Microsoft Office SystemCustomer Solution Case Study

Municipal Government Deploys Web Content Solution, Saves $230,000 in IT Costs

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Government—State and regional

Customer ProfileThe City of Virginia Beach, the municipal government of Virginia Beach, Virginia, employs 6,890 people and provides information and services to the city’s 438,000 citizens.

Business SituationTo develop and maintain compelling websites that inform citizens and attract tourists, the city needed an intuitive, integrated solution for web content management and powerful web development tools.

SolutionThe City of Virginia Beach is replacing its web content management solution with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to create interactive online experiences.

Benefits Reduced costs Simplified content publication Improved online experience

“With SharePoint technology, the City of Virginia Beach is building a true web portal to enable city services and provide access to information for residents, businesses, and visitors.”

Jason Hall, Lead, Web Team, ComIT, City of Virginia Beach

The City of Virginia Beach is the municipal government that has jurisdiction over Virginia Beach, Virginia. To meet citizens’ requests for additional intranet site functionality and to assist content contributors, the city retired its web content management solution and migrated its Internet and intranet sites to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The project will save the city approximately U.S.$30,000 in annual licensing costs and $200,000 in upgrade costs. Employees now use an intuitive web content publication solution based on SharePoint Server to upload more photos, videos, and content with less IT involvement. These additional elements contributed to a 21 percent increase in unique visits to virginiaaquarium.com in the first four months of migrating to Office SharePoint Server 2007.

SituationThe City of Virginia Beach is the municipal government that serves Virginia Beach, Virginia, the most populous city in the state. It provides approximately 30 different civic services to residents through the operation of its departments, including fire, police, libraries, social services, agriculture, and parks and recreation. It is the responsibility of the Communications and Information Technology (ComIT) department to maintain a cost-effective, reliable, and stable IT infrastructure to support these operations. ComIT has 182 employees working in 10 divisions. The members of the ComIT department’s web team, Jason Hall, Brian Reed, and Scott Holava, are responsible for maintaining the City of Virginia Beach intranet in addition to its public-facing Internet sites.

ComIT decided to reassess its platform for web content management. Its existing web solution was developed on the Java platform, and it supported three public-facing sites: vbgov.com, yesvirginiabeach.com, and virginiaaquarium.com, as well as the city’s intranet. The city’s official site, vbgov.com, is the main communications channel between the government and the public, informing Virginia Beach citizens about the functions, services, and projects of the municipal government. The website also facilitates the delivery of direct services provided by the city for citizens and other customers. Yesvirginiabeach.com focuses on economic and business development for the area, and virginiaaquarium.com promotes the city’s aquarium and marine sciences center.

“The City of Virginia Beach wanted to offer more interactive, collaborative websites to engage and educate the public about our services as a civic government and the attractions of our city and surroundings,” says Jason Hall, Lead, Web Team, ComIT at the City of Virginia Beach. “We were looking at enabling new features on our sites, such as commenting and rating and tagging content, and we wanted to upload photo and video galleries on a regular basis.”

Each department of the municipal government has a page master who is the content expert for the department. This person is also responsible for publishing content and training users. “We wanted to offer user-friendly tools to make web content management and publication as seamless as possible. The existing content management solution has good qualities, but it was not always that intuitive,” says Hall. “Just to change content, you had to go through a two- to four-step workflow to make sure that everything was approved. The system did not have versioning capabilities, and you could not do bulk uploads of images. And the IT staff had to manage user permissions for who could update content, which was time consuming.”

Another problem was that the City of Virginia Beach did not have in-house expertise in the Java development environment: a prerequisite for customizing the existing web content management solution. “We are more adept at working with the C# language and in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development system and the Microsoft .Net Framework 4 environment. We didn’t want to have to

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“The City of Virginia Beach wanted to offer more interactive, collaborative websites to engage and educate the public about our services as a civic government.”

Jason Hall, Lead, Web Team, ComIT, City of Virginia Beach

contract work out to do any custom coding for future upgrades to our web content management system,” says Hall. This meant that the City of Virginia Beach had to settle for the existing solution’s functionality, unless it was willing to pay for outsourced development work.

By February 2009, the city had reached a crossroads. The current version of the content management system was running on outdated hardware that needed to be upgraded. At the same time, ComIT recognized the need to build an overarching knowledge management and collaboration solution for all employees.

“We were faced with essentially two different IT projects, one to implement a knowledge management and collaboration solution and another to upgrade the current content management system’s software and hardware,” says Kevin Fairley, Information Services Administrator at the City of Virginia Beach. “However, instead of committing to finding two solutions to these issues, we chose to save money and find one that could do everything. It turned out that we already had the solution: we had deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to support a few team sites for departmental staffs to collaborate on their daily work.”

SolutionThe city decided to retire its existing web content management solution and standardize on a Microsoft solution for several reasons. First, Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers the requisite functionality and flexibility required by the city. Employees can use its efficient web content management functionality and IT

staff can deploy it as an integrated portal solution for the city’s intranet and Internet sites and build a city-wide knowledge management platform, thus fulfilling its directive from the business.

“Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers a whole range of capabilities, including enterprise search, collaboration, business processes, and workflow, that meet all our web content management needs,” says Mick Vollmer, Technology Architect, ComIT at the City of Virginia Beach.

A Collaboration Platform that FitsThe city was already using Office SharePoint Server 2007 for its team sites, and it had Client Access Licenses for SharePoint for all its desktops through the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. “We have a philosophy in the organization that before we buy new products, we see if we can accomplish our goals with the products we own,” says Vollmer. “However, we still did an analysis of our existing content management solution and SharePoint. But when we looked at the functionality and the licensing and upgrade costs for our existing solution, it made sense to go with the Microsoft solution.”

It also made sense to switch to a product built using the same development tools that city IT staff members were familiar with. “We have a lot of coding expertise in the Visual Studio development environment, so to work with SharePoint we wouldn’t need to learn anything new,” says Vollmer.

In making its decision, the City of Virginia Beach also considered interoperability with its existing IT infrastructure. The city is

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gradually standardizing on Microsoft technologies because many of the third-party applications it uses are built to run in the Windows operating environment. “With Microsoft products, we get a lot of interoperability benefits. Office SharePoint Server 2007, with its ties into Microsoft Office, such as sharing calendars with Outlook, would encourage adoption,” says Hall.

The IT staffers were also impressed with the solution’s scalable architecture and with the ability to cluster servers running the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise data management software that supports Office SharePoint Server 2007. “Load balancing the front-end servers and clustering the database servers gave us a scalable solution that will continue to grow as we add more content and users,” says Rob Atwood, Systems Support Coordinator at the City of Virginia Beach.

Interactive WebsitesIn June 2010, the City of Virginia Beach worked with Microsoft to develop two new test sites that take advantage of Office SharePoint Server 2007: ourfuturevb.com and vbparents.com. The first is a comprehensive planning site that publicizes government projects and funding. The second, vbparents.com, aims to connect parents and families in the community. Both sites were built by using a combination of out-of-the-box page layouts and customized web parts in SharePoint. Web parts are modular units of information that can be inserted into pages. These sites were launched in September 2010. Then the ComIT web team migrated yesvirgniabeach.com to the SharePoint environment in November 2010

and virginiaacquarium.com in February 2010.

The City of Virginia Beach recently upgraded to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. With a phased approach, Virginia Beach plans to use Microsoft Business Connectivity Services, a set of services and features that connect SharePoint solutions to external data sources, to populate the Parks and Recreation site with new information. “We will be migrating all our sites and our intranet to SharePoint 2010, and we expect most sites to be live in August 2011,” says Vollmer.

BenefitsToday, employees and ComIT staffers at the City of Virginia Beach can more easily launch and maintain innovative, engaging web experiences that portray the city to advantage. “With SharePoint technology, the City of Virginia Beach is building a true web portal to enable city services and provide access to information for residents, businesses, and visitors,” says Hall.

Reduced CostsOnce the City of Virginia Beach standardizes on a Microsoft web content management solution, it can retire its existing solution and avoid an estimated U.S.$30,000 in annual licensing costs and $200,000 in upgrade costs. “We will no longer be maintaining web servers and application servers for two systems that provide the same essential functionality,” says Fairley. “So in the long run, we’ll have the ability to reduce our hardware requirements by half. And obviously, we’ll have those savings over the life of the system, so five to seven years from now when we do the next series of upgrades, we

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won’t have to worry about bringing two systems forward.”

Simplified Content PublicationWeb masters and business content owners who are responsible for the three sites that are currently running in the SharePoint environment spend less time and energy publishing content. “With the SharePoint system, it’s just a matter of going to the page, clicking edit, making the changes, hitting publish, and it’s live,” says Hall. “The versioning capabilities are much more robust, and content owners can upload images and videos in bulk instead of one by one. For the majority of our departments, a one-click to publish capability is going to be the standard. Our business users are a lot happier.”

Simplified content management empowers business users to update their sites more frequently and reduces reliance on IT. “Once we standardize on SharePoint 2010 for all our web portals and our intranet, I’ll be reclaiming five to 10 hours per month that I used to spend on content management issues. I’ll use that time to build great SharePoint sites!” says Hall. “When the intranet is migrated to the SharePoint environment, departmental page masters can manage permissions for who can work with different areas and content. This will be a huge timesaver for the web team.”

Improved Online ExperienceIn the four months since the City of Virginia Beach launched the new virginiaaquarium.com site, it has received 2.5 million visits and 5.2 million page views. Compared to the four months leading up to the launch, new visitors to the site have

increased by 21 percent. Part of this growth can be attributed to the site’s new look and feel, with more frequently updated photos and improved navigation. The web team used SharePoint lists and built a custom interface that is more intuitive, taking visitors where they want to go with fewer clicks. New content on the right side of the home page changes frequently thanks to streamlined content publication, so business content owners can feature changing events and activities, such as the city’s seasonal seafood dinner.

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“With the SharePoint system, it’s just a matter of going to the page, clicking edit, making the changes, hitting publish, and it’s live.”

Jason Hall, Lead, Web Team, ComIT, City of Virginia Beach

“We are looking forward to launching vbgov.com on the SharePoint 2010 platform because we’ll be offering a lot of new features,” says Hall. “Photo galleries, video galleries, commenting on content, easier navigation, and enabling visitors to share content on social-networking sites are just a few ways we plan to use SharePoint 2010 to present a more up-to-date image for our flagship site that will reflect well on our city.”

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Microsoft Office SystemThe Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to: www.microsoft.com/office

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about the City of Virginia Beach, call (757) 385-3111 or visit the website at:www.vbgov.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published August 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Office− Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

2007 Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010− Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise

Microsoft Visual Studio− Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Technologies− Microsoft .NET Framework 4