'll affect historical records to say just mark them as an active. And the other one, approver, it's a little bit of a misnomer because it doesn't just apply to approvers, but it applies to anyone who'd be part of an approval sequence. That includes FYI notification people as well. So this checkbox, one thing to keep in mind is it doesn't actually affect their security group, their user settings.