In retrospect, this turned out to be a positive for the city's portal initiative, as it was unburdened with existing legacy infrastructures. What about money, typically a major issue for government IT projects? "Sure, there were budget concerns, but vendors were creating lots of hooks on their own," Cull relates. Those "hooks" were not only price discounts but also commitments to work with other applications in San Diego's portal.
This was important, says Cull, because the city realized that it wanted a portal with many features and functions -- not just a presentation layer -- and therefore needed vendors able to dovetail with each other within the technology stack.
San Diego's Sun-powered portal went live in November 2002, with core collaboration functionality provided by vendor SiteScape. "The first important peg" is how Cull describes SiteScape. "It's for groups that aren't in proximity. Engineers can use it to work on projects, exchange CAD drawings and documents." More generally, city employees can use the embedded SiteScape functionality for threaded discussions. "That's how the Web team accepts suggestions for changes to the city's website," explains Cull. "It's better than faxing documents and making phone calls."
Cull goes beyond describing SiteScape to emphasize the mix of vendors and applications within the portal. "We use Novell's GroupWise for instant messaging (IM) and calendaring. Our search engine is Google. There's Interwoven and Documentum for content management. We also have Crystal Decisions."
The common thread, Cull concludes, is collaboration. San Diego wants its portal to be a place where employees can meet and get their work done despite handicaps of location. While the project is only six months old, Cull says that it has been widely adopted because of the ways in which it makes employees' jobs easier. He offers statistics as proof: "We had nearly 5,000 unique users in March, and 8,000 employees have direct access to PCs."
Quelle: Line56
