SOCITM & e-Gov Monitor partner with Compusys to provide e-Government Information Exchange

SOCITM (The Society of Information Technology Management) was founded in 1986 as the professional association for ICT managers working in and for the public sector.

SOCITM also play a leading role in the implementation of local e-Government in the UK. Due to the fact that SOCITM is made up from a team which is separated geographically, they needed a solution to enable the website to be updated remotely by users with virtually no web design skills. Compusys Consulting have provided a platform based initially on CMS 2001 (and more recently CMS 2002) which has enabled the amount of content available to its members to grow exponentially, making the SOCITM website the most comprehensive information resource for public sector IT managers available today.

This has been an ongoing project for Compusys Consulting and SOCITM with many improvements and enhancements being made over the last 2 years, the most recent of these being an information feed from e-Gov Monitor (e-govmonitor.com) in an XML format which is used to populate the e-Gov Exchange Database on the site. The site is also used to manage registrations for the many events managed by SOCITM to promote the effective use of IT in the public sector.

Initially, the SOCITM site was based around Content Management Server 2001 with templates being developed by Compusys to enable multiple page type to be produced from single templates. The number of templates has now grown to include summary pages and online forms. The solution was moved over to a .NET environment earlier this year and is now on a CMS 2002 platform which is hosted by a 3rd party hosting company.

The most recent addition to the solution is to consume data being published by a 3rd party (e-Gov Monitor) which is used to populate and SOCITM e-Gov Exchange database on the CMS Server.

A new XML file from e-Gov Monitor triggers a routine which updates the structure and content of the SOCITM exchange and then re-caches the pages on the CMS to improve speed. This method was used to ensure that structural changes could be made by the 3rd party without the need to login to the CMS as it now simply mirrors their replicates their structure into the CMS channels. The site also contains a discussion forum with topics aligned to the SOCITM e-Gov Exchange database to allow discussions around the issues within the database.

Click here to enter the SOCITM e-Gov Exchange