Communication and event management platform
CLIENT: Governmental tax authorities from among 44 countries
Client: Intra-European Organisation of Tax Administrations (IOTA)
The Intra-European Organisation of Tax Administrations (IOTA) is a non-profit intergovernmental organisation, which provides a forum to assist its members to improve tax administration. The main field of its activity is organizing workshops which provide an opportunity to participants from various member tax administrations to exchange views, experiences and best practices about the most important and current issues in the field of taxation. IOTA also promotes cooperation between tax administrations in the European region and supports their development according to their individual needs.
The scope
News portal and communication platform for the members, but also for the public. It serves as an intranet for the IOTA staff to support their event planning and organizing workflow by allowing them to create, collect and store documentation. It serves as a registration interface for all potential event attendees by allowing them access to event information, receiving notifications and signing up.
Event management
Organizing several kinds of events is one of the core functions of IOTA. Website is used not only for announcing future programs but also for managing participant admission, helping them in preparation for an upcoming event, document the outcome of each gathering, and save past occasions as an archive timeline.
Technical enquiry
The feature allows the Principal Contact Persons of the member countries to share their know-how on specific tax-related topics. Furthermore, they can invite professional outsiders to resolve definite cases or to ask specific questions from the related countries' delegates.
The component's specific and strict workflow makes the international work easier and improves the communication between the partner countries.
To see the full process working scroll a bit down.
The implemented strict workflow of a technical enquiry
The platform is used by 3000 professional tax experts from 47 member countries.
Continuous support and maintenance
- We will continue to help leveraging the power and adoption of the system across the organisation via fine tuning, continuous maintenance and support.
- We are working on the automated test suite for regression tests.
- Redesign, and continuous UX improvements forthcoming.
- Cooperative editing and other interesting features are also on the roadmap.
Challenges
1. Managing several roles with different user interfaces and authorities
Journey: On the previous site, there were 23 different roles and authorities. To manage them we had to merge some of the roles, unlike what has recently been done with the site's 8 main roles, which can have some sub-roles as well. The main roles are Secretariat, Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), Principal Contact Person (PCP), back office user, group member, PCP extended, authenticated user and Anonymous.
Solution: Drupal's role and permission system combined with custom modules for task delegatoin inside of the organizations.
2. Custom forms, surveys built by the users
Solution: Custom form handling by form builder based on Entityforms, extended functionality of the module and interface via custom modules.
3. Replace the legacy workflows
Solution: Custom rules, components.
4. REST API for a mobile application
Solution: RestWS module with some customization.
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Even more features
- Issue Management – built-in support channel for end-users and administrators
- Custom Reports – event statistics, annual reports.
- Custom Notifications – Highly customizable email and web-based notifications, reminders managed by the IOTA Secretariat.
- Form Builder – for creating and cloning custom forms as well as result analysis.
- Numerous user groups with sub-groups – Special task delegating rules and workflows for the member organizations.
- Knowledge Base – Categorized searchable content, constantly growing from multiple sources and discussed by the members.
