Local Florida government delivers innovative Web services via open source CMS
Local governments throughout the country are under continuous pressure to do more with less, and Manatee County, Florida is no exception. They have a tiny IT budget compared to state and national governments, yet they are responsible for the bulk of everyday citizen services. In tight financial straits, the county could ill afford a costly proprietary system plus stiff maintenance fees for their new website IT. They turned their sights to open source alternatives, and found that Magnolia CMS fit the bill.
About Manatee County
The Manatee County was created in 1855, though the area had been inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years, and may have been the landing site for the De Soto Expedition. Situated on Florida’s Gulf Coast, about 316,000 residents now inhabit its 741 square miles.
The Challenge: Upgrade website and infrastructure at minimum cost
With a diverse population including many immigrants and seniors, Manatee’s Information Services Department is charged with providing high quality, highly accessible government services at a minimal cost to taxpayers.
As of late 2009, Manatee County's aging website and technical infrastructure consisted of:
- A vendor-implemented in-house CMS based on IBM Lotus Domino
- An Oracle PLSQL Database
- Sun Microsystem's Solaris operating system
- IBM Same-Time services completely disconnected on the backend
In searching to modernize their web IT, they drafted a list of requirements and prepared a Request for Proposal to solicit vendor solutions.
The returns were bleak. Vendors responded with proprietary solutions that had licensing costs in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, with lock-in commitments for at least the next decade. The entire country was in the grips of recession, and the big vendors were asking for big bucks at the wrong time. The Information Services Department realized that they needed to turn to open solutions as the only good way to reduce costs and prevent vendor lock-in.
The Solution: open standards and open source
Two Information Services employees were tasked with finding a better solution based on open standards and open source. In January 2010, they came back with these recommendations:
- Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition
- A JSR170 document store
- A Tomcat application server
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Rolling out an Intranet portal puts Magnolia to the test
Although the original plan hadn’t called for a new Intranet system, the Information Services Department recognized that it was an easy way to test Magnolia in a production environment and, hopefully, get an immediate ROI. From their January 2010 start, they managed to roll out an Intranet portal to all County employees in only 90 days. Magnolia’s Standard Templating Kit (STK) made integration a breeze, and allowedthem to pull data directly out of the legacy Oracle environment.
Empowering content authors
As Manatee County had no professional writers, they had to rely on operations staff within each department to populate the Intranet. Ease of use was critical to adoption – now 140 users are actively involved in creating and editing content on the Intranet. Twenty have become subject area experts, networking among themselves and building a community of editors. They’ve created invaluable internal resources, including guides to adding and editing content and adding RSS feeds.
A new County Web portal with best practice layouts
Fresh off of the resounding success of their Intranet portal, Manatee County's Information Services is now working full time on an even more ambitious Internet portal for all County departments, set to launch during the summer of 2010. Using the best practice layouts of the Magnolia STK, they've already created the basic framework and ported most of the old information to fresh, accessible content views.
SOA Infrastructure with Magnolia Web front end
Work is also proceeding on turning legacy applications into back-end services, accessible through the Magnolia CMS Web front end. This simplifies cross-application content management, and makes adapting the front end no harder than changing a paragraph by leveraging the browser-based template and layout editing capabilities.The move to this Services-oriented Architecture (SOA) with a Magnolia front end is already making the County’s heterogeneous IT environment simpler and more robust.
Maximizing content reuse, accessibility and quality
Reorganizing design and content is a major part of the Magnolia CMS implementation. Magnolia’s search engine is vital to improving content retrieval and usability. Content authors are able to keep information up to date and accessible, and move away their legacy piles of PDFs.
The County users’ Intranet experience will prove invaluable when they come to take control of their content in the Internet portal. The SOA infrastructure integrated with Magnolia CMS will enable editor creativity and ownership without breaking consistency and usability, ensuring a highly attractive and effective County portal.
21st Century government services with Magnolia CMS
Manatee County plans to better serve its citizens services with Magnolia CMS, while lowering its IT costs. Magnolia CMS is not only made it possible to meet their Web goals, but also to experience a positive ROI only 90 days into the implementation.
With Magnolia CMS, Manatee County Information Services will bring more local government functions directly to the web:
- Adding new services through Magnolia’s STK will be as simple as creating a specific paragraph template, and then writing a Java service to connect with backend systems.
- Users will be able to update their integrated back-end applications through the same Magnolia CMS interface,employing the skills they use to update any other content.
Everything from paying tickets to applying for licenses will eventually be available online, raising the quality of citizen services while dramatically cutting costs. Government will be more responsive as employees react to the public in real-time, providing in-page feedback to eliminate problems and friction.
Magnolia CMS is helping to bring a cultural change for Manatee County. The old website was hard to use with arbitrary limits, and editors had to rely on Information Services to add or edit content and upload files. Now, Information Services is removed from content creation: operations people keep content current, while Information Services focuses on expanding features and accessibility.