Development of a Content Management System (CMS) solution to enable the Council to maintain both their Internet and Intranet sites to meet Government targets for 2005.

http://www.cherwell-dc.gov.uk/
The CMS back-end system is not available publicly

		Home page	CMS for pages	CMS for events

Cherwell District Council(1) in line with Government targets continues to build and upgrade its online services in order to meet the requirements(2,3) to electronically deliver all services by 2005. Cherwell has an ongoing development programme to meet these targets, and as part of this plan some of the projects BOCC has been involved with are listed below.

Cherwell District Council's aim is to make their services as accessible as possible to the public, and this includes their own ability to be able to easily update and maintain the information across their Internet and Intranet sites.

Previously two key members of staff were manually updating the static HTML pages, (along with a number of other discrete self-publishing areas) across the sites. Due to increased demands for changes and updates, Cherwell required a system that would allow individual members of staff to be responsible for and maintain the content of the site for their own particular service areas. BOCC worked with Cherwell District Council to develop such a system, which could accommodate for their needs.

BOCC worked directly with the Web Team from Cherwell District Council to develop a functional specification and to implement a complete redesign for both the Internet and Intranet sites. BOCC attended a number of 'surgery' meetings to discuss ideas and formulise a solution for their needs.

Ultimately, BOCC developed a content management solution to organise and automate the management and publishing processes of content across both the Internet and Intranet sites. They wanted Service Areas and Staff to be responsible for the maintaining of their own information.

Staff had no prior knowledge or experience of HTML and this was an important factor to take into consideration. Therefore the administrative capabilities of updating the sites are easy to undertake. BOCC developed a secure administration area with specific administrator permissions to maintain the content of the site. A range of Publishers and Editors are able to add and edit content within specific areas of the sites.

Since the launch of the re-designed Internet site, staff have been actively updating and maintaining the content of the site. The ability for a number of devolved users to maintain the information on the site has certainly lightened the workload of the Council web team. Particularly with the Intranet, it has provided greater flexibility in publishing information quickly for the benefit of all staff on the site.

Cherwell District Council have also received favourable comments from members of the public regarding the Internet site, particularly complementing them on the usability of the navigation and the overall clean and professional design.

The Internet website and databases are hosted on servers at BOCC, monitored 24 x 7 by our own systems staff. The document and database replication transfers from an internal copy of the website are undertaken using a secure connection between BOCC and the Cherwell District Council network. The Intranet site only exists on Cherwell District Council's internal servers.

The system utilises Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Macromedia ColdFusion Application Server(4) and Microsoft Internet Information Server as key technologies. The system integrates with email servers and the existing internal systems.

Pages output to browsers are Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0(5) and Cascading Style Sheets 2.0(6) compliant.

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