Announcements / maintenance updates

Do not use any of these common illegal characters or symbols in your filenames or folders as it can impact your moving papers:

• # pound
• % percent
• & ampersand
• [ left bracket
• ] right bracket
• { left curly bracket
• } right curly bracket
• \ back slash
• < left angle bracket
• > right angle bracket
• * asterisk
• ? question mark
• / forward slash
•   blank spaces
• $ dollar sign
• ! exclamation point
• ' single quotes
• " double quotes
• : colon
• @ at sign
• + plus sign
• ` backtick
• | pipe
• = equal sign
• emojis
• alt codes

📸 If using a phone to take pictures:

1. Use a "Document Scan" app – Don’t just take a photo with the camera app.
    
   • Recommended free apps:
      
     • iPhone: Use the built-in Notes app → New Note → Camera icon → Scan Documents.
        
     • Android: Use Google Drive → Tap "+" → Scan.
        

1. Choose PDF format – Most scanning apps allow saving as PDF, which is more compact and better for uploads.
    
2. Enable compression or low/medium quality (if available) – High-res color photos of receipts are unnecessary.
    
3. Crop the scan – Remove excess background. This reduces file size and improves clarity.
    
4. Avoid scanning in color unless necessary – Black & white or grayscale keeps file sizes smaller.
    

1. Set resolution to 150 or 200 DPI – 300 DPI is overkill for receipts and standard documents.
    
2. Scan in grayscale or black & white – Color drastically increases file size.
    
3. Use PDF instead of JPG or PNG – PDFs are better optimized and usually smaller.
    
4. Use the scanner’s "document" mode – Avoid "photo" or "high-detail" settings.
    

• A scanned receipt or document should be under 500KB, and ideally under 200KB.
   
• A photo of a receipt taken with a phone camera might be 3MB to 6MB if not optimized — 10–30x bigger than needed!
   

The EGS is like any other browser-based applications that uses considerable resources and bandwidth with thousands of users.  

The file upload process is one of the most strenuous processes on your EGS application.  It takes considerable time: more the time to upload, more the chances of failures or connection drop. With each failure, a file needs to be re-uploaded from the beginning with traditional methods.

Best Practice:

Keep your file size limit to 10MB or Less.  This will lessen the resources needed to upload excessively large files and smaller files are always lest risky to store and maintain.  

If you rename a grievance after you initially save it, it will disable the documents in your grievance folder.  For example, if you created it originally as "xyz001" and then changed it to "XYZ001", it would disable your documents.  That is only changing the capitalization of the letters.  If you have done this and cannot access docs, go back and change to it its original form and click save.  

• Don’t include spaces or other punctuation in your file name. If necessary, use dashes in this manner: “my-new-file.pdf”.
• Try to keep your file name short while still making sense.
• Pick a filename and stick to it. Not renaming your file will keep the file indexed by any search engines.

In addition, keep these rules in mind when choosing filename:

• Don’t start or end your filename with a space, period, hyphen, or underline.
• Keep your filenames to a reasonable length and be sure they are under 31 characters.
• Most operating systems are case sensitive; always use lowercase.
• Avoid using spaces and underscores; use a hyphen instead.