CMS Case Study - Oxford City Council

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Overview

Oxford City Council is a district council that provides a wide range of services for approximately 149,000 residents, 83,000 people who work in Oxford, and 7.5 million people who visit the city every year.

http://www.oxford.gov.uk/

Objective

BOCC has been working in partnership with the Council since 2003 to continue to develop, build and upgrade the range of online services provided to citizens, visitors, partners and staff via their website. The Council required a flexible and robust content management system solution for the maintenance of the content.

Solution

BOCC combined development of the Councils' Internet, Intranet and Secure Extranet sites driven completely by the BOCC CMS. The CMS was customised to match the requirements of the Council and specifically the range of online services that needed to be integrated with the website and staff intranet. BOCC created the graphical design, structure and functional modules for the Council; as well as the integration solutions with various third-party and back-office legacy systems.

The features of the sites include:

Scope covered Internet, Intranet and Extranet sites;
Integration of IPSV metadata tagging;
Developed to W3C WAI level ‘AA’;
Online e-Forms integrating with existing back-office systems;
A-Z of Services search and browse that is integrated with the existing Cintra web service to provide both WODC and Countywide results;
Publications library matching the FOI schema;
FAQs search and browse facility;
Democracy area to include Council Meeting Diary and Find Your Councillor facilities;
'Where you live’ facility to aid users in finding their local Councillor and Contacts for Council services;
Online interactive Events Diary with user submitted events option and downloadable events listings;
Development of a secure online payments facility integrating with existing back-office financial systems;
Inclusion of a recycling and household waste collection interactive calendar;
Intranet site features including - staff directory; 'Sales and Wants' noticeboard; staff news and a searchable documents library resource.

Technologies

The system utilises:

Microsoft™ SQL Server 2005
Adobe® ColdFusion®
Microsoft™ Internet Information Server
Content updating is carried out on an internal server on site at the Councils' offices
Data is replicated from the internal server to the external site hosted at BOCC
Other replication for file data, which then integrates with OCC back-office systems
Secure replication of data to and from internal systems via a virtual private network (VPN)
Hosting on a fully managed dedicated web server at BOCC
Disaster recovery hosting facilities
SSL (Secure Server Certificate)
Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.0 compliant