Doxpop - Tools for Attorneys and Public Information Researchers: December 2015

Monday, December 7, 2015

Vigo County converts to Odyssey. Doxpop user's access unaffected.

Over the last weekend, the Courts in Vigo County moved to the Odyssey case tracking system, thus moving their data storage and administration to Indianapolis. 

This move does not significantly affect Doxpop users because Doxpop buys access from the State Court Administration to a real-time feed of court data from the Odyssey system. Our customers' access to court information will not be interrupted during this transition.

A few of the services we provide will look odd during the transition, because there will be a short period when both the old data and the new data are available. In particular:
  • If you use the personal calendar feature to keep track of hearings connected to your Bar ID, you will see two colors for each County on your calendar. Every event will be available, but the older cases will have a different color from the newer cases. When we complete the merge process, these will go back to being a single color.
  • When you look at our "County Details Page", you will find two entries for each court until the merge is complete.
  • When you are doing searches, you will find two entries for some cases. This is because while we are loading the information from Odyssey, we will also be maintaining the old data until the operation is complete to ensure you don't miss anything. When you see two case entries, please look at both to ensure you have the most current information.
  • If you use any of our "watch" services to keep an eye on cases or people of interest, we will be moving those watches over so they point to the cases and people that are a part of the Odyssey data feed. We run a process to convert these twice each day, but it is possible for notification of events to slip through the cracks between conversion runs so you may want to periodically do a manual check between now and early January, after that, we'll be back to normal.
Finally, one deficiency in the Odyssey system is that financial information is not exported in their data feed, so that detail will not be available after the transition. We regularly ask that the Court Administration add this to the data feed, but so far, we are told that it is not allowed because the clerks using the Odyssey system have requested that they not make that information available to us. If this information is important to you, please encourage the clerks you work with to tell the State Court Administration differently so we can get the information back online.

As always, we are available to answer any questions in person, so don't hesitate to call support at 866-369-7671 if you have any questions.

Friday, December 4, 2015

Notifications paused, but coming back soon.

** Update: Notifications were resumed at 5PM today (12/4) and will be completely caught up by the end of the day.

Yesterday, the State Court Administration added some information to the data feed Doxpop uses. In the long run, this is a good thing and we are grateful that they are adding the information.

However, the manner in which this information is being added is that a massive number of cases are being completely deleted and then put back with the new information added. Since Doxpop scans every single update to cases for changes that our customers want to know about, this has resulted in a huge number of bogus notifications and slowed our system significantly.

To deal with this, we have turned off the notification system briefly while we apply a filter to remove these false notifications. As soon as we've removed those, we'll turn the notifications back on, and the system will catch up on the notifications for changes you actually care about. We expect that to happen late this afternoon.

We're sorry for any inconvenience this causes. It's ultimately good that more information is being made available, but we wish it had happened in a more graceful manner!

If you have any questions about this, please feel free to give us a call: 866-369-7671, or email support@doxpop.com.