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Background
Ontario, California is a city of about 163,000 people located in Southern California. Its 50 square miles and nearby areas hold a remarkable variety of attractions including Disneyland, golf courses, beaches, skiing, and professional racing, baseball and hockey.
The city itself has a modern international airport, a state-of-the-art convention center and a number of features that make it attractive for both residents and businesses.
Despite all these benefits, Ontario had a major marketing problem. Its official Web site often contained outdated information, and thus did not effectively promote the City or properly serve its residents.
The Challenge
Ninety percent of the Web site update requests were funneled from the city’s twenty agencies and departments to its two-man Web team. These two professionals were simply swamped with the sheer number of updates, all of which they handled manually.
“We were either spending a great deal of time updating the content or having stale—and even inaccurate—content,” explained Elliott Ellsworth, then Ontario IT Project Manager. “ We realized we needed a way to keep the Web site current with user updated content. Rather than training the users in Web editing software, we wanted an easy-to-use interface that functioned in a controlled fashion.”
In addition to the update problem, the City wanted to speed up the laborious and time consuming process of publishing the City Council agenda and activities on its Web site. Twice a month these were placed online where residents could conveniently and quickly get the information. The established publishing process took a Web programmer 4-6 hours.
The Web team also needed a low bandwidth solution for displaying a lively six-minute movie that takes Web site visitors on a rapid tour through the City and neighboring tourist attractions.
The Solution
The City selected Adobe Solutions Partner Webworld Technologies to install a customized version of the firm’s Webworld Content Manager (WCM), an enterprise-level content management system that Webworld was then in the process of rebuilding from the ground up with ColdFusion MX and Flash MX.
The City was so impressed with Webworld’s solution and the benefits of the MX technology, that they agreed to become the first installation for the MX-engineered version of the WCM.
“We picked Webworld,” said Ellsworth, “because they provided a comprehensive solution with a user -friendly interface that supported our ColdFusion Web environment.”
Component-Based Development
Webworld had originally designed the WCM so that non-technical content authors and editors could easily learn and use the product. The MX version improves on this ease-of-use with a user interface that leverages Flash MX to enable users to create, revise, delete and publish content. It also allows site administrators to quickly create user profiles complete with user names, passwords and permissions.
With the WCM’s basic features in place, Webworld also took advantage of ColdFusion MX’s component-based development environment to rapidly customize its solution to fit the City of Ontario’s specific needs. The finished product has emphatically handled the City’s Web site update problems, and has also given it a number of other benefits.
“Using ColdFusion MX components as the basic building block for the WCM makes development faster, more modular and improves our ability to re-use code,” said David Aden, Webworld’s Chief Technology Officer. “Many of the actions that you do with content are the same from one content type to another. Using components allowed us to write generic code to implement those actions that are inherited by all the content types in the system.”
The Results
“The biggest benefit so far has been the ease of getting content out,” explained Robert DeCasas, who was part of the team that first began using Webworld’s solution. “Shortly after the system went live, I had a request to get a bid solicitation online, and was able to put that in the content manager in about five minutes. The content owner then called and said they did not want the solicitation to go out until a certain date, so I just changed the publication date. The Webworld Content Manager saved me maybe ten minutes.”
Saving ten minutes on adding one content item may not seem like much, but when you multiply such savings over the course of an 8-hour workday and a 40-hour workweek, the time savings can easily translate to hundreds of staff hours per year.
Ellsworth agrees that the system is saving them a lot of time. “The WCM has freed us up to do Web mapping, and other critical functions. Now we have the ability to add new and creative things to our Web site. We’re not doing the content—we’re administering it and saving time.”
“Before we installed the Webworld Content Manager, content authors either didn’t have the tools, the technical expertise or the time to publish their own content. We’ve been able to build the case that the tools we now have in place are not technically difficult,” notes Ellsworth. “If our users get into a technical challenge, we are available to help them out, but generally it is not a challenge at all for them to add content or pages to their Web site areas.”
The Ontario Web team now has the ability to set a standard look and feel for the City’s Web site, and quickly change it whenever they want. At the same time, the content authors from the City’s various departments can freely publish their own content without worrying about the site’s look and feel.
The Webworld solution has also reduced the amount of time it takes to publish the bi-monthly City Council meetings and agenda. According to DeCasas, who handled the chore twice a month, the WCM transformed a process that used to take 4 to 6 hours to one that can now get done in 2 to 3 1/2 hours, a reduction of 42% to 50%, or a savings of 48 to 60 man hours per year.
Project Website: http://www.ci.ontario.ca.us | 
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