Exeter City Council leads the way with a brand new .NET website

Monday 23rd May 2005 saw the launch of an exciting new Content Management System for Exeter City Council’s Top 20 SOCITM ranked website.

GOSS, a local Enterprise Content Management company were chosen to design and build a solution capable of fulfilling the council's needs now and into the future.

Exeter as the regional capital of the South West is a vibrant and confident city. With over 110,000 residents, the strategic vision was to enhance Exeter as the regional capital and one of the key themes is An electronic City. The City Council has been recognised as an 'Excellent' authority through a recent Government inspection (CPA) and is well advanced in its EGovernment and its electronic Customer Service provision

Exeter City Council's web site has already been rated as one of the most advanced EGovernment sites in the UK achieving the coveted 'transactional' status by SOCITM (Society of Information Technology Managers). The challenge now is to sustain, then exceed this level of excellence by raising its game in collaboration with GOSS. Paul Evans - Head of IT at Exeter is confident that, "by working together with GOSS we will now go from strength to strength by providing more transactional services and enabling our Customer First strategy".

In answer to this, GOSS recommended the use of their CITIZEN solution, based on their industry leading Intelligent Content Management (iCM) technology. Designed exclusively with the needs of local government in mind, the system is already being used in over 16% of local authorities in England and Wales, making it the leading choice for government authorities in the UK.

In choosing GOSS CITIZEN, Exeter City Council was keen to make good use of its many features. Non technical contributors can add content to the website through a secure workflow and approvals process and the common sense layout facilities an ease of use and allows changes to be made quickly whilst maintaining a consistent branded look and feel.

Of paramount importance to the team at Exeter was accessibility. The website needed to be capable of offering services across a wide range of platforms, such as mobile phones, as well as being compliant with all the accessibility regulations for websites. Again GOSS rose to the challenge with Citizen, which offers the user a framework for compliance with e-government and industry-standard protocols.

Richard George, GOSS MD said, 'Exeter.gov.uk is an exceptional example of a .NET based Citizen solution from GOSS. It highlights our complete versatility across multiple platforms, proving that we work with your needs, not you with ours.'