|
|
|
| Home ->
Case Studies -> Warwickshire County Council - Connecting Communities |
|
 |
Connecting
communities @ Warwickshire County Council
In line with implementing e-Government standards, Warwickshire
County Council sought an innovative yet cost effective solution
in connecting a web based application, Warwickshire Communities,
to their main Internet site. Through a competitive process,
Charles McKenzie Consulting won the contract to work with
WCC to develop a solution. |
|
|
Warwickshire
County Council
- Based in the heart of the English midlands
- Serves over half a million people
- Promoting and Supporting excellent services
- Services spend exceeds £400 million annual
|
Solution
Offerings
- Site integration through the web – no need to have direct
database connections
- Manual or Scheduled Synchronisation
- Seamless System Integration
- Extendible to other systems
- Automatic Field conversion
- Easily configurable
|
Warwickshire
Communities
Warwickshire Communities is a new initiative launched by the Council
to provide local communities, groups and organisations with free
web site hosting. With the aim of having as many communities online
as possible, the site has been developed to make the process of
creating a web site easy and fast. Part of the functionality enables
groups to upload details of upcoming events. As such events are
of general interest to the community, the Council was keen to include
them in its own Internet listing of local events.
| “We
had proposals for our XML project from a number of companies.
The Charles McKenzie proposal stood out by offering an innovative
generic solution that we could extend to handle other XML data
transfers in future. We had confidence from their previous projects
that Charles McKenzie had the relevant skills and this was backed
up by very good reports from reference sites. Their bid was
also very price competitive.” Warwickshire County
Council |
System
Integration
As both applications are constructed in different technologies and
hosted at separate locations, WCC decided to use XML as a means
to exchange information. The original design proposed that the system
receiving the information be modified to retrieve, process and update
the XML data. As XML is the de facto standard for system communication,
Charles McKenzie suggested implementing a separate component, to
handle all XML related tasks.
The
Solution
XML Broker sits between communicating applications, enabling changes
from one application to be automatically reflected in the other.
Complicated organisational infrastructures can result in systems
residing in many different locations, making it difficult to exchange
data. To resolve this issue, the Broker can connect to other systems
in a variety of ways, including over the Internet. As a scheduled
process, the Broker connects to the Internet to download data from
the Warwickshire Communities site. Once retrieved, XML Broker, processes
the data and updates the Warwickshire Events site with any changes.Sometimes
there is not a one to one correlation between communicating applications,
i.e. date fields can differ in format between UK and Far Eastern
systems. So, XML output from these systems is not immediately interpretable.
XML Broker resolves this issue with its internal translation module.
Before any information goes into the receiving system, the translation
module rebuilds the XML data, ensuring every field is interpretable.
"The
project went very smoothly, delivered to time and to budget.
We found Charles McKenzie to be flexible and willing to come
forward with helpful suggestions. They ran a skills transfer
session for us at the end of the project, which has helped to
increase our understanding of how to implement the standards
laid out in the government's e-Government Interoperability Framework.
I would have no hesitation using Charles McKenzie again in the
future".
Warwickshire County Council |
|
