Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to deploy Brief Connect?

Your organisation can get up and running with the base implementation of Brief Connect and deployed to your environment within a week. The deployment process is highly automated, and we leverage modern CI/CD provisioning and deployment processes to streamline everything for you.

Brief Connect is a powerful system that can be customised and configured in many ways to meet your business needs – from record metadata requirements, workflow solutions and permission structures. For a totally bespoke configuration, we recommend up anywhere from 2 to 6 months implement, validate, refine and test configurations before launching into production.

Who else in government is using Brief Connect?

Brief Connect technology is currently in use at several government departments, including:

• Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet | Vic DPC
• Victorian Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action | Vic DEECA
• Victorian Department of Justice and Community Safety | Vic DCJS
• New South Wales Department of Premier and Cabinet | NSW DPC
• Tasmanian Department of Premier and Cabinet | Tas DPaC

Can I customise Brief Connect for my organisation?

Yes! Central to the design of Brief Connect is that each instance can be customised to the specific needs of any organisation:

• Match your organisations branding and style, including use of logo, colour and domain to completely white label the experience
• Customise the types of records you need. Take existing records from the OOTB experience, and completely change the metadata requirements for those records – adding new fields, changing field types and setting your own field descriptions and helper text.
  You can even create your own types of records to meet organisation needs to brief in different document types
• Design your own workflows – Brief Connect comes with pre-built record workflows, co-designed with our Government partners and applicable to many general record types, like Ministerial Briefings and Correspondence. These workflows can be used as a baseline and customised, adding and removing steps as needed, creating different branches and pathways, and finely tuning to the collaboration, advisory, endorsement and approval processes your organisation requires.

Can users work on the same document at the same time?

Yes. All documents in Brief Connect are stored in your SharePoint Online environment, which means any Office files (such as Word, PowerPoint, or Excel) added to a record can be collaboratively edited by users together in real-time.

This means no more locked documents, files stored on file shares, failed backups, or version control issues. There is only ever a single copy of the documents, stored securely within your Microsoft 365 cloud environment, with granular version control all included.

How does Brief Connect support task management? Do I get a single view of all my tasks in one place?

When you log into Brief Connect, your presented with a tailored and personalised Dashboard. The Dashboard shows you exactly what you need to know – what tasks are assigned to you, what’s important to work on right now, and what’s in the pipeline.

The dashboard includes features like:

• Visuals and charts to quickly understand the current state of a user’s task backlog
• Different core views, from My Tasks to Open Records, which present relevant records to users
• Powerful filtering, sort and search functionality, allowing users to drill-down into the detail and find the records and tasks that are critical to work on at that moment
• Export record data into other formats like .csv for more fine-grain analysis

Is Brief Connect secure and who has access to the information in the platform?

Brief Connect is built with “Secure by Design” principles – from our chosen programming languages, architecture design, our deep integration with Microsoft services, and where we store your data.

• Brief Connect is built using modern, memory-safe languages which reduce the overall attack surface area of our application and minimise the chance of memory exploitations (which make up 70% of all CVEs)
• Our modern, forward-thinking architecture runs out of Azure cloud and Microsoft 365, taking advantage of Microsoft’s $1b+ annual investment into cyber security.
• Each instance of Brief Connect is single-tenanted and self-hosted by you, directly in your cloud environment. You can control the specific configuration to suit your security and compliance requirements. Engage Squared do not capture any sensitive information or store any record data within our environment. You can optionally enable Engage Squared to receive system logs to assist with proactive support and maintenance, but it is not a system requirement to do so.

Can I use Brief Connect for internal business processes not related to ministerial briefs?

Brief Connect comes included with workflow templates for core departmental work products, including:

• Briefs for Ministers, Department Heads (Secretary/Director General) and Department Leaders/Executives.
• Correspondence briefs and responses
• Parliamentary records – including PAEC/Budget Estimate briefs, Possible Parliamentary Questions (PPQs) and Constituency Questions (QCs)

When you deploy Brief Connect, you can take these templates, modify their workflows, clone them to repurpose for a different process or workflow, or create entirely new workflows for any business process. Workflows in Brief Connect are suited towards processes that require many people to interact with standard documents in the form of drafting and collaboration, endorsement, review and final approval.

What governance standards apply to Brief Connect in relation to sensitivity of information?

Record documents and metadata are stored on SharePoint Online. This approach makes it simple to apply labelling, retention and archiving rules to meet your Information Compliance and Records Management obligations.

We recommend users adopt Microsoft 365 and Azure Purview for In-Place Records Management. We can also support our users with record exports so they can be securely stored in third-party Records Management platforms like TRIM.

Can information be shared externally in a secure way?

Absolutely. If your Azure Entra ID tenancy has been configured to allow external users to access your tenant as guests, you can invite those guests to securely access your instance of Brief Connect and collaborate with other users on departmental briefs and records.

How can I make a more detailed assessment of features and functions to ensure it will work for my organisation?

We recommend getting in touch with our sales team who can organise a tailored demonstration of Brief Connect.

Do you offer a managed service for Brief Connect?

Yes! For customers who would like extra support to maintain and extend Brief Connect, we recommend taking up a Managed 360 Support package. Our Managed Support team can assist your organisation with troubleshooting, configurations and updates. We offer a variety of support tiers, with options to include 24×7 Support and Continuous Improvement packages as addons.