happy and excited to be here today to give you a preview. so without further a do, i'm not sure if you remember this slide. it's to replicate the current process that business owners have to go. they have to run around to different buildings and have to pick up forms and go online searching through different websites to get all the information and what i try to set out to do is get some of these arrows that are shown on the slide. i mentioned last time that this is what our goal which i call the bad, the big audacious hairy goal is a big comprehensive that supports the businesses in the sfre --

from their inception to their life cycle of their business. here we go. i was hoping for a drum roll, but i will do without. so what you are looking at at the san francisco business portal. this hasn't gone live yet to the public. we have some test users and some of you guys have probably logged in and checked it out and maybe given input along the way. this has been my blood, sweat and tears for the last 10 months so i'm really excited to show you guys. this is our official logo for the portal. we wanted something different from the city seal but also representing something from the city of san francisco. so people would look at the site and think this doesn't look like

our traditional government website but the seal will give them the reason that this is coming from the city. this is a view of small businesses and i would like to feature other businesses as well so that everyone can get their time in the spotlight. so when we scroll down you are going to see everything you need to succeed. a little welcome message on what this portal is about. you can get information on starting a business, managing a business and growing your business. here you will see a time line where you can scroll left and right. this website is designed to be a tablet as well as mobile devices. on a tablet and on your phone you can scroll with your finger which is much easier. these are the generic 10

steps starting in the city. statement, announcements about wage going up, business license renewels, any important legislation about small businesses will be here. this is a quote. brenda was someone i helped many years ago and this was something that will inspire others. a piece that connects the user to the portal and giving them a personal sense. if brenda can do this, i can do this too. starter kits. i will go over this in just a second. permits and licenses, this is sort of our version of hosting all of the city forms and applications for permits and licenses. kits, tools and resources. early whier y -- when i delivered to small businesses. we had a huge library, like

here is a document that you can take everything with you. we have everything online now in an online resource library. on the bottom of the page we have information where you will see content on the bottom of every page that is related to the topic of the page. i will give you an example in a second and on the bottom about getting connected and sharing this page. >> starter kits. i said i would go over that. this is probably my favorite piece of the portal. starter kits you will see in this current phase of the portal. it will feature the top 10 questions of the portal. as you see food services is very popular, restaurant and bar caterer and food

trucks, salon, business consults. as we go along we are going to add to these starter kits. what i really wanted this portal to do is replicating that hand holding at the office of small business. so many people give us positive feedback about thank you so much for taking me through every single step about what i'm about to embark on and thises the experience i wanted to replicate online. i will show you one of these. so restaurants, when i click into it, it tells you everything you need to know about starting a restaurant. you are going to find a restaurant guide and a road map for how to start a restaurant and you are going to find related documents and all the permits that you are going to need to start a restaurant. you can download the entire kit into a folder feature and i will go

into that. you can download your kit or add your kit to your folder. in your restaurant guide we've also produced this in a one pager pdf format so people can print and take this with them. the restaurant guide is that detailed hand holding that people would get when they speak to a counselor directly. so information about choosing a location. there is going to be notes throughout the restaurant guide, any guide. these notes i consider small nuggets of information. so if you are taking over a space that is already a restaurant, that will make the process much easier. don't forget if you are going to serve liquor or alcohol in your restaurant you need to start the application process early. these are the a little bits of pieces of information you will get. some of the other information about setting up your business,

preparing your space, some of the conditional things such as what if you want to have tables and chairs outside of your restaurant. what if you have an open flame at the tables in the restaurant. so information about after you open and what you will find on the bottom again are resources that were could doctor -- crated information and ada information and lots of resources along the way. i won't go into too much detail but the rest of the stuff on starting a business you have the whole page and detailed information on each piece and every page has relevant resources that are on the bottom. manager business you will find key dates and

closing your businesses and assistance and disaster preparedness. st 123 dov .org doesn't have the information and so we have all this information and what the steps are and hiring employees and getting city contracts and how do you grow your business by getting a piece of the government pie. permits and licenses are the sections with all of the forms. i tell users if you are starting one of the types of businesses go to the starter first because that's a detailed guide. if you know what you are searching for, let's say you've owned a restaurant for many years and you know you have tables and chairs

outside, you can come here and search for the form or you can filter. filtering gives you lots of information about businesses as well that are not covered in the starter kits. for example you can go into food and drink, you can see alcohol and wine distributor and candy store, cafe, deli. i'm going to see relative results required for this specific kind of business. each form, for example, you will be able to, for example the weights and measure, you can download it and save it to your folder. what you see here is that you have saved an item to your folder. this is a way to get around to an

affect that we have not developed individual user profiles. that is a big goal so you can have unique user id's and log on and get your permits and licenses and renewels. for now we have the folder. as a business owner, when you are doing research along the way you can start saving some of these documents and resources into your folder. it's in the folder for 24 hours or you can choo is at the mail the folder content to yourself. let's say i'm sitting in a meeting and bored and dreaming about opening a restaurant some day i can e-mail this to myself and view it later. so we can skip to viewing the contents of the folder and i just saved that one point, the weights and measures and we can download to my desktop or

e-mail my folder list. i think of this as an online shopping cart. and going through the last piece, resources. resources is that big library that we pulled together. you are going to find document resources. some of really important documents will be here or you can save them onto your folder. you will find online resources and you will be able to find resources based on business need. so it really doesn't, i feel like it doesn't do the user any good if you look at a bunch of resources that are names of organizations and names of documents and what the business owners really needs based on the type of help they are looking for. four corners if -- for example, if i'm in need

of ada information, these are the ada resources that you can click on and you can click on any of these links to view the guide or the information saved online. and we've created a terms and definition. a little glossary. if you want to look up, these are some of the featured words, business or property, and you can search through the letters of the alphabet to get to the glossary. the last piece of resource is a directory. so we have gone through every single city, state and federal government agency and listed their contact information and the department's information. for example, san francisco, if you want to take a look at the arts commission, all of their contact information is here. and one thing i forgot to mentioned is

the permits and licensing section is we have 428-piece of information whether it's a document that's hosted or a permit through the state or federal government. when we had license 123, it was around 200. we've made this a lot more robust and comprehensive in terms of giving people our users the correct information. and at any point users can get the information. contact us and it also links to the office of small business. we set this up as a direct link where if someone types in a message based on the subject of the message, they will either be directed to the office of small business or directed to my team if they had technical questions about the site. feedback is another option for users.

lastly i want to point out to select a language bar up here. that's supposed to show chinese and spanish. we are in our launch stages. so fixing that little bug like that. i planned that, actually. to select that, you select spanish or chinese in traditional. in a previous presentation we really went through content writing where we paid attention to staying way from things like id iomatic expresses so when we click on the button it will make a lot more sense. on the portal in the home page you see more titles that says get your business off the ground, in english it says let's get started, but in chinese it means literally picking up your business off the ground. so we stayed

away from that and we were really careful about writing the content as we went through. okay. any questions so far? >> this is really awesome. >> infant fantastic. >> this is really great. when is it going live. >> i will keep moving through my presentation here to give you a little more information. >> are you going to be able to show the video? >> i won't. i have a screen shot of it. what we have done in the last couple of weeks is conduct in user testing. we've talked to speakers and business owners in san francisco. we generated 7-8 scenarios for them to work through using the portal and the users describe this site as

professional, useful and engaging and beautifully designed and comprehensive. we are searching for chinese and spanish users this week to conduct the exact same user testing with our limited english speakers. some of the quotes, these are direct quotes from our user testing. one user said "i feel like it inspires and gives all the information you weren't sure about or aware of" this is key to me. somebody else said this website has all the tools i need as a business owner. someone else said "love it". it's pretty good food back. we launched a week ago. we sent out a mass e-mail to about 100 people on the mailing list

and sent to the city department who are part of the process and also small business leaders who are a part of the research and champion of getting this portal built. in phase two, this week we are going to send this out to 300 license regions and we are going to say, hey, we have developed this new website and developed a lot more information and we want you to check it out. that's going out next week. our full launch which commissioner riley just asked. we are preparing a press release. as soon as that press release gets scheduled. within a week or two, i'm anticipating the if you -- the full

launch. we had a firm create the video and they did this pro bono. we are in the final stages of editing and making some final changes. but when that's ready, i can't wait to show it to all of you guys. we also created a post card style handout and we can get this out to all of our friends at the counter and cross departmental links, it will be on the san francisco home website and some of our key departments such as planning, dph, some of the key players will get our links up. we are sending this out to merchant associations, our other supporters of this project. we are going to get the announcements out. some of the trainings and demos i have conducted so far.

we have trained the counselors at osb and 311 customer service reps a couple weeks ago and i will be presenting a demo for our quarterly release. this is an example of our postcard coming out. the department of helping you start your business. that's the front of version one, front of version two, is you've got this and pa pointing to the idea and we have the rest like creating the plans, the finances. you've got idea, so we are going to help you reach your dream and on the back of every postcard you will see the basic information about the portals and some of the main sections. this is a screen shot of video that regina asked about. so we had four sessions with four local small businesses and

the intent is to really inspire other people. it's beautifully shot and we will connect that to the portal helping people reach that goal and make that idea come to fruition. so., again, i would show you this when we are done. reviewing some of the key 2014-2015, this project started at the end of november so it's been on an adjourn for -- journey for the last nine 9 months and we are really close to the finish line. full launch is october which is where we are at now. we need to create and operations and training manual so it's something that we can pass on some day if we are not around anymore and somebody takes over the portal. i really feel this is a site that has longevity and

not something that is created and will disappear in a year or two. we will have a training manual and operational manual and this will have to be conducted periodically and we need to check with the department to make sure all the information in the portal is correct. we need to do a content management and we are already getting feedback from some of our early users and updating forms and information and some of the feeds as they increase. technical maintenance and security maintenance. part of the next phase which has already begun in a parallel process is mapping out the five consolidated billing departments. we want to do is having the portal as a great first step into getting information into one place, but eventually if there is a way where people can log in and manage

their account, they can pay bills and look at delinquency and pay for everything they need to do online. that is the pie in the sky. i don't know if that will happen anytime soon but it's something we are working on and to get to that step, is looking at the process. there is so many things about the physical process itself to starting the business and so many hurdles that business owners face that we want to map out and looking at the gaps and trying to close up those efficiency gaps so we have a more stream lines process and we can automate some of the work flow and that is something i will be working on for the next couple of years and again making future state recommendations and stream lining. lastly i just want to thank the commissioners. every single one of you have given us so much support over the last

couple of years. when this idea was first talked about to the times that you've all given us your support in securing funding and allowing me to take the leadership in creating this port al. i heard from kids that it takes a village since i don't have kids. this is my baby. it really takes a village. it's not just myself. the team you see here, all flt small business leaders and some of them actually spoke earlier and all of you guys, we couldn't have done it without you. thank you so much for your unwavering support. >> congratulations. >> this is fantastic. i know start up technical companies take a lot longer. the fact that you did it inside of government is even more remarkable. i think it looks very modern and very up to date and i love the

fearful it and looks like some of the best websites. it does look like it's going to be very easy to navigate and something that is going to be frankly just a great way of off loading some of the work that's being done in person today because i think it's very self service oriented. >> it's not perfect and still not done, there is still so much more work that needs to be done. >> i would like to say this is fantastic. i can't wait for this to be launched. as i open another business, i will wait for this. >> it makes you want to start another business. >> i hope that the next phase is where it can connect the dots with the back end of where a small business could come in and see their account and pay their bill. that seems like the most logical thing. i had a question for you. is it possible to connect new

users as far as new businesses with this to move forward with, connecting the dots on the back end or is that just -- like for example, not existing businesses already, but new businesses that would sign on there, could they get their business number. is there a link that can be linked to? >> not yet. the currently officers doesn't have the new business registration online because there are hurdles with things like signatures. so we are working on that. i certainly don't want to over promise and under deliver. those are some of the dreams and goals that i stay awake and think about and wouldn't it be great if everybody had something online. it's something that we are going to work towards even if it takes small steps and this

final implementation just taking these small steps forward every little step will add up and eventually us being a world class city delivering services to our constituents, we'll get there. >> it will show that we are obviously going to get there. this is going to be great. >> commissioners, as part of your role is to provide some guidance to this city. so as you work with that site and you see that these are the next needs that it's certainly a directive, a directive or request that the next phase is that the city needs to be supporting the funding or the needs to do the research and what needs to happen with that to support that to make it happen. it's been your support to continue to push this and to get the services that we provide online so we can service more people and we saw with license 123, in a way we double the

number of individuals that could get information by being able to access some of the information online. so this is now going to as commissioner dwight said, it's going to dramatically increase the numbers because not everybody could get to us from 8-5, monday through friday. again, it's under your purview as a small business commission to say these are the next directions that we want the mayor and the board of supervisors to support and fund. >> yeah, it seems like the most efficient way to go moving forward. >> want to mention one more thing, this project has been a great great success because of the collaboration between the office of small business, between the department of technology and also office of economic and workforce development. so it's been really great to see everyone come together with this common objective and with the support of all these different departments, and me getting resources from

the department of technology, that's what's helped this move so quickly. >> when they are going to the site are they required to give at the e-mail? >> only if they want to contact us because i really didn't want that to be something that would be prohibiting them from wanting to use this site. at this point we are not requiring that people submit their e-mails. but we are tracking on the back end with google analytics and we are looking to using another tool to track some of the activity that's going on in the back end to do analytics on the click where they are going. google analytics i can see when someone enters the portal where are they going next, are they going to the permits and licensing section are they navigating and going into resources. so having all that data will

make things even better. >> is there a button? the reason i ask because for small businesses is about getting information. so collecting as much data. in my website, would you like to join our newsletter? is that the type of business you are that you can e-mail? >> we don't have a newsletter and that would be the fingers of the office of small business. all over this portal you can see the osb contact information on there. we are really not collecting that. >> but i think that's the point to take commissioner white, in terms of the next sort of level of enhanced features of how to better connect. because i don't see that as at the news letter but if you would like to be updated on small issues, click here. >> got it. hopefully right now that function is on osb website. i

will make sure that we make that very clear. if you would like to stay connected and i will port them through and get them to the osb site. >> thank you. it's fantastic. >> great job. i logged in and it's very user friendly. >> good. thank you. >> i second that opinion and i thought that it was a very crisp, the colors were very crisp and very modern and very intuitive. i like the flow of the site and i think there is a lot of information that comes out. so congratulations. it's a beautiful site and there is a lot of room to devil up as you were saying. i have a question regarding the content management and content update and how do y