The office of the Scottish Information Commissioner (OSIC) have changed their internet addresses and emails from the domain name “itspublicknowledge.info” to “foi.scot”.
In all templates:
“Email: enquiries@itspublicknowledge.info” must be changed to be “Email: enquiries@foi.scot”
“Web: www.itspublicknowledge.info/Appeal” must change to “Web: www.foi.scot/appeal”.
So that means each public sector organisation must change all templates and correspondence. In some of our clients this is over 100 different mail merge templates and automatic emails. It is a legal requirement for public sector organisations to provide instructions for when they are not satisfied with an FOI (or SAR). In all jurisdictions IG must provide applicants with the full contact details for the information commissioner in the jurisdiction. In the picture is an example where the end of a template letter presents this information to an FOI applicant (including non-internet options).
Timescales for change to foi.scot
The old itspublicknowledge.info email and website will forward to the new foi.scot links and emails. So you have time to plan and a changeover. Exactly how long do we have? Below is pasted in from a written response to this question from OSIC 14th August 2024:
“We haven’t yet set a fixed timescale for the closure of our old domain, but we’re obviously keen to ensure that anyone who tries to contact us via that route can continue to reach us, so I’d certainly anticipate that this redirect will remain in place for some time yet, and certainly for the next year.”
OSIC email response14th August 2024
That seems reasonable as our clients have sent out many thousand documents, letters and emails in the last month alone with the old emails and web links. Those cannot be changed but the new ones must be changed in your templates.
What is involved in changing to foi.scot
You will have many different files to change in different formats. For email merges, documents and auto-emails using Trigaware(TM), please call us up if you would like to run through and assess what needs to be done.
Mail Merges and auto emails
- HTML files for email templates
- TXT files for email and other templates
- Word documents (.doc, .docx, .rtf, and other)
Your website
- HTML pages on your website (.htm, .html) and many pages – probably best edited manually in your CMS system. Just ask your webbies to get it in he work queue.
Save time
A couple of clients have asked for help. We have used the batch function in Notepad ++ (free software) to update many hundreds of .txt, html, and .rtf files in one go. However, if you have only a few templates, it is probably a good opportunity to assign an officer to download each one and review and update them manually. A revie can never hurt and there are always opportunities to improve them.
We did the auto-emails (i.e. those launched by Trigaware(TM) manually. It was time consuming – especially where manual editing of HTML is required with subsequent testing.
Enhancements Planned
Going forward, we will add some template structure so that the IC contact details are available in text, html and any other format. Then they can be changed in as few places as possible. Most likely we will bring in a feature from our commercial applications called “System Templates”.
What’s next?
Did we miss anything? If you have any queries or would like AXLR8 to take over the problem, please call us for an estimate.
