Brisbane City Council is Australia’s biggest and one of the largest municipal Councils in the World.  Servicing a million people across 14 city regions, as well as Brisbane Airport and Port of Brisbane, Council plays a key role in the provision of information to residents, visitors, ratepayers, businesses and community groups.  

BCC recognized that its website www.brisbane.qld.gov.au would continue to become a more important service delivery channel, and in common with many local government organisations, was seeking ways to evolve its website to better serve the needs of multiple audiences.

Selecting a new CMS

In early 2003, driven by a number of business drivers BCC conducted a public tender to identify a new middle to large- scale Content Management System to better manage and expand its web presence.

After an exhaustive short listing process, Brisbane City Council selected Netcat WCM, ahead of all the leading international brands.

Key amongst its selection criteria were:

Ease of use

Netcat’s intuitive browser-based editor is delivered complete with in-place, wysiwyg editing.

Sweeper technology

The software offers the most advanced tools on the market for converting Word documents to web format.

Low implementation costs

80% of BCC’s software requirements were delivered ‘out of the box’ – ie. without any need for technical configuring. The benefit: significantly lower implementation cost than other CMS products.

Extensibility

Netcat’s ability to add redundancy, capacity, modules and users in easy, affordable increments. This minimizes time and cost.

Migration tools

Netcat Site Migrator’s ability to complete a significant task in migrating 1000’s of pages of material from existing sites to the new in 2 weeks, instead of the budgeted 6 weeks, was a decisive advantage

DM integration

The deployment of the Netcat DM-Bridge module for integrating with the Council’s Document Management System was seen as a strong advantage when phase 2 was due to begin.

Multi-lingual capabilities

BCC customers and stakeholders are a diverse audience requiring delivery in multiple languages. The BCC corporate website now has selected content in 16 languages.

Dynamic content delivery

Netcat CMS accommodates the rapidly changing nature of BCC content in several ways:

• The software publishes material from various repositories.  If the material changed at source, the website is dynamically updated.
• It democratizes the publishing process by allowing non-technical subject matter experts to publish to their own section of the website
• Time-based publishing – material can be published and unpublished according to preset rules
• Auto-publishing – by converting data to metadata, Netcat can use the same material in multiple parts of the website, each occurrence, adopting the style of the page on which it is displayed.

Flexible navigation

Netcat’s flexible navigation allows for innovative ways to find material.  Visitors can take the following approaches:

• Customer-centric “product and services” clusters
• Time-based (city project updates, event calendar, latest news)
• Task-based (self-service transactions, registrations, subscription)
• Location-based (GIS, maps, service locator)
• Personalisation (subscription-based topics/ news alerts)
• Meta Navigation (Advanced Search, Text Only, My Language)

Key results after 12 months

To date BCC has:

• Set up a large corporate website
• Put up content in 15 languages
• Incorporated intuitive customer-centric navigation
• Migrated thousands of web pages
• Achieved impressive “speed to market” of important information
• Streamlined web publishing process through the Council
• Improved website content accuracy and relevance
• Won international acclaim for the quality of the site