City of Tshwane improves service delivery with new website
The City of Tshwane is the second largest municipality in Gauteng and the
third biggest metropolitan municipality in South Africa. The following towns
and townships form part of the municipality's area: Pretoria, Centurion,
Akasia, Soshanguve, Mabopane, Attridgeville, Ga-Rankuwa, Winterveld,
Hammanskraal, Temba, Pienaarsrivier, Crocodile River and Mamelodi
Pretoria, as one component of the City, is the administrative capital of
South Africa and houses the Union Buildings. The City of Tshwane aims to become a smart city,
in a bid to position itself as Africa's leading capital city of excellence.
Business Needs
The City of Tshwane has for many years managed its own IT infrastructure and business support systems, including the public facing website.
The previous website was developed and designed on a ColdFusion platform and was administered by internal staff with maintenance and support functions being outsourced to 3rd party providers.
In its drive to become a smart city, the City decided to upgrade its business support systems and standardize in specific areas in order to improve service delivery and drive down costs.
One of these areas of optimization was the public facing website. Under its new License Agreement, the City acquired Microsoft SharePoint licenses and required the services of a suitably qualified service provider to build and maintain its website.
SharePointKonsult, a division of SMC Enterprise (PTY) Ltd, was selected to design and deliver the new website.
The City was very clear on its mandate and expectations and listed design and functionality as the key success factors for the project.
On the design front, the City required a complete redesign to bring the website up to date and relevant, considering that the City was one of the host cities for the FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010.
For this reason and future events, the City wanted to have the freedom to change the theme of the website from time to time.
SharePointKonsult delivered a cutting edge design for the website and focused on site functionality. The City requested that the new site be easy to use, easy to update content and easy to change the design.
“The website is key to our Smart City strategy,” says Febridge Lebea, Chief Information Officer for City of Tshwane, “and SharePoint 2010 is the ideal platform for our future plans to improve citizen services.”
With offices in different geographical locations,
updating content had to be easy and possible from these various locations
without the need for tedious and sometimes cumbersome change controls.
SharePointKonsult enabled content publishing from various
locations with the necessary workflows to approve content and automatically
update the website.
Solution
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 For Internet Sites (FIS) was
chosen as the platform for the new City of Tshwane Website.
Working closely with the City’s IT team,
SharePointKonsult added unique design and branding qualities to the site in
order to enhance the user experience. Function over form was the mandate in
order to precisely match the client requirements.
SharePointKonsult added content publishing workflows in
order to fast track the site publishing process. SharePoint 2010 caters well
to the City’s needs and the site can now draw content from more
contributors.
Benefits
SharePoint 2010 For Internet Sites has
enabled the City of Tshwane to realize the following benefits:
Rich User
Interface
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 integrates seamlessly with to
improve user experience with animations, sliding images, tiles and various
other rich user interfaces.
The City welcomed the opportunity to add dynamic
components to the otherwise static website in order to enhance the user
experience.
Scalability
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 For Internet Sites enables
public users to access a SharePoint site and view the content with the
custom experience the site has to offer.
The City is able to scale services to its users by
enabling various SharePoint features such as event calendars, polls,
discussion forums and blogs, scaling up or down as it requires.
Content Management
With SharePoint 2010 For Internet Sites, the City is able
to manage all its web content and assets from a single central location.
This platform enables the City to move its web servers
outside of the network. Acting Director for Information Management at the City, Chris Labuschagne says, “We
are very excited about the opportunities presented to us with Microsoft
SharePoint. The initial website project is just a small part of the greater
Smart City strategy and what we aim to achieve with SharePoint 2010.”
Enhanced Search Experience
The powerful search capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 enable users to easily find information, search for contacts and even find related content that may not necessarily reside within the City’s web content.
This richer search means that users do not have to leave the site in order to find what they are looking for.
Reduced bandwidth usage
The City’s previous website was not very bandwidth friendly. Every time the site or a section/s of the site was accessed, the entire page would load, causing a lot of duplicate requests as the same banner, navigation pane, images and related structure would be called up.
With SharePoint, only the requested content is sent to the end user, not the entire site or page. This greatly reduces the amount of bandwidth used by the end user as well as the web server.
Summary
With Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites, the City of Tshwane can drive its e-Citizen strategy into 2011.
For more information on this project, feel free to contact Manager for Business Development, Nizaam Karjieker at info@smcenterprise.co.za
Website:
www.tshwane.gov.za
