Trainer walks Dane County staff through Legistar administration; follow-up session tentatively set

Trainer (Legistar trainer) led a roughly 90-minute remote refresher on Legistar administration for Dane County staff, covering how back-end settings determine public-facing agenda and Insight page behavior and how to configure people records, meeting bodies, approval sequences, workflow templates and attachment requirements.

The training focused on the practical steps administrators use to keep the county’s agenda and minutes system consistent. "If you haven't been in there before, it is basically the back end configurations that can control the front end," the trainer said, describing how site information, logos, and address fields feed the system’s public pages. The trainer added, "I have logged in with my Legistar credentials, and I do have to have admin rights in order to use Legistar administration," to explain why only assigned administrators should change system settings.

Why it matters: county staff and elected-official profiles, agenda templates and approval flows are driven by these back-end settings. The trainer noted that people records are retained for historical purposes and should be deactivated rather than deleted when users leave; the trainer said the county’s People list currently contains about 2,000 records. Administrators walked through: creating and editing people records (names, titles, departments, email preferences, alternate approvers), assigning elected officials and office members to meeting bodies, and uploading photos or signatures used on reports.

The session detailed user-account and security-group management: how to add users (people must exist as a people record before being added as a user), how usernames and standard passwords are generated, and how security-group permissions and body-level access must be granted when a new meeting body is created. The trainer demonstrated the security log for auditing recent changes and noted that body-level access needs explicit assignment when a new legislative body is added.

On approval tracking, the trainer explained approval sequences, the options for department- or person-restricted sequences, typical due days (the trainer used a standard of two days in examples), and how email templates are attached to action types. The trainer showed building a sequence with approvers and FYI members and demonstrated copying existing sequences to save setup time.

Workflow control and meeting body templates were covered in detail. The trainer explained that meeting-body types share a master agenda template and workflow actions; administrators can rename body types, set whether a mover and seconder are required, control header/footer text and determine which file types appear under each agenda section. The trainer also flagged common cleanup tasks, including removing unused file statuses (the trainer noted about 50 file statuses in the county’s list) and explained that deactivating a status prevents new use, while deleting throws an error if it has never been used.

Administrative features demonstrated included auto-numbering for file IDs, text-section and text-file templates for staff reports, code-section imports for associations, and attachment templates that can require drafters to attach specified documents (for example, a staff report) before starting approval tracking.

The trainer reviewed vote and attendance types, motion and vote text strings used in minutes, meeting statuses, and standard paragraphs that can be reused in minutes entries. The trainer pointed out the difference between items shown on the public Insight page and those kept internal: if a file type is marked "not available on the web," it will still print on an agenda but will not create a clickable link to the public item.

Scheduling follow-ups: staff agreed to schedule further training. Kylene (county staff member) told the trainer she would be unavailable on the 4th; the trainer and participants tentatively held a two-hour follow-up session on the 6th from 9 to 11 a.m., pending calendar checks. Kylene confirmed she could make that time, saying, "I can do that. I can make that work." The trainer also confirmed a boards-and-commissions training session set for the 30th.

The trainer closed by directing participants to the in-product Help tab for field-level definitions and offered a calendar invite to finalize the follow-up session.