The secure public portal allows request for information and tasks to be issued to external parties from the COMtrac platform. External parties can respond through a secure, encrypted and authenticated web based portal.
What's New?
A new feature is available in your Training (UAT) Environment. The feature will be released to your agency’s Production Environment following approval from your COMtrac liaison officer, advising us to release the new feature to your agency.
COMtrac Secure Public Portal
The secure public portal has replaced previous environments where COMtrac users could request information or assign tasks to external third-parties via a direct link in an email notification from COMtrac. In the new version, an external third-party will still receive an email notification containing a link to the request however the link will now require the user to sign in through a secure authenticated public portal. This is illustrated below.
Security Notes
- An external user must register with an email address and password to access the portal.
- Only external users sent an invite from an agency to register can actually register with the portal. The invites are in the form of shared investigation reports, requests for information (RFI) or investigation tasks.
- Registered users can only see investigation reports, RFIs or investigation tasks specifically shared with them.
- All files downloaded through the portal use a secure, encrypted link. Once downloaded, the link will expire after 30 seconds, blocking sharing of links with unauthorised users.
- Registered users however can continue to download the same file repeatedly as a new link is generated each time.
- All uploaded files will be subject to a virus scan (maximum 4GB).
- Passwords will have a minimum length with content rules applied.
What does this mean for me?
As a COMtrac user, the way in which you send an RFI or assign a task to an external third-party remains the same. The focus of the change is your third-party recipients have to authenticate (verify) themselves as legitimate recipients of the request.
An additional advantage of the COMtrac secure portal is you can now share briefs of evidence by selecting the new Share Brief feature in the briefs of evidence section. Third-parties you share the brief with (e.g. Brief Checker, Legal Officer) will now access the shared brief through the new COMtrac Secure Portal.
Where do I find the new feature ?
Third-party recipients of your RFI, Tasks or Shared Brief of Evidence will be sent a link to the secure public portal when you action the request as illustrated below.
