IP Australia is looking to implement a content management system for its websites and potentially Intranet by March 2011, in an attempt to improve communication and information flow to clients.
A Web Content Management Solution (WCMS) will be tested from an as-yet-unnamed contractor in November this year, with plans to transition the system live by March next year for at least the main IP Australia site.
The agency, which is run by the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, runs 13 websites, 30 online services and has 800,000 unique browsers annually.
According to IP Australia documents, the content management system would comply with the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), version 2.0, as stipulated in the Government 2.0 Taskforce recommendations. The agency has also identified the possibility of joining a federated login solution such as that already available at australia.gov.au using a Single Sign On authentication.
Web 2.0 tools may also be on the agenda, which the agency wishing for the WCMS to provide online forum, event management, wiki and blogging modules for future use.
“It would be an advantage to have a blogging module that was tightly integrated with the solution to allow sharing of user log-in details, workflow and search capabilities,” agency documents read. “The blogging module should contain a number of standard features such as commenting, categorisation, tagging and trackbacks.”
The WCMS would operate in the agency’s existing infrastructure which is geared towards Java-based servers on the Unix Sun Solaris 10 operating system and using network-attached storage from NetApp. The agency also hosts a virtualised servers providing access to Solaris and Windows Server 2008 operating environments.
The agency currently lacks IPv6 compatibility, but envisions compliance by 2012. It is also looking to utilise HTML5 technologies when they become ratified and available in the future.