Dane County staff receive refresher training on Legistar administration

Trainer, a Legistar system administrator leading the session, provided a step-by-step refresher on the Legistar administration console and walked Dane County staff through people records, meeting bodies, user accounts, security groups, approval sequences, workflow control and attachment templates.

The trainer said the session would focus on “the essential and key components of registered administration,” and demonstrated how administrators can create people records and user accounts, assign elected officials to meeting bodies, configure security groups and set up approval-tracking sequences.

Why this matters: Legistar’s back-end settings determine what appears on public agenda and minutes pages (the county’s Insight page), which users receive email notifications and which meeting bodies and file types are available in staff workflows. The trainer flagged several setup and cleanup items that can affect public-facing information and internal approval processes.

Key points from the training

- People records and cleanup: The trainer noted the system contains about 2,000 people records and recommended deactivating records that are no longer needed rather than deleting them so historical minutes and audit trails are preserved. "The system does not allow for deletion once somebody's record exists in the front end of the system," the trainer said.

- User accounts and security groups: Administrators were shown how to add users (people must first exist as people records), assign them to security groups and control permissions. Security group settings include module-level access and body-level access; when a new legislative body is created, no security group automatically has access to it until an administrator assigns those permissions.

- Approval tracking and email templates: The trainer demonstrated how to build approval sequences, assign approvers or FYI recipients, set due days (the trainer used two days as a standard example) and link email templates to sequence actions. The trainer noted approver emails can be consolidated (daily summary) or sent individually depending on the person’s email preference.

- Meeting body types, workflow control and motion text: The session covered how meeting body types provide a master agenda template and shared workflow actions. Administrators learned to edit headers and section rules, set standard actions for file types (for example, marking "adopted" to update a file’s status to passed), and change standard motion text used in minutes.

- File types, file statuses and public visibility: The trainer explained file types and auto key numbering and showed that file statuses can be marked “available on the web” or hidden. If a file status is not available on the web, its agenda title will still print but the item will not be a clickable link on public pages. The trainer cautioned that deactivating a file status prevents new uses but does not automatically remove it from workflows that already reference it.

- Attachment templates and required documents: The trainer demonstrated attachment templates that force drafters to attach required documents (for example, a staff report) before initiating approval tracking. This was presented as a tool to reduce missing attachments on published agendas.

Questions and clarifications

- On titles and scope: A participant identified as Kylene asked whether an office title (for example, chair or vice chair) applies only to the meeting body where it is entered. The trainer confirmed: the title is specific to that meeting body and will display in contexts that pull the title for that body (for example, motion text or vote tallies).

- On deactivating file statuses: Asked whether deactivating a file status would remove it from existing workflows, the trainer tested the system and reported deactivating did not produce an error and appeared to prevent new uses while leaving existing references intact; deletion would be blocked if the status had already been used.

- On email and login details: The trainer showed that default account passwords generate as the word "password" (lowercase) and reiterated that administrators should change passwords and deactivate accounts for staff who leave the agency rather than deleting accounts.

Next steps and scheduling

The group agreed to tentatively schedule a follow-up, two-hour session to continue hands-on configuration and minutes scheduling. The trainer proposed Monday the 6th from 9 to 11 a.m. and participants agreed to check calendars and confirm that slot; the trainer said she would hold the time pending confirmation.

Ending

The trainer offered staff guidance resources in the administration help tab and encouraged local administrators to review security groups and file-status lists, remove or deactivate unused entries and consider attachment templates to reduce missing documents on agendas. The trainer and staff planned to meet again for the follow-up session to finish configuration and walk through minute scheduling.