Alberta Health Services

Spring 2009

Alberta Health Services is a new and complex organization that represents health care to the entire population of one of Canada's fastest-growing and most complex regions. AHS is Canada's largest employer and has a vast audience. The goal of their project was to create a single web portal that would serve as a point of entry to the health care system for all Albertans.

AHS chose Open Text Web Solutions and Yellow Pencil because of our track record of success in the province and because of the repeated successes that Yellow Pencil had achieved in health care and regional government communications within the province. Open Text was also selected because of the legendary ease of use as well as the rapid adoption cycle for both content authors and developers.

One of the biggest challenges of the project was content migration. AHS housed more than 12,000 pages of content in Microsoft CMS 2001 websites and in an Oracle data repository. Yellow Pencil leveraged the powerful RQL development API inside of Open Text Web Solutions to automate the import and build of the AHS website. The entire site is generated automatically every night using scheduled import and publishing scripts and site editors have a simple interface to add tagging and keywords to content as it is imported.

Our total development cycle on the project was less than 6 weeks and we delivered on time, allowing AHS to make a very important internal deadline for the site launch.

Content authors were trained very quickly and 4 AHS developers were able to pick up the Open Text developer interface within the 5 day training period and build a very complex web publishing environment with minimal vendor support.