An open platform for online public services
Lausanne, the fourth largest city in Switzerland, has over 130,000 inhabitants. The city wanted an open platform that could provide uninterrupted electronic access to administrative services for its citizens. With Magnolia, it set up myLausanne, a virtual services portal offering citizens the ability to view their bills, check their energy consumption and communicate changes of address online.
Magnolia was the centerpiece in setting up this portal, allowing the city to integrate the tools that enabled citizens to meet their needs safely online 24/7. For Lausanne, this has meant increased efficiency and reduced administration requirements and costs.
Highlights
The Solution
The Solution
A virtual services portal for residents
After 12 months of development, myLausanne went live. Once an online account is created, any user of the City of Lausanne’s utilities has access to various online administrative services, allowing them to view bills, energy consumption or communicate a change of address online, all without travel or time constraints.
A services integration platform
The project by the City of Lausanne is a portal, in its true sense of the meaning. myLausanne provides a combination of static content specific to Magnolia and data from external applications. All information is specific to the logged-in user.
Magnolia truly demonstrates its integration potential within this portal. Information such as electricity bills, consumption and any other billing documents are deployed from Alfresco and SAP, while a JBoss-run business logic component aggregates, prepares and exposes the data via a web service, which is then consumed by Magnolia and displayed to the end user. A Flash application integration is also included, which can graphically display utility consumption data.
With private data being displayed, the security of the portal is also an important consideration. The integration of OpenAM manages authentication and was possible thanks to the standard JAAS, implemented by Magnolia.
The Result
The Result
A portal that provides services to citizens wherever they are
After only two months live, over 2,500 people had registered on the portal. The first results were more than satisfactory, with 25% higher registrations than expected, putting less demand on the call center that usually manages these requests. The portal users’ needs are also well met. Their data are accessible 24/7, and all their important information is now in one secure place - myLausanne. The site has hourly page view peaks of 9,000 and 300,000 per month, and 70 editors continuously work on the 8,300 pages.
Towards an integrated and more mobile future
In terms of integration, the City of Lausanne is considering a simpler and more integrated "mash-up" approach to myLausanne. Another development of the portal would provide information for mobile devices. The mobile strategy would be to provide specific services for mobile users, but also to make myLausanne available on tablets and other smartphones. This is a challenge which Magnolia will respond to with advanced features for creating and managing mobile websites.
“The first step of myLausanne was a success and exceeded our initial expectations. Magnolia was a centerpiece in the design of our eGovernment portal.”
“We needed an open platform for integration of our various systems to provide uninterrupted and electronic access to administrative services for the inhabitants of Lausanne. The integration of our SAP systems and Alfresco was possible thanks to the open architecture of Magnolia. Support for standard authentication also enabled us to leave the management of authentication and authorization to OpenAM.”
