LINZ News

Two new area managers join the LINZ team

Two new area managers joined LINZ late last year as part of the move towards a 100% electronic environment for survey and title lodgement.

Lichelle Guyan has been appointed Southern Area Manager and will look after the Dunedin, Christchurch and Wellington processing centres. New Northern Area Manager, Peter McLellan, is in charge of the Hamilton and Auckland processing centres.

The move to 100% e-lodgement means a significant decrease in manual processing work, a reduction in LINZ's workforce, and a requirement for fewer processing centres. Longer term, LINZ will retain two of the current five processing centres in Hamilton and Christchurch.

Lichelle is no stranger to electronic environments having spent the majority of her career in the banking industry. "There are parallels between electronic banking and Landonline and I'm looking forward to using my experience to benefit LINZ's changing environment."

Lichelle worked for Trustbank Otago for 16 years, seeing it through many changes, including its evolution to Westpac. She managed three branches in Otago, before moving to Wellington after significant branch closures in the late 1990s. While in Wellington, she established a Virtual Relationship Management team with Westpac in Christchurch. Lichelle subsequently moved to Christchurch to manage that team where she is currently based.

On Landonline, Lichelle says, "It's a very good tool and LINZ is proactive at getting feedback from customers prior to releases and upgrades. I'm keen to do my bit to keep that feedback loop working well."

Peter comes from EDS in Auckland. He worked on the survey conversion project with EDS at LINZ in 2000 and says that this was a driver for him applying for the job.

"I'm passionate about Landonline because I was involved in the original survey conversion project in Wellington," says Peter. "It's very exciting to see the fruition of that work and be working with it now as an actual tool that's being used."

More recently, as operations manager for the contact centre at EDS, Peter has been looking after international clients. He is keen to apply the knowledge and skills gained at EDS to benefit the wider community rather than just the business sector.

"I believe what LINZ does matters to New Zealanders. It's our heritage to own a piece of land so it's great to be able to work with the survey and title communities to ensure that that becomes a reality."

Peter says communicating with customers is crucial. "LINZ's commitment to communicating change via publications such as Landwrap is paramount. People need to know what's happening and why, and I'm looking forward to contributing to this process."

New area managers: Peter McLellan and Lichelle Guyan

Landonline

Landonline unavailable over Easter

Landonline and Customer Support will be unavailable on Easter Saturday, 22 March 2008, and therefore over the entire Easter period from 9pm on Thursday 20 March until 7am on Tuesday 25 March.

During this time, LINZ will be undertaking some routine maintenance work to Landonline. This work will not change the Landonline application and as a result, customers will not experience any changes.

Landonline and Customer Support will resume normal services from 7am on Tuesday 25 March.

If you have any queries, please contact Customer Support on 0800 ONLINE (665 463).

Release 3.0 update

Release 3.0, currently aiming for April, continues the journey to 100% e-lodgement for conveyancers with the addition of functionality to handle complex e-dealing transactions. This Release will also include some changes that will improve existing system processes within e-survey.

More information about the Release is available for conveyancers.

Screen resolution

With the increased e-dealing functionality, all the space available on the screen is now being utilised. As previously advised, a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 is the current recommended setting. If your screen resolution is set to something other than this, you may not be able to see all of the screen. To avoid this inconvenience, refer to How to change your screen display settings in the System Support section of this website.

Release 3.0 e-dealing presentations

Invitations to attend Release 3.0 presentations will be sent out soon. Be on the look out for them and also see the article Release 3.0 is on the way – who should attend the presentations? in this month's Landwrap.

A reminder about passwords

To help ensure the ongoing security of Landonline, Release 3.0 will enforce password requirements.

The first time you reset your password after Release 3.0, you will need to use a combination of lower and uppercase letters and numbers and ensure your password is between eight (8) to twenty (20) characters in length.

For further information about passwords, refer to last month's Landwrap story Changes to Landonline passwords coming.

Regulatory

Changes to Land Transfer regulations for Release 3.0

Landonline Release 3.0 will allow for more complex transactions involving Discharge, Transfer and Mortgage instruments to be prepared in Landonline using e-dealing (see article Landonline Release 3.0 overview in Landwrap, January 2008).

The process to provide the necessary authority by Land Transfer regulations for these more complex transactions is almost complete.

More detail on the regulations will be published in the March issue of Landwrap.