City of Edmonton

Fall 2008

During our City of Edmonton Website/Intranet redesign project, one department manager summed up the problem of city governments perfectly: "Cities: we're a mile wide and an inch deep." A city government has to deal with almost every facet of a citizen's life: their recreation, their plumbing, their streets, their pets, their buses, their safety and their economic health. However cities are extremely limited in their revenue opportunities since most taxation goes directly to regional and federal government. So a city has to always do more with less: especially when it comes to IT and Communications.

When the City of Edmonton approached Yellow Pencil to redevelop both their public facing website, and their intranet, they came with a unique request. Edmonton wanted to completely outsource web operations, and have web operations delivered in a pure Software As A Service (SAAS) model. This required providing a high-availability web hosting environment, content management software, support and training, design services, content migration and implementation.

Our partner on the project was Alentus Corporation, who helped us to develop a customized hosting and backup solution that met both needs and budget. And as always our first choice for content management is Open Text Web Solutions (formerly RedDot). The Open Text product allowed us to rapidly develop templates even as City authors began to migrate content, shaving months off the project timeline and cost. Open Text also provided complete customization of the design, meeting the City requirements for rich media integration, integration of legacy and future applications (written in a variety of programming languages), integration of 3rd party search (the City had previously selected Thunderstone search) and most of all - ease of use for content authors to minimize training and accelerate adoption.

Our design process was paired with the City's Public Involvement Project which allowed us to draw on the knowledge of hundreds of Edmontonians, as well as hundreds of City employees. We also completed a thorough audit of every major municipality website in Canada, many in the US and many in Europe and Australia to identify best practices and build a vocabulary of successful approaches. We were able to create a visual and structural concept for both public website and intranet site that met with unanimous approval from everyone from city workers right up to the mayor's office.

One of the constraints of the project was the the current Internet/Intranet sites were being published out of a single instance of Microsoft CMS 2001, so there was no acceptable way to shut down one without the other. This meant that we needed to build, convert and launch both websites in the shortest possible timeline. And during the entire time we had to minimize content update blackouts, since the City posts nearly 200 changes per day to the website/intranet.

We were given a 7-week window from project start to launch, with an additional 2 weeks to bring the Intranet online. Our tactic involved automated cleanup and conversion of site content, using tools that we've build to convert, clean and organize content to allow automatic build of websites through Open Text's WCM product.

We handed the site over to a war room of city content authors who reviewed page titles, content quality and internal links and released pages for publishing. During the entire cycle we were onsite to respond to author requests for templates, styles and interface features, and our team was able to respond and document on the spot - so that by the time the website launched we had completed thorough acceptance testing, documentation and the creation of training materials, all without adding additional time cycles to the project. At the close of the migration, those war room experts became Open Text champions for the training of the 200+ content authors who would be taking over ownership of the website.

The City of Edmonton is now able to publish compelling, rich media enabled messaging to residents and visitors alike in a standards-based, accessible web environment. The SAAS model has freed up so many internal IT resources that several new major application projects - including the launch of Google Transit - have been completed in record time. The new Web Operations Office inside of the city is tasked with supporting content authors, reviewing website statistics and providing leadership in the areas of usability, accessibility and web publishing.

At the close of the project, we had met all timelines, stayed within budget and met all of our core goals.