There has been a recent trend nationally for Community Legal Centres to add a CMS (Case Management System) to their CLASS system tools. Currently, the most popular CMS tool that is being added is Actionstep, followed closely by Consensus, with a few other modern CMS tools being used such as Salesforce, CSNet, Smokeball or Leap.
As centres start to use these modern CMS tools and then want to make it connect back to CLASS to meet their reporting obligations, it became apparent that the Data Import Tool built to send the data back to CLASS was not working. This project has failed and will not proceed.
The creation of this bridge was important to ensure that centres did not have to double-enter data, that data was entered into one system and able to be used for all reporting needs. After working unsuccessfully with multiple external vendors to resolve the issue and improve the bridge, CLCs Australia has decided that a better, more flexible, and future-proof option was to set up a new reporting data repository in the CLASS environment and to load data from external systems, like Actionstep, as well as CLASS, into the new repository, and to build on this for reporting and data visualisation. We have been working on this solution for several months, in order to ensure it was fully tested and available to deliver CLASS NLAP reporting for June 2023.
CLCs Australia remains agnostic as to technology selection by centres or our state/territory member organisations and we will do our best to adapt our solutions to any technology selection. We have reviewed and evaluated some modern CMS tools for our sector. Here are the results of that review and evaluation.
