Getting Started
No guesswork. No surprises. Here's exactly what happens when you become an ALIS client — and what to expect at every step.
What to Expect
Most organizations are fully up and running within 2–3 weeks. The timeline depends largely on how quickly your team can provide the inputs we need along the way — but we'll guide you through every step.
The Implementation Process
Once your service agreement is fully executed and initial payment is received, we get to work immediately. For hosted clients, we provision a new dedicated server environment for your organization. For on-premises installations, we'll request remote access to assess your existing server and confirm it meets ALIS requirements before proceeding.
We handle the full installation and configuration of ALIS. During this phase, we'll ask your team to create two subdomains under your organization's main domain — one for staff access and one for your public intake form. Once those DNS records are in place, server configuration continues.
We'll work with you to create your initial set of user accounts, configured with the appropriate roles and access levels for each member of your team.
This is one of the most important setup steps. We'll build out your organization's core reference lists together — including counties, facilities, referral agencies, salutations, genders, ethnicities, pronouns, subjects and issues, and status codes.
These lists power your intake workflows and reporting, so getting them right from the start matters.
Once you have access to ALIS, we'll walk your team through setting up your email templates, letter templates, and standard attachments — so your communications are ready to go from day one.
ALIS needs to connect to an outgoing mail server to send confirmations, notifications, and correspondence. We'll configure ALIS to work with your organization's existing email account, or you can use our SMTP server at no additional charge. Most organizations opt to use their own.
We'll work with your team to design and configure your public intake form — typically modeled after an existing form your organization already uses. This ensures the transition feels familiar to the people submitting requests.
Before go-live, we conduct thorough end-to-end testing — submissions, routing, notifications, user access, and reporting. We won't hand the keys over until everything is working exactly as it should.
Your team gets access to ALIS. Your annual billing period begins on this date. From here, your dedicated onboarding session gives your staff a live, screen-share walkthrough of the platform — covering daily workflows, answering questions, and making sure everyone is confident before we step back.
A Note on Existing Records
If you have existing intake records you'd like to bring into ALIS, we'll discuss this during the implementation process. Data migration is available as a paid service — cost varies depending on your current platform, data format, and volume. We'll assess your data and provide a clear estimate before any work begins.
Timeline
The server can typically be provisioned and your team logged in within one week of receiving your signed agreement and payment.
Full implementation — including list building, form configuration, and testing — generally takes 2–3 weeks, depending on your team's availability and response time.
Billing
Your annual billing period begins on your go-live date.
We'll send renewal reminders at 45 days, 30 days, 15 days, 1 week, and the day of your renewal date — so you're never caught off guard.