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JFAC staff demonstrate SharePoint, session record as primary public document access for budget season
Summary
Legislative staff walked Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee members through SharePoint and the public "session record," showing how members and the public can download, annotate and retrieve agency presentations and the legislative budget book during the budget-setting session.
Members of the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee spent part of orientation learning how to access committee materials through a new SharePoint setup and the legislature's public "session record." Keith Bybee, division manager for the Legislative Services Office's Budget and Policy Analysis team, told the committee the tool mirrors OneDrive and allows members to download and annotate the legislative budget book and agency presentations ahead of hearings.
The briefing was intended to reduce paper circulation and speed members' ability to find and mark up documents. "Think of SharePoint as that same mechanism, the kind of repository for you to check each morning," Bybee said, adding that downloaded files must be saved to a member's device before they can be annotated.
Bybee demonstrated the new naming convention for the materials, which groups agency presentations and analyst slides by a five-digit code and distinguishes analyst and agency versions (for example, "1-049A" for an analyst presentation and "1-049B" for an agency presentation). He showed members how to select multiple files and download them—advising that simply opening a file in SharePoint leaves it in read-only mode.
Bybee also showed the committee the legislature's public session record, which links recorded audio and video to the day's documents and provides an archive of presentations by agency and by date. "The session record is another really useful tool for the members," he said, noting it contains the video and audio files and can be used to review a prior day's presentations.
Practical points highlighted for the committee included: the legislative budget book is about an 850-page document and can be printed on demand; staff can assist members with copying files into a personal JFAC folder; and the Legislature has iPads and Surface Pros available for members who wish to annotate documents electronically. Bybee offered one-on-one follow-up help to members who needed it.
The SharePoint orientation lasted through committee questions and was followed by a review of the JFAC hearing schedule and the committee's plan to use small work groups to review agency budgets between the committee's morning sessions.
