Weekend update on the slowness issue- Marginal gains on Friday.

We are still not seeing anything like a return to the original performance for the E-Filing Manager API.

Some changes were made by the State's vendor early Friday afternoon that appeared to result in a small improvement, but it's hard to tell for sure because Friday afternoon is a time when our load is usually lighter than the rest of the week.

We're hoping the small gain is still discernable on Monday. However, even if this gain is solid, we acknowledge that it was small and we are not even close to calling the issue resolved. There's still far to go.

Thursday Morning update on performance issues. Bottom line: No noticeable improvements.

Early this morning (Thursday, 7/28) Tyler Technologies took the State's E-Filing Manager (EFM) off-line to do some performance tuning. We have been watching closely this morning, and as of 9AM, it looks like no improvement resulted from this work. (sigh.)

We'll be reporting these results to Tyler Technologies shortly so they can get to work on next steps.

Note that at 9AM, our sample size is fairly small, so our conclusions may be adjusted as the day unfolds, but so far, we're calling this round of tuning ineffective.

E-filing will be offline at Midnight while Tyler Technologies works on performance tuning.

We have been notified that Indiana's E-Filing Manager (EFM) will be offline for roughly one hour starting at midnight tonight (7/27/22).

That's good to hear, because as you doubtless know, the recent migration of the EFM's servers to the cloud went very poorly, and we've all been struggling with an extremely slow system this week.

Given the results of previous tries at performance tuning, we're not going to do the happy-dance yet, but we're hopeful and will wait to see what the morning brings.

If you'd like more background on this saga, take a look at our previous three posts on this topic.

Update on slowness isues with the EFM as of 1PM Tuesday, 7/26

For what has transpired up to this point, take a look at our post from last night about what caused this issue.

Here's the new information from today:

Yesterday, the State's EFM was running so slowly that it was effectively unusable. We estimate that the EFM was taking 17 times as long as usual to respond to the EFSPs such as Doxpop.

Today, it started off looking good, but a little slow. However, as of Noon today, our estimate is that the EFM is still taking 7 times as log to respond as prior to the cloud upgrade.

We have passed this information along to Tyler Technologies along with an urgent request to essentially double whatever change they made last night. That change got them halfway to the goal, so we expect it should not be hard to travel the rest of the way.

We share your frustration with this extended problem. Please know that we're doing everything we can, and at this point we're waiting on the folks at Tyler to respond.

The E-Filing outage on Friday and Monday- What happened?

 To understand this explanation, you need to know that there are two distinct sections of the E-Filing system in Indiana:

1) The section you interact with as a filer is called an E-Filing Service Provider (EFSP). The largest EFSPs in Indiana are the Tyler system, the Indiana Prosecutors' CMS, The Public Defenders' CMS and Doxpop. We provide the part of the system you interact with to get your work done.

2) Behind the scenes, all of the EFSPs connect to a single E-Filing Manager (EFM). The EFM takes the filing information that the EFSPs assemble into envelopes and write that information to the Odyssey system used by the courts. Tyler Technologies operates Indiana's EFM.

So in our case, the primary flow of data is Doxpop > EFM > Courts.

On Thursday evening, Tyler migrated Indiana's EFM to a cloud-based server. It didn't go smoothly. The result was a nearly complete outage lasting from Thursday night through the close of business on Monday. During this time, the EFM was extremely slow- Slow enough that it was essentially unusable. 

On Friday, all EFSPs were affected. Over the weekend, Tyler managed to get the connection to their EFSP working well. However, the interface used by the Prosecutors, Public Defenders, Doxpop, and other smaller EFSPs was still unusable on Monday. Doxpop reported this early Monday morning, and provided Tyler with all of the information we had available.

At 9:50 PM on Monday, Tyler reported that they completely fixed the interface used by the EFSPs, including Doxpop, that were affected on Monday. We'll be monitoring the system closely on Tuesday morning to confirm this, and ask that our users quickly report any issues they run into so we can let Tyler know if the fix applied Monday evening did the job.

Thanks to all of our users for your extraordinary patience and kindness during Friday and Monday. We were having two very bad days, but you made it a lot better by being so understanding!

Similarly, although it's tempting to point fingers, we really can't complain about the team at Tyler. Upgrades of this magnitude are no fun for anyone. They were having a very bad day too, but Tyler stuck with it until all of the issues were resolved. We appreciate that their technicians were hard at work well into the evening tonight.

Did this outage cause you to miss any filing deadlines?  If so, please read our previous blog post, which explains how the trial rules address this situation.

Did the e-file outage on Friday through Monday cause you to miss a deadline?

On Friday, July 22nd, we noticed an increasing issue with slow or completely unresponsive response times being returned by the State's E-Filing Manager, which is the central system that routes E-Filing submissions to each court. 

Doxpop promptly reported the issue to the State's vendor for this system, and received confirmation they were "aware of an issue which is affecting filings in IN Prod and are currently investigating".

As of 5PM, this problem was still not resolved, and the State's vendor indicated that they would continue working on the problem into the weekend.

If these issues caused you to miss a deadline, please note that Trial Rule 87(J)(1)(c), essentially provides for a one-day extension when a lengthy e-filing system outage or issue prevents filers from meeting a deadline.

We expect that the Trial Courts will all be aware of the scope and timing of this outage via direct communication from Trial Court Technology. However, if the court you are working with requires an affidavit from Doxpop to attach as an exhibit to the motion described in TR 86(J)(1)(c), please let us know and we'll be happy to supply documentation in support of your motion. (Simply attaching a screen print of this blog post may be sufficient.)

On the appellate side, take a look at Rule 68(M)(1)(d), which appears to be nearly identical to the Trial Court rule on this topic.

USPS Postal Rate set to increase, how will this effect Delivery by Doxpop rates?

 

As announced by the USPS earlier this year, USPS postal rates are set to increase on July 10th, 2022. We've reviewed those changes and will be updating the pricing to our Delivery by Doxpop services in line with that pricing at the end of the day on July 8th due to the update happening over the weekend.

The rate updates are detailed but in short, the only increase you will see is the actual postage increase for services that utilize the USPS. The only exception is with First Class Mail and Certified Mail flat packages. With those, you will see the per-page printing fee slightly increase as that is how we account for additional per-ounce charges. 

You can review our full Delivery by Doxpop fees on our fee schedule here. 

If you have any questions or would like more details on these updates please don't hesitate to contact Doxpop Support at 866-369-7671 or support@doxpop.com.

The Judgment Search is known to be incomplete, but still useful.

The Judgment Search is Incomplete. 

Here's an explanation of why, and what we're doing to fix it.

In August, we released our new judgment search with high hopes of providing a simple and comprehensive tool for finding judgments. It turns out we got ahead of ourselves. Here's an outline of the two significant issues we have identified, and how we're addressing them.

The context:

The data for the judgment search comes directly from the Indiana Courts. Doxpop pays the Indiana Office of Judicial Administration to send us a real-time data feed of public court information. One of the elements included in this data feed is a judgment record, which creates the Record of Judgments and Orders (RJO) book for county clerks. It is this judgment record that we search for when you do a judgment search.

What we got wrong:

(1) The data feed from the State Courts is incorrectly formatted. The issue is that when multiple judgment records exist on a case, the Court is sending us just one of the records. The Court IT folks quickly agreed that this is wrong and they are working helpfully with us to resolve that problem. Fixing this is a big project that will take more than a month.

(2) Because the judgment records drive the process to create the RJO book automatically, we expected that every court would make judgment entries. We were wrong. Some courts aren't using this tool to report judgments, so we can't do a complete judgment search in their counties.

How we'll resolve the problem:

The data feed issue described above is in the process of being resolved. There's a lot of work involved, but the solution is clear. When the judgment records are coming in correctly via the State Court data feed, we'll be able to tell you that the judgment search is complete for the counties that enter judgment records.

The second issue is a more complex one because we can't control the court's choices about internal business processes. Every court in Indiana that hears civil cases has a tool that will make their work easier... but we can't force them to use it. What we can do is survey the courts and give you a verified list of the courts that are entering the judgment records, and the date they started. We're in the process of doing that survey now, and will be releasing information about the participating counties shortly.

What you should do until both problems are fixed:

A regular case search on Doxpop will reliably return cases that a person is involved in statewide, and by visually scanning the minute entries, you can locate the entries noting when a judgment has been rendered. This is the way it's been done for years, so stick to the old reliable methods until we have a better solution. To make sure you search for every variation on a name, we suggest that you use our "super search" tool or do wildcard searching.

Why is the judgment search still useful?

We suggest still doing a judgment search in addition to a regular case search because although the judgment search is incomplete, every record it returns is definitely a judgment against the name you searched for. Doing a judgment search only takes a few seconds and may locate a judgment you missed with your visual scan of minute entries. Redundancy is useful when doing a thorough job is important.

Doxpop's Fine Payment has been retired

Doxpop is no longer contracted to take traffic or citation payments for any counties in Indiana and the service has been retired as of January 1st, 2022.

If you found this post looking to pay a traffic ticket issued in an Indiana county here are some suggestions:

• Most counties are payable on the Indiana State Court payment site at public.courts.in.gov so start there. We suggest allowing 7-14 days to pass for the ticket to be payable. 
• If you are unable to find or pay your ticket at that site please call the clerk of courts in the county the ticket was issued. 
• If you are unsure of the county, look at which court the ticket was assigned to and the first part of that court name will be the county or municipality the ticket was assigned to. 

Holiday Doxpop Closings. We're wishing all of you a great holiday season!

In observance of the holiday season Doxpop offices and support will be closed for the following upcoming holidays:

Thursday, December 23rd

Friday, December 24th

Friday, December 31st

That said, our support doesn't entirely stop just because of the holidays. We understand that sometimes our users may have an emergency situation during a holiday so here's how to get help if you need it while we are closed:

We will not be monitoring phone lines, so you must use email. One of our managers will be checking email periodically throughout the holiday break. If you have a real emergency, please send an email to support@doxpop.com that contains a brief description of the problem and a phone number we can call to reach you.

Please be respectful when using this option. It's for real emergencies that can't wait until we're back to the office.