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GCN Home > 03/10/03 issue

Capitol Content: Architect’s offices benefit from common site management system

By Patricia Daukantas, GCN Staff

When James Graham started work for the Architect of the Capitol in the spring of 2001, there was no system for updating materials on the office’s Web and intranet sites.

Graham, the Web developer for the architect’s Office of Information Resources Management, installed a content management sys
Flowers seen in the Botanic Garden
Image: U.S. Botanic Garden
Botanic Garden employees make their Web site bloom with fresh photos of seasonal flowers.
tem that puts designated staff members in charge of updating their own content. The system, built from off-the-shelf software, went live in January of last year.

The architect’s office manages 35 buildings on Capitol Hill including the Capitol itself, House and Senate offices, the Supreme Court building and the U.S. Botanic Garden a short walk from the Capitol.

Graham maintains the Botanic Garden site, www.usbg.gov; AOC Link, an intranet for workers in buildings served by the architect’s office; and the Senate restaurants’ Web site, www.senaterestaurants.gov, which is open only to Hill workers.

Using AOC Link, legislative employees can request heating and air conditioning maintenance, furniture moving, painting and other repairs. The intranet also supplies human resources forms and information about the Thrift Savings Plan and other policies. There is a searchable employee directory for the architect’s office, which has people stationed in all 35 buildings.

“The intranet has become the method of disseminating information across the campus,” Graham said. When he arrived on the Hill after two decades as a corporate graphic designer and Web developer, he found that posting procedures lagged behind the standards he had followed in the private sector. The architect’s office had Web and intranet sites, but each department maintained its own pages, and there was little coherence in graphics or posting and updating policies.

“Creating Web pages from scratch is a lot to ask of your employees,” Graham said. So he introduced a unified content management system.

Building on the architecture

The most efficient means is a database-driven Web site that serves up pages dynamically, Graham said.

Some people in the architect’s office were using the ColdFusion page-building tool from Macromedia Inc. of San Francisco, but Graham said he wanted software with an open architecture that would let him add functions.