Tidying up some loose ends

We have made some small changes to aid navigation between areas of the system in HPA2 for those local authorities that also use one of Locata’s letting systems. Locata run many Choice Based Lettings (CBL) systems, but we have also developed Property Pool and Direct Letting systems for councils.

We have therefore dropped the “CBL” link from the navigation system and replaced it with “Lettings” to better reflect the range of lettings systems we provide. We have also made changes to the linking icons by adding a house for Housing Register and HRS for the Housing Related Support system as shown here.

We’ve added “Rent Account Balance” to the TA Tenancy List Report so you can see all the people who have rent arrears and at what level those arrears are.

Server upgrade

We have upgraded the servers that hold all HPA2 data as agreed with all clients.

This meant that our HPA2 system and customer portals were down for an hour when we move to the latest version of SQL server within the Microsoft Azure cloud-based service that we use. The work was undertaken outside of normal working hours, so we knew that the that the change would cause minimal disruption. We could not be precise about the timings of the upgrade as we had to move a few clients at a time to the new server so that we could keep a close eye on every scheme’s data.

The work started on a Wednesday and we used both Thursday and Friday to move every HPA2 scheme across the country and sign off as safely upgraded.

The new environment for your system is now substantially more secure, robust and efficient. It will also mean that all the HPA2 data will now be held on Microsoft Azure servers based within the UK. While this is not a Brexit requirement, it may help reassure any members, senior officers and DPOs within your local authority who may be less clear about the regulations related to where data should be held and its movement across international borders.