About

Bayside City Council is located in the inner southern area of Melbourne, 8km from the CBD at its northern most point.  The vision of Council is to provide a safe, attractive and vibrant city, which values its heritage, environment, promotes innovation and celebrates success.  The organisation’s Web site serves as a key informational vehicle for the entire region.  This case study will detail how the RedDot Content Management Server (CMS) streamlined the maintenance of their online presence while generating a return on investment (ROI) at the same time.

Challenge

Prior to implementing the RedDot system, the publishing and development of the Web site was performed by a centralised team of two staff. This was prohibitive as a disproportional amount of time was required for the simple tasks of editing and updating the accuracy of the existing information, at the expense of expanding and developing the functionality of the Web site.

As the amount of content publishing and new developments increased, it became clear that the two publishing/development staff would no longer be able to keep up. This increase was the result of growing public expectation and the Council’s vision for delivering greater information and services online to the public.

Bayside City Council needed a content management system (CMS) that would provide them with hands-on publishing and would enable them to task-out content creation, editing, and approval to the appropriate owners/departments in the organisation. Such a system would allow individual departments to take ownership of their own areas of expertise and responsibility, enabling the development team concentrate on higher level projects such as online service developments. The staff also needed a solution that would allow Council to automate workflow, ensuring information was approved and published in a timely manner. It also negated the need for staff to be trained in HTML as they could use the template driven system with minimal training.

Council staff compared many different content management solutions and narrowed it down to two - RedDot and the Microsoft CMS.  These systems provided everything that Bayside required in the form of workflows, email reminders, versioning, multiple publishing targets etc.  

Michael Whittaker, Council’s Project Manager Communications Strategy, was involved in the final decision, "RedDot came out on top because of price, ease of use, back-end power and robustness.  Their SmartEdit™ technology was the most intuitive editorial user interface we examined."

Solution

Upon implementation of RedDot, the organisation continues to maintain two staff in a developmental role while ownership and maintenance of the existing Web pages has become the responsibility of the respective departments.  "RedDot has enabled us to free up our technical and developmental resources to expand the Web site’s capabilities in a timely manner including such things as e-commerce, on-line bookings, registrations, and GIS integration," said Mr Whittaker. 

The RedDot Content Management Server (CMS) met Bayside City Council’s needs by:

• Satisfying the growing public expectations for online services, by enabling the development team to concentrate on higher level projects
• Allowing departments to update their own sections of the Web site in a timely manner without the need to be trained in HTML
• Enabled individual departments to maintain their sections of the Web site on a day-to-day basis, as needed
  

Results

Implementing the RedDot system has enabled Bayside City Council to transfer Web resources from maintenance to development resulting in substantial savings of time, resources and money.  "Now that we can dedicate staff to other business initiatives, and as additional people take ownership of sections of the Web site, we anticipate that our organisation will save about 80 percent moving forward", Mr Whittaker said.

The Councils Systems Development Coordinator Stephen Podlena who created the Corporate Web site in RedDot also plays a key role database integration. Liberating Stephen’s time has enabled a range of dependent projects to be completed in a timely manner.

The RedDot Content Management Server (CMS) has provided a number of positive results, including:

• Decentralised authoring and updating of pages
• No HTML knowledge required to update Web information
• Workflow to ensure proper authorisation process
• Timely update of information through email reminders
• Controlled access to pages able to be edited

Additionally, the Bayside City Council Web site was recently voted best local government Web site by the Leading Newspaper (Metropolitan Melbourne). 

The Bayside City Council Web site currently consists of 600 pages. The organisation is also developing an Intranet and other related Web sites including:

http://bayside.vic.gov.au/
http://www.baysidebusiness.com.au/

Launch of the site: August 2002

Largest challenge:  Maintaining and updating information in a timely manner

Volume of Site:  600 pages