OneGov Org - OneGov Cloud’s Flagship Application
By far the most extensive application of OneGov Cloud is OneGov Org. Originally it was a homepage for municipalities with a heavy focus on town-related services like room reservations, forms, events and directories. Eventually the town-specific functionality was moved out to a more specialized version named OneGov Town.
What remained is a web application that is useful for any kind of organisation in the government / NGO / associations realm that is an essential part of the live of Swiss citizens.
Org, as it shall be called from here onward, now serves as a foundation for many specialized applications that need the features that Org offers and maybe a bit more.
Org Features
Org’s most important features are the following:
Tickets
All services which are offered by organizations are piped through a ticketing system that includes e-mail notifications, a chat and ways to execute actions on tickets (for example, mark a ticket as paid).
This offers users an easy way to turn their sites into perpetual ToDo-lists and offers a modern and professional approach to handling customer requests.
Topics
A a CMS-like tree of pages with unstructured content.
Forms
Forms can be written using the formcode syntax described here: Write Forms with Formcode Syntax
Submitted forms are then presented as open tickets, which offers a generic way of handling a wide range of situations. Additionally, submission windows may be used to limit the influx of forms to a certain time and number.
Reservations
To reserve things like tickets, gear, or rooms, the reservation system may be used. To maximize backwards-compatibility we used Libres, a Plone-based reservation system we wrote back in 2010:
Reservations, like most other things that require an action on the website owner’s part, are managed through tickets. Additionally, formcode may be used to ask for additional customer information.
Events
Concerts, exhibitions and the like can be submitted by users or imported from external systems and displayed in a timeline.
Directories
Topics are not great when it comes to unstructured content. When structure is present and should be enforced, directories are used.
Directories are somewhat complex for the user to set up, but they allow the use of formcode to create a schema for data that is then enforced over a set of records.
Additionally, users may submit new entries and change requests for existing ones. This is handled through tickets.
Uploads
Org supports the upload of various images and documents that is then served through the web applications. We have some customers with 20GB worth of pictures organized in photo-albums. As most files are cached directly on the front-end server (nginx), offering this feature puts little strain on our servers.
Additionally, we support the digital signing of PDF files through the Swisscom All-In Signing Service.
Payments
Through Stripe we support payments in any module that supports formcode:
Forms
Directories
Reservations
As Stripe is just a payment provider, we are able to add additional payment providers, though it is certainly a lot of work.
User-Management
We offer user management with four roles:
Admin (may do everything)
Editor (may do most things)
Member (may not do much)
Anonymous (my do even less)
There’s no way to add additional rules or to specify custom permissions. Doing so is often a great way to shoot oneself in the foot, so we generally try to avoid it as much as possible.
Org Derivatives
From org, other applications have spawned that usually change little:
OneGov Town, which includes some customizations for municipalities.
OneGov Intranet, which offers a different permission set.
OneGov Winterthur, which adds some features and changes the UI.
OneGov Fsi, which is specialization for the canton of Zug.
OneGov Feriennet, which adds a large number of features for Pro Juventute.