From August, a consortium of 46 rural and regional NSW councils has dumped its aging, proprietary content management system (CMS) for an open source Joomla solution. Their websites are being migrated to the new CMS in a $300,000 upgrade to the NSW Local Government and Shire Associations' (LGSA) Local-e project.
Local-e was formed in 2001 to improve smaller councils' web publishing capabilities through shared services and joint purchasing arrangements. Joomla vendor Jentla and its integrator, Energetica, won the Local-e contract following a competitive tender process involving both open source and proprietary bidders. Jentla-N is also expected to satisfy Government 2.0 aims of making public sector information more readily available through tools like RSS feeds and improved transactional capabilities.
Pricing, minimal infrastructure changes and interoperability with LGSA's open source server environment led LGSA to select the Jentla-N CMS, which is expected to simplify content management for non-technical council staff. Many site administration tools have been pushed to the front-end, allowing council staff to create users and content after logging in to the user-facing website.
According to Jentla, the deal was aligned with a public sector trend towards open source CMS. Joomla powered the websites of the United Nations Regional Information Centre and the US City of Boulder, Colorado.
There's a growing acknowledgement in government that open source is the right decision. The days of paying really large amounts of money for a CMS is over; and particularly with government, they are very interested in the longevity of data, which may be maintained through open standards.
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