“As the official homepage for the Commonwealth of Virginia, MyVirginia is the gateway site to every Virginia government related resource, with information ranging from government elections data to travel and tourism. MyVirginia is the main vehicle for visitors to access the wealth of information on doing business, traveling, living or relocating in Virginia. We needed a tool that would manage our extensive content while making that content easily accessible to site visitors -- and all within our strict budget. After reviewing many other potential choices, it became clear that CrownPeak’s Advantage CMS is that tool.”

Summary

State and local government organizations in Virginia maintain hundreds of disparate web sites, and content management became a critical need. VIPNet, an organization created to help Virginia streamline and enhance the ways citizens and business access government information, conducted an extensive review process to find a content management solution. The solution requirements were focused on an application that responded to the unique needs of government in a rapid, affordable manner. VIPNet selected CrownPeak as its partner to bring CrownPeak’s Advantage CMS to state and local government Web managers throughout Virginia at a discounted rate via an agency-to-agency purchase. The first project that the partnership has successfully launched is Virginia’s portal www.myvirginia.org.

Client

Virginia Interactive, a subsidiary of the e-government company NIC, serves under contract with the Virginia Information Providers Network (VIPNet) Authority. VIPNet’s mission is to assist Virginia government entities in Web-enabling their information services. In order to accomplish this goal, VIPNet offers services to governmental organizations and manages a number of government websites including the myvirginia.org portal, a gateway that provides Virginia’s citizens and businesses access to government information.

Challenge

Virginia Interactive assessed numerous content management solutions, and determined that most content management systems were either too costly or too proprietary for their clients. Additionally, these expensive, proprietary solutions didn’t always meet the specific needs of government, including an intuitive, easy to use interface and an ability to archive all content, for access by external review processes.

Solution

Virginia Interactive reviewed CrownPeak’s Advantage CMS, a solution offered as a service but robust enough to meet and exceed the needs of their clients. Advantage CMS was selected on the basis of significantly lower cost, lower risk, and more rapid implementation, as well as its government-friendly feature set. CrownPeak implemented the Advantage CMS™ content management system (CMS) for Virginia’s official state portal (www.myvirginia.org).

Innovation

Advantage CMS enables Virginia Interactive to standardize navigation and develop dynamic templates. This provides for an incredibly efficient process for both content and navigation updates, as well as ongoing maintenance for a large number of links. Advantage CMS also allows Virginia Interactive to administer and modify the system through a simple but powerful browser-based user interface. The site can now be expanded and even redesigned through the CMS.