Dane County staff say Granicus incident emails lack detail, ask vendor to clarify
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Summary
County staff told Granicus representatives during a training call that automated incident notifications for Legistar and related products provide insufficient detail, causing confusion about whether and how staff should respond.
Dane County staff told Granicus representatives on a June support call that automated incident emails from Granicus give too little information about product outages and make it unclear whether county users need to take action.
County staff said message subjects often only note “an incident” and link to a status page without explaining which product functionality is affected or how severely. That uncertainty has left staff unsure when to notify internal teams or escalate to vendor support.
On the call, a Granicus representative acknowledged the problem and said incident notices are typically authored by the vendor’s incident team or senior support leadership. The representative said she would relay feedback to the incident team and asked county staff to forward examples of confusing messages so the vendor can improve the text and links.
County staff gave examples of notices that list multiple Granicus components as affected (for example, Swagit video and media manager playback) while the county does not use all those products. Staff said that created ambiguity about whether Legistar itself was degraded.
The vendor representative said the status page does include a lifecycle for incidents—"investigating, identified, monitoring, resolved"—but agreed that the initial email often lacks specific impact details. She proposed follow-up with the incident communications team and suggested possible product-level subscriptions so clients receive notifications only for products they actually use.
County staff also asked whether Granicus could link Office 365 out-of-office signals to Legistar in the future so automated out-of-office settings and some notifications would synchronize; the vendor said that integration is under consideration but gave no firm timeline.
Staff said broad-scale outages reported by Granicus (for example, a data-center power loss) should be articulated more clearly in initial emails so county IT and communications staff can determine whether to alert internal users or the public.
The vendor representative asked county staff to forward specific confusing messages so Granicus can revise templates and make the status-page links more useful. The county attendees said they would do so.
The conversation concluded with Granicus agreeing to take the feedback to its incident communications lead and follow up with the county about whether product-filtered notifications and clearer email copy are feasible.
The call did not record any formal change to Granicus incident procedures; the vendor said it would investigate and respond to the county’s request for clearer messaging.
