Administrator Guide

This guide covers AccessPoint deployment, configuration, and ongoing administration. Almost nothing is hard-coded — AccessPoint follows a configuration-over-code approach, so you can reshape request types, letters, exemptions, calendars, roles, and the privacy program from Settings without a developer or a redeployment.

Start here: Deployment Guide — provision Azure resources, install the SPFx web part and Teams app, and connect them to your Microsoft 365 tenant.

Who is this guide for?

• IT Administrators responsible for deploying and maintaining AccessPoint
• SharePoint and Azure Administrators who manage the Microsoft 365 and Azure environment
• System Owners who configure business rules and operational settings

The pages below mirror the Settings hub. See the Settings Overview for the hub as the app presents it.

Getting started

• Settings — the grouped directory of every configuration area
• Setup — API base URL, Azure deploy/update, and email + Teams notifications
• System health — whether the database is keeping up, and what to do when it isn't
• Training — train mode, the training copy, guided help, team exercises, and training roles
• Jurisdiction packs — import jurisdiction or universal packs and review applied packs
• Organization — the institution display name merged into notices, letters, and tokens
• Languages — active tenant languages, default language, and display order
• Calendars — business-day calendars and statutory holidays for due-date math
• Features — per-tenant feature opt-out toggles

Foundations

• Public portal — the public intake portal: forms, program areas, the reading room, and requestor messages
• Payment providers — registering Stripe, Paymentus, or a hosted payment page, and reconciliation
• Repository connectors — registering connectors, identity modes, Test connection, health, and Hybrid Connections
• Notification contacts — the Security, Privacy and Operations contacts reached when something is wrong

Data and AI

• AI suggestions — the guidance-proposal inbox for AI-drafted playbook and catalog refinements, plus question mining of Ask AccessPoint questions into aggregate themes
• Data import & export — migrate historical caseloads via a tenant-generated import template, and export a business-readable Excel workbook

Users, roles & access

• Manage users — assign or remove application roles per user (last-admin guard)
• Roles & permissions — build tenant roles from a categorized, scoped permission catalog

Request intake

• Request types — categories, default durations, date conventions, and expedited rules
• Request statuses — configurable status labels for the request lifecycle
• Numbering configuration — prefix/separator/year/sequence patterns with live preview
• Requestor categories — fee categories (media, public, business) used in volume reporting
• Requestor category taxonomy — translatable contact and institution classification lists
• Requestor languages — preferred-language options for requestors
• Requestor flow control — active-request limit, hold reason, activation policy, and stale-hold days
• Request pattern review — when My Day suggests reviewing a requestor's pattern of requests
• Relationships — requestor-to-subject relationship types (self, representative, third party)
• Information categories — classifying the type of information requested
• Custom fields — tenant-defined fields added to entities

Request lifecycle

• Extension reasons — reasons with suggested/min/max durations and applicable request types
• Closure reasons — the reasons a request can be closed
• Response methods — how responses are delivered to requestors
• SLA targets — per-stage business-day targets for requests, assignments, and consultations
• Follow-up rules — follow-ups, notices, and statutory waiting periods created by rule

Collaboration & reviews

• Communication methods — how the office communicates with requestors
• Consultation types — inter-departmental and external consultation categories
• Correspondence templates — milestone-typed, multilingual letter/email templates with tokens
• Automatic acknowledgement — acknowledgement letters sent when a request is activated
• Notification templates — reminder rules and multilingual notification content
• Review types — the kinds of review used by the review engine
• Review workflows — sequential/parallel stage templates with reviewers, gating, and reminders
• Required reviews — mapping review templates to trigger stages across case areas
• Hours tracking — self-entry toggle and hours categories (fee-rate, scope)

Documents & review

• Document types — classifying documents within a request
• Document tags — colour-coded tag taxonomy, categories, mutual exclusivity, and email-family cascade
• Document templates — letterhead/blank/merge templates for working files
• Document workspace views — tenant-shared saved views pinned in the Documents workspace
• Document conversion — spreadsheet layout, hidden content, releasing spreadsheets as files, and SharePoint lists
• Relevance options — document relevance classifications used during review
• Legal authorities — the "which law" reference (type, jurisdiction, citation, regulator)
• Exemptions — exemption/exclusion provisions for redacting documents
• Redaction appearance — final style, redline transparency, exemption overlay, and approval-before-export
• Attestation templates — the certification text custodians sign when submitting

Privacy configuration

• Assessment types — PIA/AIA/Security types, scoring, tiering, and summary templates
• Assessment statuses — configurable status labels for the assessment lifecycle
• Assessment templates — the questionnaire builder (sections/questions), versioning, and screeners
• Screening lists — regulators' lists of processing that requires, or is exempt from, a DPIA
• Control option lists — the Controls-library lookups: control families, control kinds, and baseline profiles
• Incident types — categories for privacy incidents and breaches
• Incident statuses — configurable status labels for the incident lifecycle
• Incident option lists — cause, PI-category, harm, containment, remediation, and notification taxonomies
• Complaint types — categories for complaints and appeals
• Complaint statuses — configurable status labels for the complaint lifecycle
• Complaint choice fields — grounds, dispositions, and other complaint lists
• Risk categories — shared risk-register categories and appetite settings
• Privacy subject choice fields — subject types (with the AI/ADM system flag), categories of personal data (shared with incident reporting), categories of data subjects, and categories of recipients

Audits

• Audit types — the kinds of audit, their starting status, follow-up interval, and rules
• Audit templates — audit questionnaires and the standard sections
• Audit statuses — the audit lifecycle labels
• Audit root causes — the root-cause list for audit findings
• Audit settings — the management response window, the finding age threshold, and the Audits board

Records and retention

• Storage and archiving — storage policies, archive tiers, housekeeping, and disposition
• Preservation holds — holds that stop any deletion, and who may place them

Reporting configuration

• Dashboard views — tenant-shared saved views across entity dashboards
• Reporting brackets — timeliness day-range buckets for statistics
• Report catalog — enable or rename custom-report-builder fields per tenant
• Statistical report templates — jurisdiction annual-report templates and custom definitions

System & compliance

• Audit ledger — the append-only, hash-chained audit trail and integrity verification
• Disaster recovery — backup, recovery, rollback procedures, health monitoring, and scaling