How Lugano built a digital government platform with Magnolia

In 2011, the City of Lugano realized it had to step up its digital game if it wanted to provide a website that could communicate with citizens and visitors equally. There was no way around it: its website and online services had to be dramatically improved. It needed a scalable solution that would enable the city to achieve its digital strategy in coming years. The CMS it was using was difficult to use, so ease of usability was a big requirement. The new system also needed to integrate with third-party tools Lugano was already using.

The relaunch resulted in an impressive array of digital government services and newly efficient web properties, but the city still wanted to get more out of its CMS. It decided to migrate to Magnolia's latest and greatest version, Magnolia 5.3. This would allow it to carry out further extensions and customizations to enable interaction with citizens and to provide a wide range of digital services.

Not only did Lugano want to make all relevant citizen documents accessible through its website, it also wanted to enable citizen interaction. For example, by triggering processes directly from the website through an integration with SAP and Lotus, citizens can now pay invoices through the citizen portal directly.

In Lugano’s case, Tinext chose a three-step migration: it migrated Lugano.ch from version 4.4.4 to 4.4.6 to 4.5 to 5.3. Migrating Magnolia from 4.x to 4.5 requires a fair amount of time and resources, whereas the move to 5 is usually smoother. In autumn 2014, Tinext migrated 100,000 pages of content to Magnolia 5.3. By moving to the latest Magnolia version, Lugano could take advantage of the revolutionary interface, as well as new features, such as personalization and easier integration. Lugano was further motivated to migrate because of its big plans for the relaunch: extensions, customizations and integrations were all in the pipeline. The migration's result was an integrated digital platform that allows for diverse integrations with third-party tools - such as SAP and Lotus - and maximum interaction with citizens.

Lugano decided to migrate its existing microsites as is, but it saw the migration as an opportunity to review the content and information architecture of the remainder of the site. It thus rebuilt the main site completely, resulting in less content and revisions of multilingual content. On top of that, all website HTML templates were revised and adapted with a responsive layout.

The new Lugano website offers citizens digital government services that allow them not only to download documents, but also to pay for bills, such as electricity and taxes. New integrations enable the site to offer subscriptions to cultural events, as well as the possibility to buy travel flexicards directly on the site. A nifty parking availability integration with a custom system shows where parking spots are available. Assocations have the possibility to manage content directly on the public instance.