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A public request portal that opens straight onto the case file

A guided request form on your own website, a status page requestors can check and reply from, secure delivery of released records, online fee payment and a public reading room — in up to eleven languages, with no requestor accounts to manage. Every submission is triaged by your team into the same request record your office already works, and the portal runs in your own Azure subscription.

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Most access-to-information offices already have a front door — a PDF form, a web form that e-mails an intake mailbox, a phone number. What comes through it is rarely ready to work: no time period, no program area, "all records about the arena". The request is retyped into the system or the spreadsheet, a clarification letter goes out, and the requestor starts calling to ask where things stand.

AccessPoint's public request portal replaces that front door with one built for the statute. The guided form asks for what a search needs, with worked examples and a checklist that explains what is missing but never blocks. The requestor confirms with a one-time code e-mailed to them — no account, no password — and from then on can check the request, reply to a question, add detail, answer a fee estimate, pay, withdraw, and collect the released records, on one page that explains each phase in plain words.

Behind it, nothing becomes a request on its own. Submissions wait in a Portal inbox until someone on your team promotes, merges or rejects them, and a promoted submission becomes an ordinary AccessPoint request — the requestor's own words filed as its first correspondence, the attachments in its Documents workspace, the received date set to the day the requestor confirmed. The portal is an optional web app you deploy into your own Azure subscription, isolated from the rest of AccessPoint by design, and included in every plan.

Sound familiar?

Three moments every office with a public front door recognizes — whether the requests land in a spreadsheet or a legacy case system.

The web form that feeds a mailbox

The request form on your website e-mails the intake inbox. Someone copies the name, the address and three paragraphs of request text into the system — or the spreadsheet — and saves the attachments to a shared drive, hoping the file names will make sense later.

"All records about the arena"

No date range, no department, no kind of record. The clarification letter goes out on day two, and a request that could have been searched in an afternoon waits weeks for a reply.

"Just checking on my request"

The same requestor calls every Monday. Someone looks the file up, decides how much of the internal status to share, explains "on hold" again, and logs the call — if they remember to.

What to look for in a public records request portal

Whatever you buy — including if it isn't AccessPoint — these are the capabilities that separate a web form from a front door that actually reduces the work behind it.

Requests that arrive ready to search The form should ask for a time period, the part of the organization and the kinds of records, with worked examples — and explain what is missing without refusing the request. And you should be able to measure whether it cuts clarification letters.
A person decides what becomes a case Submissions should be triaged — registered, merged with a duplicate or declined — before they reach the register, while the statutory received date stays the day the requestor actually sent it.
A status page that explains itself Public phases mapped from your internal statuses, holds that say why, dates in context and a way to reply — so requestors stop calling, and internal stage names never leak.
Verification without accounts to manage Nobody should need a password to make or follow a request. A one-time code sent to the address they gave proves they control it, on every visit, and shows them only their own requests.
Delivery you can prove Expiring links, file hashes, a malware gate, download counts, an acknowledgement of receipt and a revoke button — instead of an e-mail attachment you can never recall.
A public surface kept apart from your records The internet-facing part should be isolated from the system that holds your case files, accessible to WCAG 2.2, and available in the languages your public speaks.

How the AccessPoint portal works

One front door for requests, complaints and privacy concerns — these are the load-bearing pieces.

A guided form on your own website

Embed the form with a two-line snippet, or link to the portal's own page. It asks what you are looking for beside a worked example, a time period, kinds of records and program areas, with a completeness checklist that never blocks — single page or step by step, previewed before you publish.

A Portal inbox, not a back door

Every submission waits for triage. Promote opens Create request pre-filled with the scope, the requestor contact and their language; Merge attaches it to a request already on the register; Reject records a reason. The received date is the day the requestor confirmed.

A status page that closes the loop

Seven public phases mapped from your statuses, each explained in plain words, holds that say why, a dated history, shared letters, fees with a Pay button and your review-rights text at closing. Requestors can reply, add detail, answer a fee estimate, withdraw, or see all their requests with one code.

Secure delivery of released records

Deliver the response package from Export History: copied with each file's SHA-256, held until Microsoft Defender for Storage reports it clean where deployed, opened with a fresh code, downloaded through short-lived links, acknowledged by the requestor and revocable at any time.

A public reading room

Publish a released package for anyone to search and download. It takes two people — one proposes, a different senior official publishes — and each entry states what its accessibility check found and offers an accessible edition where there is one.

Complaints, concerns and own-information requests

A form registers in Requests, Complaints or Incidents. Templates cover a guided access request, a request for your own information that lands on your identity-verifying request type, a privacy complaint and a privacy concern report.

See it in AccessPoint

Real screens from the product, running in a Microsoft 365 tenant. Click any one to enlarge.

The public portal home page with Make a request, Check a request and search of what has been published Click to enlarge
The portal. Requestors make a request, check one by its reference, or search what has already been published.
The portal's request form coaching the requestor to describe the records Click to enlarge
Guided forms. Plain-language forms ask for the records, not the reason, with an example of a specific request.
The Portal inbox in AccessPoint with a verified submission awaiting triage Click to enlarge
The Portal inbox. Every verified submission waits for your team to promote, merge or reject it.

The structural difference

The front door is in your tenant, and it opens onto the case file

When the public portal and the case system are separate products, every submission has to be moved across, and the requestor's record lives in two places. AccessPoint's portal is part of the same deployment, in your own Azure subscription. A promoted submission is an ordinary request, with the requestor's own words as its first correspondence and the attachments in its Documents workspace. The status page is drawn from that request; replies land on its Requestor tab with a follow-up on the access officer's My Day and never restart a paused clock by themselves; payments land in its fee ledger; and deliveries leave from its Export History through the same release gate as every package. The portal itself runs as a separate web app with its own managed identity, confined to its own database schema and two storage containers, with no network path into the AccessPoint API.

Your subscription, your data Submissions, deliveries and requestor details stay in your own Azure subscription; the requestor's e-mail address is encrypted at rest with a per-tenant key.
Isolated by design No HTTP client, no third-party script, no third-party CAPTCHA — and no IP address stored, only a pseudonym whose key changes every 30 days.
Included, and opt-in Every plan includes the portal, with online payments and the reading room. It stays off until you deploy it and switch it on.

From deployment to first release

The path for an office opening the portal:

  1. Deploy the portal web app into your Azure subscription — optionally behind Azure Front Door with a web application firewall — and switch it on under Settings → Features.
  2. Choose the languages, the reference prefix and the websites allowed to embed the form; create the guided form from your pack's template, preview it and publish.
  3. Paste the two-line snippet into your website, or link to the portal's own page.
  4. Triage submissions in the Portal inbox — promote, merge or reject — and work each request the way you already do.
  5. Release records through a secure delivery, and publish the packages the public should see to the reading room.

Go deeper

Online FOI fee payments Deposits and balances paid from the status page, booked only on the payment provider's confirmation. The Portal inbox in the docs Promote, merge and reject — every field and choice in the triage queue. Setting up the public portal Deployment, Front Door, languages, forms, the embed snippet and requestor notices. Privacy complaint management Where a complaint submitted through the portal goes once your team registers it. AccessPoint vs. NextRequest NextRequest's public request portal is a genuine strength — how the two approaches compare. Security & data sovereignty How AccessPoint keeps the internet-facing portal apart from your records.

Public Request Portal Questions

What is an FOI request portal, and what does AccessPoint's portal do?
A public request portal is the web front door through which members of the public submit freedom of information, ATIP or public records requests and follow their progress. AccessPoint's portal provides a guided request form that can be embedded in your own website, a status page the requestor can check and reply from, secure delivery of released records, online fee payment, a public reading room, and forms for privacy complaints, privacy concern reports and requests for one's own information. Submissions are triaged by your staff in a Portal inbox and become ordinary AccessPoint requests, complaints or incidents.

Do requestors need an account, and how are they verified?
No account or password is needed. Each step — sending a request, checking it, collecting released records, paying a fee — is opened by an 8-digit code e-mailed to the address the requestor gave: valid for 10 minutes, single use, and locked for 15 minutes after five wrong attempts. A verified session sees only the requests made with that address. Where a request type requires proof of identity, such as a request for one's own information, the form collects the proof and your staff verify it on the request, exactly as they would for a request received any other way.

Does a portal submission start the statutory clock automatically?
Nothing becomes a request on its own. A confirmed submission waits in the Portal inbox until someone promotes it, merges it into an existing request or rejects it — or, if you choose, it is auto-promoted as a draft for known requestors or for every verified submission. When it is promoted, the request's received date is the day the requestor confirmed the submission with their code, so the statutory clock runs from when the requestor sent it, not from when your team reached it in the queue.

Where does the portal run, and what does it cost?
The portal runs in your own Azure subscription as part of your AccessPoint deployment. It is opt-in and off by default: you deploy it as a second web app, which shares your existing App Service plan so it adds no compute of its own, plus two storage containers whose cost is small. You can put Azure Front Door with a web application firewall in front of it, which Azure bills as a monthly base fee plus traffic. The portal module — with online payments and the reading room — is included in every AccessPoint plan, with no add-on fee.

Is the portal accessible and multilingual?
Yes. The portal is the one surface the public uses, so it is self-assessed against WCAG 2.2 AA in its own section of AccessPoint's Accessibility Conformance Report: time limits warn before they end, codes are spelled out digit by digit for screen readers, and limits and errors say what happens next. It offers the languages you choose, up to the eleven AccessPoint ships in; its e-mails go out in the requestor's language, and with AI Assist translation on, staff can read a submission written in another language beside the requestor's original words.

How do we know whether the portal is reducing clarification letters?
The Intake quality report compares requests by intake channel — the portal's step-by-step form, its single-page form and every other channel — with the clarification rate within 30 days of receipt, the median days to the first custodian assignment, how many portal requests answered each scope question, and the portal's anonymous funnel for each form version. An optional clarity assistant can ask requestors about the scope questions they left unanswered, and the report splits results by what was shown. Nothing in the report identifies a requestor.

Flat annual pricing, published in full. Every feature in every size — access requests, privacy impact assessments, breach response, complaints, video & audio redaction, the public portal, repository connectors, and AI Assist. No per-user or per-module fees.

  • Under 500 employees$2,990/yr
  • 500–1,999 employees$7,990/yr
  • 2,000–9,999 employees$14,990/yr
  • 10,000+ employees$29,990/yr

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Give the Public a Front Door. Keep It in Your Tenant.

Try AccessPoint free for 30 days in your own Microsoft 365 tenant — the public request portal, online payments and reading room are included in every plan.

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