*** BREAKING NEWS *** about ECAS!
A friend just mailed me saying he'd read a story that Jill O'Peorafosk, one of the junior ministers at CIC, was talking to the press about the new ECAS interface to GCMS, which should be in place during the next 2 months. This replaces the current interface which formerly served CAIPS and is being used as a temporary interface to GCMS.
Apparently once it's fully in place - will be able to being able to give a lot more information about the progress of our application, including:
- Comments made by visa officers (automated anti-profanity filters will filter out any nasty remarks, so we won't get to see those)
- A projected visa approval date, so after you've been entered onto the system you can see the date you expect to get approved, if you make it that far
- The next brought forward date for your address disappearing from ECAS
- RNG number - this is your own unique Random Number Generator multipler assign to you when you file is first created. This is responsible for calculating the next BF'd (brought forward date) of your application phases - i.e. how long your application has to wait between one phase and another. Each phase of the process is multiplied by your RNG number to get the next brought forward date for your application. Hitherto this number has not been visible to applicants, hence why the delays of one application compared to another have gone unexplained until now.
The new system will also provide access to CIC's list of standard replies, so rather than waiting for them to follow up a query with one of their standard replies, you can simply choose your own from the list.
The end result will be just as useless to the applicant, but the timed saved by immigration officers in not having to hit "autoreply" to the tens of thousands of "What's going on with my application?" type queries they get, will free up a lot of man-hours which they can use to help tackle the backlog.
A second release of the interface, expected around October 2011, will feature an instant messenging system where applicants can chat with fellow applicants who are on their "favourites" list as well as posting messages to immigration officers.
Jill O'Peorafosk stated the first release of the system would be in place within 2 months, although refused to comment as to whether this was to curry favour with the voters ahead of the forthcoming parliamentary elections in May.
