Managing an Organization Account (admins only)
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      3. Managing an Organization Account (admins only)

      Request Visibility

      Learn more about request visibility settings and how to set default for your portal and departments.

      Note: Admins, department admins, and publishers can change the visibility of an individual request. Only admins can change the default visibility settings for the portal and all departments, department admins for departments that they belong to. 

      You can restrict who can view a request and its associated documents, both inside and outside of your agency, using the specific visibility settings for that request. Externally, you can control whether only the requester can see the request and its documents, or any member of the public who visits your portal. Internally, you can control which departments can see certain request. For instance, if requests to a police department should only be visible to police staff, you can set this using visibility settings.

      This document covers everything you need to know about managing the default visibility of requests. For information about how to change the visibility of an individual request click here.

      Click on any of the links to jump to that section:

       

       

      Overview of visibility settings

      There are five different visibility settings. Think of request visibility as who can access a request. In order of least restrictive to most restrictive they are:

      • Published: the request is visible to everyone (the public) without requiring a login. Requesters will see Public and Requester + Staff timeline entries and documents when logged in. All agency staff will have access to Staff timeline entries and documents when logged in.
      • Embargoed: the request is set to All Staff and then a set amount of time after the request is closed it is set to Published
        • Note: For this setting to be an option embargoing must first be enabled for your organization. For information about how to do this click here.
      • All Staff: the request is visible to the requester and to all agency staff that have a portal login
      • Department only: the request is visible to the requester and to all staff in the assigned department(s), as well as support staff specifically assigned to the request
      • Restricted: the request is visible only to the requester and to staff assigned specifically to it

       

       

      Different levels of visibility settings and how they interact

      There are 3 levels of visibility settings.

      • Organization level visibility settings determine what the default visibility of a request is when it is initially created
      • Department level visibility settings determine the default visibility of requests assigned to a particular department (this overrides organization level settings)
      • Request level settings are specific to that particular request and override organization and department settings (this overrides department level and organization level settings)

       

       

      How to enable embargoing for your account

      With embargoing you can set a request to be published a set amount of time after it is closed. It is particularly useful for media requests where the request prefers that the information be made available more publicly after a delay. You can turn off embargoing and/or manually publish requests on an individual basis.

       

      Steps for enabling embargoing on your account

      1. Sign in to your account
      2. Click or hover over the ADMIN link in the upper right hand corner
      3. Click the Portal Settings link in the drop down menu
      4. Click Request Publishing/Visibility in the menu on the left hand side
      5. Check the box “Enable embargoing for this account”
      6. Enter the amount of time after which embargoed requests are automatically published in the box
      7. (Optional) if you would like all requests to be set to Embargoed by default, select the Embargoed radio button that is now listed under Default Request Visibility in the section above. You can also set this on a department level. 
      8. Click SAVE

       

       

      How to set organization level default visibility

      Steps for setting the default visibility for your entire portal. 

      1. Sign in to your account
      2. Click or hover over the ADMIN link in the upper right hand corner
      3. Click the Portal Settings link in the drop down menu
      4. Click Request Publishing/Visibility in the menu on the left hand side
      5. Select the visibility that you want your organization’s requests to be given by default
      6. Click the Save button

      How to set department level default visibility

      Changing the department level default visibility will only change the visibility of new requests that are assigned to that department. Existing requests that are assigned to that department will keep their existing visibility even when their department’s default visibility is changed.

      The default department level visibility must be set when the department is created. The steps below are for changing the default visibility of a department that has already been created. For information about how to create a department, including setting the default visibility click here.

       

      Steps for setting department level default visibility

      1. Sign in to your account
      2. Click or hover over the ADMIN link in the upper right hand corner
      3. Click the Departments link in the drop down menu
      4. Click the Edit icon () next to the department you want to change the visibility for
      5. Select a visibility option from the Default request visibility drop-down
        • Note: In addition to the standard visibility options, departments have the additional visibility option Account Default. This will always match whatever the organization level default visibility is.
      6. Click the SAVE button