Welcome Jay County Recorder!

The Jay County Recorder is pleased to announce two new services for providing access to Jay County recorded documents through the web.

The index to documents and images of documents filed in 1997 or later are now available on-line at http://www.doxpop.com. Basic information about the documents is available at no cost. Detailed information and document images are available as a fee-based service.

In addition, The Recorder's Office now offers a free property watch service to our community. Any person may sign up at http://watch.doxpop.com to set a watch on his or her property and name. Participants are notified via email any time a document is filed that references the watched property or name.

Both of these services have been provided without any use of public funding (no use of tax money.) The access provided by these services is in addition to the public access already provided at the courthouse.

For additional information, contact Bev Myers at the Recorder's Office, (260) 726-6940 or Nick Fankhauser at Doxpop, LLC; (765) 373-9245; nickf@doxpop.com.

Kosciusko County Now Offering Unlimited Image Viewing for Recorded Documents

Doxpop customers needing to view a large number of recorded documents will be pleased to learn that unlimited viewing is now available in Kosciusko County. Kosciusko County is the third Indiana county to participate in this service. Wayne County and Dearborn County are also currently participating in the unlimited viewing feature.

For a reasonable monthly fee, Doxpop customers can add this service to their existing subscription to view an unlimited number of full-size document images filed in the Kosciusko County Recorder's office.  Documents such as mortgages, deeds, and liens are available for your viewing pleasure.

To view a demonstration of how to add this service to your subscription, make sure to watch our demonstration video on our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/doxpop, or just watch the video below.

Odyssey Court Records Now Current Through May 1

Over the weekend, Doxpop completed its latest information update for Indiana Counties using Odyssey's case management system. Court record information for Odyssey counties now contain all information filed up to May 1, 2012.

We continue to work with the state in providing our customers with real-time updates to Odyssey information. Keep an eye on our blog as more information regarding the status of this project becomes available.

April information posted from the State's Odyssey system, Good news and Bad...

The monthly update for counties using the Odyssey Case Management System run by the State's Judicial Technology and Automation Committee has been posted.

However, please note that the information is incomplete for the last few days of April. The posted information is complete through midnight (end of day) on April 24th. (You may see some entries after April 24th, but please don't depend on these being complete.)


The reason is that the folks at the State extract the information in two separate batches which we merge to update our system, and they did these two extracts several days apart this month. Since the first one occurred on the 24th, we can't guarantee complete information after that date. They are sending us a second file in a few days to patch this up and make the information complete through May 1st. They have also agreed to alter their process slightly to prevent this problem in the future.

On the good news side, we are currently receiving "real time" updates from the State's Odyssey system, and are working to fully test and integrate this data feed into our system so you won't have to worry about how current the information is in the future. The initial assessment from our programmers on this feed is that the folks at the State have done their job well, and it's just a matter of time (and hard work) before we'll be able to pass the information along directly to our users.

Doxpop at the 2012 Mira Awards

Doxpop is honored to be selected by TechPoint as a 2012 Mira Award finalist. The Mira Awards recognize the top contributors among those involved in Indiana's technology industry, and can be considered Indiana's technology "Oscars". Doxpop is nominated in the category of "IT Services Excellence & Innovation". This is a brand new category being introduced to this year's Mira Award's ceremony, and Doxpop is very excited to be included among the finalists in this first-time category.

Winners will be announced on May 12 at a black-tie gala event at the JW Marriott in Indianapolis. Celebrity chef Quang T. Dinh will be presenting his culinary skills for the special occasion. To learn more about the Mira Awards and this year's nominees, please visit http://www.techpoint.org/finalists-2012.

Welcome Jefferson County Courts!

Karen Mannix, Jefferson County Clerk, is pleased to announce two new services for the public:

People wishing to pay their fines for traffic citations or other infractions may go to http://payment.doxpop.com, find the infraction, and pay in a matter of minutes. The total payment, including the online transaction fee, is calculated and displayed prior to the completion of the transaction. The fines are sent to the clerk and the payer notified via email when the payment is accepted, usually within 10 minutes.

People wishing to access public court cases on-line may access the information at http://www.doxpop.com. This web site is designed primarily to serve attorneys and other professionals who use court information with fee-based services, but it also provides low-volume access to the general public at no cost. Doxpop currently provides on-line access to court information in 78 Indiana counties, and fine payment services for 23 Indiana counties.

Currently, citations and civil cases are available via the Doxpop Public Access system. Criminal cases will become available in late spring. After the criminal cases have been added, a public demonstration and training session will be held.

Both of these services are provided by the clerk's office in cooperation with Doxpop without any use of public funding or tax money.

March of Progress? Monthly Odyssey updates and progress toward real-time data.

Doxpop just completed the March update of information from Indiana Counties using the Odyssey system. We usually process updates in about three days, but this particular update took a bit longer because the format of the data changed this month. That's bad because it slowed us down a little, but good because the changes are corrections that JTAC has included this month to take care of problems we previously reported. Most notably, disposition status information.

The ability to provide real-time updates to Odyssey records for Doxpop users is still at least one month off, but remains our top priority.

That's the short version. For details, read on:

You'll all recall that in September 2011, the Supreme Court of Indiana publicly committed to making a real-time messaging interface to the Odyssey system available on January 1, 2012 via the services of JTAC (the Judicial Technology and Automation Committee.) In response to this public commitment, Doxpop made a corresponding commitment to our customers to connect to this interface pass the data on to them through our system. Since September, Doxpop has provided funding in the form of well over $100,000 in payments to JTAC. We have also invested countless hours from our programming staff to building our side of this interface and providing prompt, helpful feedback to JTAC programmers as they do their work.

We're confident that Doxpop will recover our significant investment, which depends primarily on the good faith of JTAC in following through on their commitment. However, the path has been a bit rough so far.

We have, since November 2011, been able to obtain monthly updates from JTAC. However, in a recent eMail, the analysts working on the real-time messaging interface from the Odyssey system told us that the program they were working on (which was apparently similar to the Doxpop API) could not sustain the performance levels required to maintain a real-time data feed.

Doxpop is confident that JTAC can achieve the necessary performance level because Doxpop maintains a similar system in the form of our API, which contains roughly twice the number of cases found in JTAC's system and exceeds the performance requirements for a real-time interface.

During peak usage periods, the Doxpop API has served 1.4 million record requests from our customers in 13 hours (about 1800/minute.) By our calculations, to maintain their promised real-time feed, JTAC's system will have to service 900 requests per minute. Thanks to the efforts of our skilled programming staff, Doxpop's service runs on a meager $5,000 worth of hardware. With their resources, we are confident that JTAC will be able to easily match our performance.

So... What's next, and how long will it take?

We've been told that JTAC is now taking a new approach that they hope will provide the required performance levels very soon. Our programmers are currently working with their staff, and report some  progress. We are very disappointed that 2 months after this service was promised, we still haven't seen anything like a production quality interface... but we are hopeful and we're providing the best feedback we can every day to the programmers working on the JTAC side of the project.

I suppose this blog post is our gentle public feedback to the management of JTAC: Please follow through on this project as quickly as you can! Our small business is depending on you to keep your commitments. if we can provide a similar system with fewer resources, your staff and resources are certainly up to the task.

Miami County, Indiana Joins Doxpop Fine Payment

Doxpop is pleased to announce the newest county to join the Fine Payment network, Miami County, Indiana. Licensed drivers and others with traffic citations filed in Miami County and other Indiana Counties now have the convenience of paying these fines on-line with their credit or debit card. This service eliminates the need of making a special trip to the county courthouse to pay your fines.

The Miami County Courthouse in Peru, Indiana handle citations filed in Peru and other Miami County towns such as Amboy, Bunker Hill, Converse, Denver, Macy, and Mexico.  Major highways in Miami County include US Routes 24 and 31, as well as State Roads 16, 18, 19, 124, and 218.

Doxpop Fine Payment can be accessed online at http://payment.doxpop.com. Make sure to check out our website to see what we can offer you today.

Howard County, Indiana Joins Doxpop Fine Payment

The Howard County Clerk of Courts, Kim Wilson, is pleased to announce that traffic fines may now be easily paid online.

When ticketed drivers are ready to pay fines, they may go online to http://payment.doxpop.com and quickly search for a traffic infraction by name or ticket number, then pay the fine using a debit or credit card. The total payment, including an online transaction fee, is calculated and displayed prior to the completion of the transaction. The fines are sent to the clerk immediately and the payer is notified via email when the payment is accepted, usually within 15 minutes.

This service, like all Doxpop services, is provided without any use of public funding or tax money. Use of Doxpop Fine Payment is available to anyone.

Update on progress toward a real-time interface to Odyssey courts

Many folks have been contacting us to learn whether we have a better update cycle for the Indiana courts using the Odyssey system yet. Here's some background and an update:

In November 2011, we announced that we had started receiving monthly data feeds for Indiana Counties using the Odyssey case management system. We released this information to our users with the caveat that the monthly update cycle makes this court information much less useful than the information we receive from the CSI and  Courtview systems with a ten minute update cycle. Still, good historical records have significant value, and our mission is to increase the value we provide to our users at every opportunity.

We also announced with great hope that the Indiana Supreme Court had ordered that a near-real-time messaging system be made available on January 1. This would allow Doxpop to transition quickly from the monthly update cycle to updating information for Odyssey courts in the same timely fashion that we've been updating information from other courts since 2002.

January 1st has passed, and although we've been provided with a set of interface specifications for what appears to be a workable system, the database behind this system contains only a small subset of the cases filed in Odyssey courts. What we're seeing is encouraging, and there's no doubt that the programmers working for the Supreme Court are making an effort to complete their work, but at this point, a production-quality data feed is not available.

So when will it be ready? The short answer is that we don't know. Doxpop has begun development of an interface based on the specifications and data that are available, but clearly we can't call ours done until the State completes their work. Watch this blog for updates, and we'll let you know right away when progress occurs!

In the meantime, we'll still be providing monthly updates for the Odyssey Courts during the first week of each month.