What’s new with National Documents?

The Automatic Document Notification Scheduler is one of the many features available today in ISOlutions National eCommittees. It allows members of national committees to be informed whenever new national and international documents are published. It also allows NSBs to define the timing for these notifications to be sent. While this automated process is quite appreciated, it has some limitations:

• There are as many notifications sent as there are mirrored committees associated to the national committee resulting in many notifications
• It is not always clear to users why they receive a notification about an ISO committee and what the ISO committee or its projects are about (project references used instead of their name)
• The information included about new ISO documents is sometimes misleading. For example, the expected date to vote corresponds to the ISO ballot date which is usually after the equivalent national ballot
• The information about new national documents sometimes lacks context and it is difficult to understand what the document is about
• The notifications look and feel is a bit outdated
• People cannot set their own notification preferences

The project to replace ISOlutions National eCommittees by National Documents is a unique opportunity to review the Automatic Document Notification Scheduler and address these limitations.

One of the underlying improvements of National Documents is the meta data describing documents and the capacity to link it with national ballots (and national meetings). This information is used to improve the integration between the ISOlutions services (National Ballots and National Meetings) but also to facilitate the search of documents. With the new version of the Automatic Document Notification Scheduler, the document meta data is a rich source of information to help national experts to better understand what is being shared with them. We also took into account the limitations described above and are glad to introduce the new automated notifications for national committees:

• One national committee = one notification: for every national committee, only one notification is sent and includes new documents posted in the related ISO mirror committees
• Clearer context
  • National documents are regrouped by expected action and sorted by expected action date
  • The meta data of national documents is used to set a better context for circulated documents including a link to the corresponding national ballot (or national meeting).
  • Notifications now include many links to the committee documents search with predefined search criterion so experts can see the latest information regrouped by topic (specific committee, meeting or ballot etc.)
• No more misleading international information
  • the international expected vote date is not shown anymore and shortcuts to ISO meeting or ISO ballot not presented anymore
  • ISO committees and projects are not only described by their reference but also with their name.
  • For project documents, a link to the ISO projects platform is now included so national experts have direct access to the latest project status.
• Set user preference (coming in April 2022): while the default notification schedule is defined by the NSB, experts will have the opportunity to change if they prefer to receive notifications weekly or daily

FAQ

• Can NSBs define various notifications configurations based on expert’s role?

No. All the committee members will receive the same notification but every person will have the ability to adjust his/her own frequency preferences.

• Can NSBs exclude some type of documents from the notifications?

No. We plan on also allowing users to choose which type of international document types to include from the automatic notifications. Also, original mirror documents are now watermarked on the fly when downloading them.