Innovative Government Services on the Web at Low Cost for Manatee County, Florida

Manatee County is located on the west coast of Florida, bordering the Gulf of Mexico. Reportedly discovered in the 16th Century by the De Soto expedition, Manatee County was incorporated in it's current form in 1855.  These days, visitors come to Manatee County to see the De Soto landing site monument  and the county's spectacular beaches and parks. About 315,000 residents live in Manatee County's roughly 741 square miles of land but during a typical tourist season can swell by as much as 150,000.

With a rapidly growing population that includes diverse cultural groups and a significant number of seniors, the county's Information Services Department (ISD) is charged with facilitating high quality, accessible government services for a reasonable cost to taxpayers.

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The Challenge: Upgrade Website and Infrastructure at a Minimum Cost

In 2009 the Manatee County Administrator outlined his vision of using the county intranet/internet as the primary means of communicating with the world at large.  With this goal in mind, the Information Services Department was tasked with helping facilitate this effort amongst sixteen departments.

When the Information Services Department of Manatee County started searching for a way to modernize their aging website and technical infrastructure, the fiscal landscape looked bleak. They drafted a list of their requirements, and did a traditional Request for Proposal (RFP) to solicit vendor solutions.

Around the same time existing platform vendors were proposing upgrades with licensing costs in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some of these proposals would require retooling, training and migration of existing applications. The entire country was in the grip of recession and Manatee County was impacted as well. The big vendor upgrade proposals were asking for a lot of money at the wrong time. The Information Services Department knew a potential option for reducing costs and preventing lock-in was to consider Open Source solutions.

Given previous experiences running community software like Apache and Tomcat ISD felt they could convert to a more ambitious open source environment with reasonable risk.

When the vendor RFP's came in and were not responsive it was time to make a change.

Moving Towards Open Source and Open Standards

Manatee County's technical infrastructure in late 2009 was largely proprietary. The system consisted of:

• Vendor-implemented in-house CMS based on IBM Lotus Domino
• Sun Microsystem hardware with Solaris operating system

In November 2009, Information Services employees were tasked to try to find a better solution using open source and open standards. In January 2010, they came back with these recommendations:

• Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition
• A JSR170 document store
• Tomcat application server
• Oracle repository to store Magnolia data
• Redhat Enterprise Linux on HP hardware and VMWare

Rolling Out an Intranet Portal First to Put Magnolia to an Acid Test

Although the original plan didn't call for a new Intranet system, Manatee County's Information Services recognized that it was a logical way to test Magnolia in a production environment and get immediate ROI. It also allowed for development of training materials and author experience prior to tackling the public facing Internet site. 

Beginning work in January 2010, they managed to roll out an Intranet portal to all County employees in only 90 days. The Standard Templating Kit (STK) made integration straightforward allowing Information Services to build templates that pulled data directly out of several existing application environment's including Oracle, IBM Domino and ESRI's ArcGIS mapping platform

Empowering Content Authors, Freeing the IT Department

Content authors at Manatee County are typically not professional writers and  web publishing is performed by operations staff within each department. Ease of use was a critical factor to driving adoption. Magnolia's in place editing, navigable site structure and template based components facilitated a more customer friendly approach to content management. Magnolia's ease of use has meant that 140 different users are now actively involved in creating and editing content on the Intranet.  Twenty have become subject matter experts, networking among themselves and building a community of editors. They've created valuable internal resources such as guide to adding and editing data, guides to adding RSS feeds and suggested ideas for new paragraph elements.

Introducing a CMS has been a cultural change for Manatee County. The older website was hard to use with no easy way to see editing results. As a consequence authors and editors relied on Information Services to add and edit content and upload files.  Now Information Services can focus on expanding functionality and accessibility on the site and the customer departments can manage their content.

Efficiently Relaunching the County Web Portal with Best Practice Layouts

Fresh off of the success of the Intranet portal, Manatee County's Information Services is working on an even more ambitious Internet portal for all County Departments, set to launch during Summer 2010. Using the best practice layouts of the Standard Templating Kit (STK), they've managed to quickly create the basic framework and port over most of the old information in fresh and more accessible content views.

Magnolia's ability to be restyled (via CSS) with ease has allowed a much more interactive collaboration between the customers and the development staff as the beta progresses.

Application Integration with Magnolia as the Web Front End

Work is now proceeding on replacing the Web front end for several legacy applications with functionality within Magnolia CMS. These applications are being turned into back-end services, accessible through Magnolia's Web GUI. Content authors will benefit from application paragraphs that modularize popular services into Magnolia's publishing infrastructure which allows non-technical users to quickly integrate backend or third-party applications.

Integration examples:

• Manage user access to the site with IBM Lotus Domino LDAP directory services.
• Display contact information for anyone in the organization from IBM Lotus Domino address book. Human resources information is imported from Oracle and Notes databases into Magnolia Data module and combined with address data.
• Display presence information using IBM Lotus Sametime server. Page footer shows who edited the page and when, whether the editor is online, and the number of currently logged in users.
• Collect data from public users with custom Magnolia forms, store the data in an Oracle database, and display instantly on the Intranet using an embedded Flexigrid control. Editors can select a database table with a Magnolia dialog. The embedded grid allows users to edit, search, sort and export the data.
• GIS integration. Embed custom maps onto pages from a geographical information system and an ArcGIS server from ESRI. A Magnolia dialog allows an editor to select the map size and area of coverage. Combined with a Flexigrid, editors can now enter data to display information about land use, governmental facilities, transportation and public safety on interactive maps.

In addition to simplifying cross-application content management, Information Services' custom application components make adapting the front end, now accessible through Magnolia CMS, no more difficult than changing a paragraph.

The move to a Services-oriented Architecture (SOA) with Magnolia CMS serving as the Web 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 implementation. The search engine that ships with Magnolia CMS is very important for improving content retrieval and usability. Additionally, content authors will be able to keep information up to date and accessible in an environment more suited for web-style publishing versus print.

Best of all, the hundreds of users that are comfortable editing the Intranet can soon take control of their content in the Internet site as well as it uses the same technology building blocks as the Intranet. Enabling editor creativity and ownership without breaking consistency and usability will promote a more attractive, dynamic and informative county web site.

21st Century Government Services with Magnolia CMS

In response to the goals outlined by the Manatee County Administrator, Information Services and the Magnolia content editing team plan on putting  themselves firmly in the 21st century, generating real time information benefits for citizens, real cost benefits for lean budgets and increased quality of technology services and communications. Magnolia CMS has made it possible to meet these goals on the web and expand opportunities for new functionality.