Release Notes: Here's What's New in Your Ontic Platform
Release Date: June 28th, 2021
Summary:
Topic Wizard New Feature
What it is: A step by step workflow to facilitate Social Feed Topic Creation.
Why it matters: The guided social topic wizard lets you choose your listening preferences by building custom searches with flexible keyword and location rules and boolean queries to deliver quality over quantity so your team can focus on what’s important and actionable.
How it works: To access the Topic Wizard, navigate to the 9-box menu. Under Administration > Listening Topics, click on Social Feed Topics. At the top right side of the table, click “Create New Social Feed Topic.” Select “Topic Wizard” and click “Next.”
Add a topic name, optional description, language, and then select from any of the curated Keyword Categories. There is no limit to the number of Keyword Categories you can pick. Then, click “Continue”.
On the second page of the Wizard, you can associate a Principal to the topic. This is helpful when it comes to metrics around volume and for sorting topics. If you would like to include or exclude any additional keywords, you can enter them in the boxes below. Note: To include all keywords that you have previously associated with a Principal, you will need to check the box to do so.
You will also include any social handles that you want to monitor mentions of at this stage. When you are done, click “Continue.”
The next step is to add a Location. To skip this, simply click “Generate Topic Preview.” To limit your topic by a location, click “Specific Location” and start typing a location in the Include or Exclude box. Note: Specific addresses are not supported. Instead, search for a city, country, or region.
Once you click “Generate Topic Preview,” the only way to make edits to the topic will be directly in the boolean (from our Classic Topic Builder.) Once the preview is generated, you will need to click “Activate and Publish” to turn the Topic on. Topics can be edited at any time from the Social Feed Topics table.
Investigations Hub New Product
Please contact your Ontic team for more information about Investigations Hub in Ontic.
What it is: A dynamic, customizable Investigations and Case Management solution that teams rely on to:
Conduct consistent, streamlined investigations using a workflow configured for your team
Perform research and collect investigation details
Analyze data and trends to identify opportunities to address gaps or areas of risk
Compile case findings and communicate audience-specific reports
Why it matters: Collecting all relevant information and turning over every stone quickly is critical to investigating and evaluating an incident or threat. Investigation findings need to be reported and shared in a consistent manner to mitigate impact and support case management efforts. To make the data actionable, team members spend hours manually searching, documenting and organizing information - often printing case documents and filing away once it is closed.
This isn’t efficient and it can lead to costly errors because of missed details, disconnected processes and lack of an audit trail ultimately resulting in financial loss or reputational damage to the organization. With so much at stake, teams need to ensure that investigations are conducted accurately and consistently with one central view for everyone involved to perform analysis and report on outcomes and actions.
With Ontic’s Investigations Hub, teams can collect, connect and research details including incidents, persons of interest (POIs) and associations, evidence documents, open source social media, public records and more. The integrated platform provides a scalable, automated solution for collaboration, smart timeline tracking, customized reporting and historical access to critical intelligence.
How it works: Click here for details on how Investigations Hub works.
Public Records International Compliance Enhancement
What it is: Users outside of the U.S will be unable to view Public Records information.
Why it matters: For compliance, individuals outside of the U.S are not supposed to be able to view sensitive information such as incarceration records, criminal activity, or civil records. With this functionality clients will no longer require admins to adjust roles as needed for international or traveling users. Based on IP address Ontic will enforce the compliance for clients.
Criminal Activity + Vehicle Sighting Indicators Enhancement
What it is: In Entity Details within the Address section there are indicators for addresses with low/no coverage for Criminal Activity and Vehicle Sightings.
Why it matters: Now in the platform you’ll have the ability to view which locations have low coverage for criminal activity vehicle sightings. Now you’ll have more transparency over Ontic’s coverage of Public Records and national Vehicle Sightings.
“Limited Criminal Activity for this area” “No Vehicle Sighting Coverage for this area”
Envoy Integration and Visitor Management Dashboard New Integration and Product
Please contact your Ontic team for more information about Envoy and VMS integrations in Ontic.
What it is: Ontic has formalized an integration partnership with Envoy. If you are using Envoy for visitor management you can now connect the two systems. Whether a person is pre-registered in Envoy or if the person shows up to your office and signs into an Envoy Kiosk, the individual’s details will be sent to Ontic to identify if the person matches any details associated with any of your Entities in Ontic.
Why it matters: This integration allows for more real-time and proactive analysis of people who enter your facilities. Once data is sent to Ontic any number of workflows can be initiated. Ontic can send notifications to team members based on certain criteria. For example, if an Entity shows up to your San Francisco office Ontic can automatically notify your San Francisco team. Ontic’s Visitor Management dashboard can also maintain a log of visitors for retroactive analysis and ongoing pattern spotting and anomaly detection.
How it Works: Via Ontic’s App Directory your admin can authenticate your Envoy instance in Ontic and select the locations and workflows that you want to connect to Ontic. For more information on how to deploy the integration you can review the Envoy Implementation Guide in our Knowledge Portal.
Granular filters for Public Record Types Enhancement
What it is: In Feeds you can now filter Public Record feeds based on additional criteria such as Public Record Source, Case Type, Category, Charges, Record Type, Jurisdiction and more.
Why it matters: Ontic has a robust dataset of Public Records and you may not want to view every type of record or alert when performing research and using the platform. This filtering makes it easy to focus on the types of Public Records that matter most to you and help you easily identify the most pertinent signals.
Team Chat New Feature
What it is: The option to send instant messages within an Investigation, Entity, Signal or Research result. Team Chat includes @mention functionality (with notifications), threaded replies, and text format options. The conversations are searchable within the chat, but do not show up in Universal Search results.
Note: Team chat is asynchronous at this time. Users need to click out of the chat window and click back into it to see new messages.
Why it matters: Team Chat is an important tool for collaboration. Previously, most quick communication was done in “Notes” or outside of Ontic. Now, teams can work together without leaving the page.
How it works: Team Chat is available on the Action bar on the left side of the screen on an Entity profile or Investigation.
To @mention another Ontic user in your Workspace, type the @ symbol followed by their username. Select the user you want to tag and click enter.
To leave inline replies, click the word “Reply” under the message you want to respond to. This will open a new window for the threaded reply. To search the chat, click the Search Icon at the top of the Chat screen.
To set notification preferences for alerts when a chat is added, please visit User Roles.
Entity Notes Revamp Enhancement
What it is: A new interface for adding Notes to Entity Profiles. In addition, the ability to add Tags, date, time and location information to a note is now available. Notes are searchable within that Entity as well as within Universal Search. You can also use Filters to curate a collection of Notes in the Entity Profile.
The Notes section of an Entity will now include a mix of both Analyst Notes (notes added by a user to the Entity profile) as well as Ontic Signals (signals relating to that entity, including Observations/Incidents, Social Signals, Vehicle Sightings…).
Why it matters: These enhancements allow the Notes section of an Entity Profile to be the central place to add key information about an Entity. Whether it is seeing all of the Entity Observations in one place, or filtering Notes to show all Analyst Notes with a specific tag, the new, dynamic Notes enhancements will allow you to find exactly what you are looking for in an easy, efficient way.
How it works: “Notes” are available on the Entity Profile in the left side menu under the Avatar. To add a new Note, click “Add Note” at the top of the screen. To include date, time, location information, or tags, click the blue ‘+’ button. Click “Add” after finishing to type your note.
Note: The Ontic Web Clipper solution is also integrated into the notes dialog box. To activate, simply click on the Ontic Web Clipper icon as shown below.
On the next screen you will see the collection of clipped content that you have previously captured as you were surfacing the open web. The example below is a clip from Twitter with the associated url and source information. Simply select that content block and click ‘done’. That clipped content and associated metadata will automatically appear into your entity notes dialog box as shown in the images below.
To filter your Notes, click on the Filter icon on the top left side of the Notes screen.
To filter by Analyst Notes, or Ontic Signals, click the quick filter options. Notes are searchable and can be sorted by Creation Time (which is the time that you chose when you added the Note) or Ontic Capture Time (which is the time that you entered the Note into Ontic.)
Universal Search New Feature
What it is: A single search across all key data points stored within the Ontic platform.
Why it matters: A better search experience to find and discover information that is stored across the platform within your workspace. Eliminates the need to stove-pipe search across individual categories. The new single search field experience will scan for data elements stored across the following data sets simultaneously (including optical character recognition - OCR and image matches):
Entities
Profiles
Investigations
Observations
Notes
Documents / Stored Files
Live Vehicle Sightings
One search to help you find the nuggets that matter.
How it works: From the masthead across any page in the Ontic platform, click on “Search Ontic”.
From here, enter in the search term and hit enter. You will see a results screen that indicates a results count from the categories highlighted below.
Each category is clickable to view the results (if applicable). Results can be further filtered by clicking on the filter icon located to the left side of the results page.
You can also build sophisticated search queries by simply clicking on any of the categories below the search field (ex: Entity), which will allow you to type sub-attributes to further refine and filter your search. In the example below after clicking “Entity” you can type the word ‘Principal’ or ‘Gender’ which will pull up checkbox options for you to refine your search against. Press ‘Tab’ to lock in the query parameter. This can be done with ‘Notes’ or other categories. Once selected, you can type specific characters (words, numbers, etc) to further narrow your refined search parameter(s). Click the blue arrow to execute the search.
Entity Card Customization Enhancement
What it is: The ability to customize which information is shown on an Entity Card. The “Entity Card” is what you see in the Entity Dashboard default view.
Why it matters: Entity Cards allow you to see information about the Entity at a glance. By choosing which information is visible for each user role, you can be sure that team members get the most important information upfront. All of the information that is visible on the card can be seen when the Entity Dashboard is exported into a “Group BOLO” for sharing as a PDF.
How it works: To customize the Card View, click the 9-box menu and under Administration > Configuration > Layouts. Here, choose Entity Layouts. You can choose to edit an existing layout or create a new Template. Once you are looking at the layout, click the “Edit” button above the avatar image.
From here, you can toggle field options on and off to include or omit that information from the Card display.
Don’t forget! You will need to assign this layout to a user’s Role (Administration > Permissions > Roles) for them to see the updated information in the Entity Card.
Feeds: Monitoring View New Feature
What it is: An alternative, higher density view of signals in the Feed Dashboards.
Why it matters: Monitoring view allows you to see significantly more signals on a single screen compared to the number of signals that can be seen in a feed column. This is helpful when it comes to getting the “big picture” and seeing the “full landscape” of signals coming in through a data feed.
How it works: Navigate to a Feed Dashboard. At the top right of any feed, you will see three vertical dots.
Clicking on the three dots will give the option to see “Monitoring View.” Clicking this will open a new tab with the high density view of signals. You will be able to leverage filtering and take other actions on the signals from the Monitoring view.
Release Notes: Additional Enhancements
Release Date: June 28, 2021
New 9-Box Navigation - Enhancement
What it is: New 9-box navigation menu organization featuring logical subgroupings and simplified feature names.
Entity Location View - Enhancement
What it is: A change to the default Entity Metrics view. Now, when clicking on the Metrics tab within an Entity profile, you will be brought to a dynamic map view of the Entity’s locations.
Feed Color Customization - Enhancement
What it is: The ability to change the color at the top of any Intelligence Feed in Ontic. Previously, users could select feed heading colors from a list of 6 colors. Now, when editing a Feed, an Advanced selection option allows for true color customization.
