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Changes made in version 2.2 of the CAB Local Information system

Version 2.2 incorporates a number of changes, many in response to suggestions from bureaux around the country.

New soft buttons

You can add up to 2 soft buttons to the adviser screen and define what they do. You can also specify the text on the button and the tooltip that appears when you hover your mouse over the button. There are two kinds of soft button:

1. Index search runs a specified search. In Epsom & Ewell we use this to show local news and internal bureau documents by searching for the special key word "adviser". The button can also flash a 'Recent updates' message if there are matching items that changed within a specified number of days.
2. Web address displays a specified web page. This could be a page containing a list of relevant links, for example.

You can add two Index search buttons, two Web address buttons or one of each. You can also hide the 'Internet search' button.

Negative search terms

When searching the database, you can use negative search terms. For example, searching for "mem par" will find references to members of parliament. Adding the term "-euro" says to exclude any items containing a term containing "euro". So searching for "mem par -euro" will find documents referring to members of parliament but excluding european members of parliament.

Simpler searching

The system automatically removes some short words from your search. That's because we automatically remove short words like 'in' and 'on' when indexing documents. It is therefore unlikely that a search containing one of these words will find a match. Searching for "member of parliament" for example is unlikely to find a match because the index will not contain 'of'. The system therefore converts your search to "member parliament" instead.

Showing all documents

You can use special search term '*all' to find all documents in the database.

New options for printing and exporting to Excel

The left hand pane of the maintenance program contains a new 'Export to Excel' button. This exports all the currently selected documents to an Excel document. For example, you can find all documents that are waiting for review, export them to Excel and work with them out of the office. If you want, you can also print the Excel spreadsheet.

Hide document addresses

Administrators can specify that the reader program should not show addresses next to document links.

Improved logging

Internet searches are now logged alongside other searches made by the system.

Word and Excel toolbars

In previous versions, when displaying Word or Excel documents, the system displayed toolbars for some versions of Word and Excel, but not for others. Version 2.2 tries to force the toolbar to appear for all versions.

Increased resilience

We modified the routine that checks whether you are running the program twice to make it more resilient if there is a problem.

Documentation updates

We have updated the Installation Guide and Technical Overview to reflect the above changes. You should delete any copies you have made or replace them with the version supplied with this release

Click here to see what changes we made in previous versions.

Click here to get your free copy of the system .

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Try it now

We've put a copy of the Local Information System online for you to play with. There's nothing to install, it's just another web site.