Adepteq enable English / Welsh publishing within Merthyr County Borough Council

As part of the e-Gov initiative in the UK, Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council must provide easy access to information and services via the internet. An additional requirement for Merthyr CMS is the ability to provide a Welsh language version of the site.

As with all Content Management projects, the main goal is to empower the departmental employees to keep the content relevant and dynamic whilst enabling the IT team to focus on the technical and administrative aspects of the web presence.

One of the key requirements was ease of use for the users to ensure that the solution is adopted as the path of least resistance for web publishing. The Solution allows content to be authored and then saved in a production area whilst a translation is provided into Welsh (key requirement). There are specific placeholders for Welsh content which are associated with the English placeholders to enable a user to switch from English to Welsh within any part of the site.

The solution was built on Microsoft Content Management Server (Enterprise) situated within the corporate network with search being provided by Mondosoft Mondosearch as this will also form the basis for their intranet in the future. At regular intervals, the site is deployed through the firewall to a CMS Server (Standard Edition) in the DMZ which has been locked down for security reasons. The CMS in the DMZ is also using Mondosearch. There are some users working from satellite offices such as libraries who authenticate on the the corporate network before being able to access the Enterprise Server to author content.

Rules were built into the templates which prohibit any content being submitted into workflow without any welsh content in the welsh placeholders. The posting then stays in production until this criteria is met. The biggest risk to projects of this type in the public sector is gaining senior buy-in from the council to ensure support at a departmental level. To ensure this, the project was positioned as a communications project (not just IT) for the council with ALL departments being responsible for authoring content in their own sections. IT played a major part of the overall project by providing the platform to enable this to take place.

To discuss this project in more detail or to find out how Adepteq can help make your own project a success fill in our online enquiry form, email us at info@adepteq.com or simply call (01296) 468 160.