Dutch National Government

The Dutch government decided to publish all public information through a single portal. Hippo CMS was selected as platform to replace the current 14 ministry websites

Dutch national government

Challenge

For the end user searching for information across different ministry websites can be a cumbersome task. The general public looks forinformation from the ‘national government’ and is often not aware of the departmental demarcation lines that determine where information is available.
To further complicate the search, each website has a different look and feel and a different navigational structure. Organically grown over the years the governmental infrastructure of external and internal websites exists of many separate IT architectures. In many cases similar content is maintained in different places. The costs of administrating the infrastructure are high, while many times editors are unaware of work already done in other departments.

Solution

Implementation of a central access point based on Hippo CMS:

  • Migrate existing content from the 13 ministries to one central repository
  • Introduce consistent navigation across the sites, while the system allows for personalization of look and feel through different color schemes, graphics and templates per site
  • Employ Hippo’s intuitive tools for picking site designs from the CMS web interface

Results

Implementation is in progress. Hippo was chosen for its:

  • Proven ability to cost effectively connect to hundreds of different sources where the original content was located
  • Multilingual & Single source publishing
  • Proven ability to handle large volumes of content and traffic
  • Ease of integration with existing infrastructure
  • Future readiness through open standards such as Apache JackRabbit, JSR 170, Wicket, Lucene