Agenda - Council - 03/12/2002 - Laserfiche WebLink

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I I I I I I I I I :1 I I '1 I I I I I City of Ramsey Recommendation Summary Web We recommend that Ramsey undertake the execution of a web strare~ aimed at providing key information to residents of the City and proacfively delivering frequendy requested public information generated by the City. The City has already investigated subscribing to the GovDocs.com document management and delivery service. We believe that in addidon to this, the City should implement a relatively basic content-management driven site to allow updates to key information by the owners of that information. These areas would include Fire, Police, City administration, and others. The City requested that the Web For Cites program be investigated. Although sponsored by the League of Minnesota Cites, the Web For Cities program is largely supported and financed via a private enterprise, Avenet. We have two primary concerns associated with the Web for Cides pro,am. The first is the possible business continuity risks Avenet w[ll suffer in the' current environment, ~ven the fact that their business requires thousands of cities to sign up to become cash flow positive. Based on our research of Avenet, we believe there is at best a fifty percent probability of Avener rema/_nJ.ng in business through the first quarter of 2002. The second concern is that the Web for Cities program is not particularly robust. Although we do feel that the GovOffice solution from Avenet may offer a low-price, low-end offering suitable for small municipalities (fewer than 5,000 residents), prkrmxily because of ks extremely accessible price, we do not believe ir is suitable for a vibrant and expanding community such as Ramsey, particularly in light of the fact that operations would likely cease prior to any substantial upgrade to the systems. We recommend the following prioririzafion of web content and transactional capabilities for the City's web initiatives. These priorities were arrived at by focusing on delivering the kighest-value content quickly, without immediately' placing an overwhelming burden across the City's departments. Phase I: Ci .t-y' Home Page and Core Content Much of the Phase I content can be delivered via GovDocs, which will offer an added benefit of allowing citizens to subscribe to updates. We recommend that items indicated with an asterisk (::') be housed in GovDocs to provide access to these subscription services. · City Code (*) · City Emergency Plans (*) -255-