"It's all about value for money — you have to justify your decision. We were lucky [an open-source] project existed in the area we needed," Dell says. "From that project to now, there has been a lot of work, but it would have been a completely different proposition if we had had to start from scratch."
The open source CMS fixed on by Camden was ArsDigita Community System (ACS), developed by US-based ArsDigita, which took several hundred thousand pounds to customise its system, and then promptly went bust in late 2001. Fortunately for APLAWS, the project's open source licence — and the purchase of ArsDigita's assets by Red Hat — meant work could continue with little interruption. ACS formed the basis for Red Hat's Enterprise CMS and Portal Server.
"The change to Red Hat wasn't that noticeable, it happened quite quickly," Dell says. Some ArsDigita staff had moved to Red Hat, so Camden ended up working with many of the same developers.
The project's initial phase ended in March 2002 and was succeeded by APLAWS+, the current version, the main new feature of which was allowing the use of non-Oracle databases. Many local authorities went live with the first version, and Camden used it as its internal CMS before going live with APLAWS+ for its external Web site about a year ago. "The CMS manages our whole Web site, it's quite a visible part of our overall strategy," Dell says.
A major part of the project has been implementing standards, Dell says — technical standards such as XML and standards for local authority sites. On the technical side, APLAWS makes heavy use of XML, with XSL for styling, and is programmed in Java. The use of government standards, in defining navigation, categories of services offered and metadata for instance, has become one of APLAWS' biggest selling points, Dell says. An example is a suite of lists, controlled by a central standards body and built into APLAWS, that defines every service offered by UK local authorities. "Apart from the quality of the system, and the fact it is open source, a big reason for people to choose APLAWS is that out of the box it complies with all the standards," explains Dell.
Talkback
The APLAWS project is an excellent example of hoe intelligent use of Open Source software can save us all money.
My company did the same thing for the Australian Government. We built a 'whitebrand' package of our open source cms, MySource Matrix (www.squiz.co.uk) that they can roll out at no cost to all Government departments. Estimated savings are already in the millions....