City of Seattle Department of Planning and Development (DPD) Web Content Project

Implementing Stellent Web content management solutions allows DPD to manage their entire Web presence with 1.5 IT staff and realize a tremendous growth in public information content.

Case Summary
The Department of Planning and Development implements Stellent Web Content Management Solutions to help meet the ever increasing demand to provide more control and consistency of the content published on DPD Intranet web pages.

The Challenge
The Department of Planning and Development is responsible for developing, administering and enforcing standards for land use, design, construction, and housing for just under 600,000 city residents. Each year DPD processes over 23,000 land use and construction related permits, completes approximately 80,000 onsite inspections, and the enforcement unit responds to over 4,000 complaints. How does the department meet these service needs? By continually providing current information and applications on their web site that allow their customers to locate the information they need and get to the services they want in an efficient manner. This all sounds easy until you start reviewing the infrastructure needed to support this level of web presence and determining where your resources are most effectively utilized.

Before the implementation of the new content management technologies, DPD content had been managed using manual systems developed in-house in conjunction with the application development tool Dreamweaver. As the demands for fresh, accurate and consistent content continued to grow, DPD knew they needed a solution that provided more control over their content. They wanted to ensure consistent messaging and timely updates to their web presence by providing the content developers the access needed to manage key content categories and information. Routine tasks such as setting up new pages and making small adjustments to existing pages were taking up too much time and needed to be automated where appropriate. DPD needed a content management toolset that would automate the routine tasks needed to support the contribution of content from a variety of sources. They also wanted to control the presentation of content so that a consistent look and feel was maintained without the need for ongoing development of the presentation templates.

The ImageSource Solution
ImageSource® developed a project plan and provided the technical expertise to assist DPD in building the technical environment needed to support these solutions. ImageSource refined DPD’s security and metadata models to make them much more efficient and assisted them in migrating their content over to the new system. DPD now has approximately 50% of the content included in the initial scope shifted over to the Stellent’s Universal Web Content Management platform.

These solutions allow DPD to track and manage content more effectively and have more control over their site structure, organization and layout while reducing the needs for design and developing resources when adding new pages. The business departments now have access to their content through familiar tools such as Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer relieving the technical team from using more advanced and traditional toolsets used for publishing content.

According to Julie Moore, Public Relations Specialist for DPD, “Some of the key features that make Stellent particularly helpful are the software’s ability to allow us to make global changes while at the same time, not worrying about the overall look when creating a new page – it will be consistent with the rest of the pages if we choose it to be. Plus, the ability to track changes, monitor other users through the workflow function, and even return to an older version when the user has made errors in updating the content, is invaluable.”

Bottom Line
DPD now manages its entire web presence with 1.5 IT staff and implementing the Stellent solutions has lead to a tremendous growth in public information content.

Through the implementation of the Stellent Web Content Management Solutions, DPD is able to effectively collect, manage, and publish their web content to meet the identified business goals of providing current information with a consistent look and feel. These solutions provide the tools to utilize key technical resources more effectively.