Agenda - Council Work Session - 09/21/2004

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CITY COUNCIL WORK SESSION Topic Report: City of Ramsey Websit~r~//tr.,,/ ~ By: Heidi Nelson, Asst. City Adminis~or & Deah Busch, IT Manager ~ Background: In early 2002, the City of Ramsey established a relationship with a company called GovDocs for website development and a subscription document delivery service: The new Ramey website was brought on-line in July of 2002 and the subscription document delivery service has been available to residents since that time. Hundreds of documents are available to xveb-users via the service, including council and commission agendas, minutes, and employment applications. Shortly after establishing the website with GovDocs, the City initiated its record management program by purchasing a software system called Laser Fiche. City staff has been making significant progress in scanning city documents for archival; to date nearly 550,000 documents have been scanned and electronically stored for archival and retrieval. Documents are text searchable within Laser Fiche, which is a tremendous resource when performing research. Earlier this year, the City's application to make our official method of docurnent retention electronic vs. paper storage was approved, allowing documents that have been scanned to be disposed of, reducing the amount of paper storage required at City Hall. As the City has progressed in the use of technology and its delivery of that technology to residents and other web-users, our desire to have more control over the structure and maintenance of our website has become ~eater. The benefits of managing our website in-house include the opportunities for the City to implement e-government initiatives for building permits, utility billing, GIS capabilities including interactive maps, and future park and recreation registrations. In addition, with the wealth of information contained in our Laser Fiche system, we have researched the opportunities to make that available to web-users via the website. The GovDocs and Laser Fiche systems have become duplicative in purpose, therefore staff is proposing to purchase the 'web-link' add-on of Laser Fiche which will enable the 550,000+ documents within the system to be available on-line in a text searchable format and abandon the Gov Docs system. The costs associated with the 'Web-Link' add-on are $12,500 and have been provided for in the 2004 IT budget. One additional issue with the GovDocs system is the document format the system utilizes, PDF (portable document format). PDF files are basically a ~aphic of the document that allows the document to be viewed and printed, but noi altered. PDF files tend to function great for small documents, but as the number of pages increases the file size increases, thereby making downloading time-consuming or impossible depelCding the type of internet service. For this reason, we have not made our City Code or other lengthy or graphic documents available on-line. Laser Fiche utilizes a TIF file format,