- After a review of its out-of-hours support and business continuity arrangements, dorsetforyou.com decided to host the website externally.
- Dorsetforyou.com selected GOSS Managed Services. To entrust the site to a general-purpose hosting company would add the complexity of an inter-supplier relationship in which it can be difficult to identify ownership of support issues such as performance.
- The move to external hosting was an opportunity for dorsetforyou.com to re-launch its site with a review of content, a fresh design and new navigation.
- Since implementation, customer satisfaction scores have risen and the new site has been a good foundation on which to launch new features.
- Availability maintained at or above 99.5% as per Service Level Agreement
Dorsetforyou.com is a partnership between four local authorities that aims to provide information about services across Dorset for residents, businesses and visitors.
The partnership was created in response to research showing that people are often unsure which tier of local government (county, district/borough, or town/parish) provides which service. This means citizens have to visit several different websites to find the information they need, which can be a lengthy and confusing process.
The website enables Christchurch Borough Council, Dorset County Council, East Dorset District Council, and West Dorset District Council to provide one point of access to local information and transactional services, delivering the benefits of integrated local Government.
Martin Bottomley, Website Manager at dorsetforyou.com explains, "We wanted to create a website that would improve customer satisfaction, produce greater efficiencies through economies of scale and create joint procurement opportunities given that there is one website with four partners, rather than four individual websites."
Challenges and drivers
In June 2007, dorsetforyou.com requested a proposal for the hosting of its live website environment to allow the site to be upgraded, managed and restructured, and hosted offsite.
Before dorsetforyou.com each of the four member partners had maintained their own sites using a variety of Web Content Management (WCM) systems and hosting technologies. The GOSS portal solution enabled all the partners to use a single content management system, initially hosted by Dorset County Council.
Neville Higman, Technical Analyst at dorsetforyou.com explains, "We analysed the business case for hosting on and off site and concluded that, for the sake of business continuity, we would partner with a third party to host externally. We needed to ensure that website availability was kept to a maximum and access to 24-hour support was crucial - an element that wasn't practical to provide in-house."
Selecting GOSS Interactive
Following a consultation period, dorsetforyou.com selected GOSS Interactive to provide a managed service delivering:
- Hosted service - the provision of a hosting environment.
- Service availability - 24/7 52 weeks per user (excluding planned outages).
- Service performance - dependent on the usage of the site, activity of contributors and external conditions.
- Technical support - during office hours plus availability of engineer for out-of-hours calls.
Robust security and functionality
The Data Centre at GOSS is a state of the art facility. It is located within secure facilities and is directly under the control of GOSS staff, monitored 24 hours per day, seven days per week. The Data Centre has its own power generator back up facility in case of a power cut and each cabinet is protected by a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) that protects the services until the generator is fully operational.
To ensure the security of client sites GOSS provides firewall protection, virus protection, password protection and security monitoring ensuring a rapid response to issues by technical experts.
GOSS Managed Services offers a powerful reporting system that provides usable statistics. In addition, a reporting and analysis tool delivers security logging, server performance and site tuning data. The GOSS team is trained to work across multiple operating systems.
Neville Higman at dorsetforyou.com comments "We needed a robust and reliable system to deliver continuity of business for our citizen users and our Customer Service Operators with a high degree of confidence. GOSS provides a safety net of features - dual power supplies on all servers, daily back-ups, fire suppression and a direct fibre connection to the Internet Service Provider - that helped to provide us with peace of mind."
GOSS Managed Services offers a service level agreement of at least 99.5% uptime each month as standard. Bandwidth can be dynamically adjusted in an instance of peak activity to reflect the volume of visitors to the site and this allows services to run at an optimum level.
Neville Higman adds, "GOSS also helps us to ensure availability of the site for users. Constant monitoring of the site, engineer support, and the UPS contribute to maintaining uptime."
Successful implementation
Dorsetforyou.com took the opportunity to review the site's content and implement new navigation and a fresh design, as well as upgrading to the latest version of GOSS iCM. Over the twelve-month project, dorsetforyou.com built and tested the new site and its content before making it live over a weekend.
Neville Higman says, "GOSS delivered on its promises and delivered to fixed cost. We took the decision to bring in additional staffing resources to help re-write and migrate content. We have since completed a follow-on project to review media, links and contacts on the website."
Results and hopes for the future
Dorsetforyou.com is a vital communication tool for Dorset's citizens. During the recent severe weather dorsetforyou.com published information about school, library, and day care centre closures as well as highways information and disruptions to refuse collections. The site is business critical, providing a real-time knowledge base for Customer Service Operators in Dorset Direct, the county council's contact centre.
Neville Higman comments, "It is important that our customers can rely on us as a trustworthy source of information 24 hours a day; in turn we are able to rely on a Service Level Agreement which governs response times and restoration of the site in the event of complete loss.
"Since implementation, customer satisfaction scores have risen and the new site has been a good foundation on which to launch new features such as 'Find your nearest' which lists information on council services based on any postcode.
"Hosting with GOSS has reduced a number of risks to business continuity but has also removed key person dependencies for technical and operational support. This means that the central team can focus on the content of the site while each partner council has ownership of their transactional services such as planning. The change of hosting will not have been visible for our customers but they should now experience a quicker site, available 24/7 and not be impacted by council staff internet usage peaking in the middle of the day."
