The BBFC is always looking for ways to improve its customer service. To this end, I am very pleased to announce that on Monday, 6 June, we will be launching a range of enhancements to our extranet facility.

The primary improvements are:

Greatly improved speed when searching. Some search tasks could previously take upwards of a minute. We have slashed search times to a few seconds for most searches. Improved options for searching. Previously you could only search via a single field that would search every field on the document for the search query entered. You can now search by 'title', 'category', 'submission type', 'reference number', 'BBFC internal code number' or 'register number'. And you still have the free text field as before. Improved display of results. When searching your back-catalogue, you used to have to click through the pages to get the title you want. Now all works view can now be filtered by a specific letter to make finding works easier and faster. (You can put the list into alphabetical order if you don't see the title you want straight away.)

Additional improvements include:

The work in progress view can now be filtered by 'submission type' and also by status. For example, if you click 'Video Feature' and 'Approval (Packaging)' it will just show those works, so it is easier to see what is at this status, while works at other statuses or of different submission types will be hidden. The existing submissions and the area in which you can create a new submission area were previously separate. They are now accessible from the same place. The 'all works' view didn't used to include the category in the table. It now does.

All the extranet view designs have been updated to match the new look for online submissions. I'd also like to mention that the old extranet will be running in parallel to the new extranet for 30 days. After this, we will turn the old system off. During these 30 days you can use either system but we would very much like you to get used to the new system as soon as possible.

Finally, if you don't already have an extranet account it's very simple to set up. Please contact ithelpdesk@bbfc.co.uk for access.