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GCN Home > 04/26/04 issue

Capturing Content

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

To get most from Web sites, feds turn to content management apps

What’s the advantage of having a content management system for online information?

Ask the IRS. Its Web content management system has brought kudos, not complaints, from the General Accounting Office.

“GAO does an audit every year of the IRS filing season, and part of that is looking at what is on the Web site,” said George Coffin, chief of the tax agency’s public portal. “For several years, GAO found outdated content.”

Or ask the General Services Administration. Ease of use for the Web team in managing content would be near the top of the list, said Dana Hallman, project leader for Web content management for GSA’s FirstGov portal.

Before her agency awarded a contract, it let the team try out vendors’ proposed products. “It was very telling how the products actually worked,” Hallman said. “Some folks were able to do things very quickly, while others were struggling after 20 minutes.”

Ease of use goes hand in glove with keeping data current. The IRS has more than 39,000 online files, many of them time sensitive. It’s a taxing job to keep everything up to date, Coffin said. A search engine such as Google can almost always dig out a forgotten public folder or an expired form somewhere.

“You don’t want to be giving folks last year’s tax rules,” said Coffin, who spoke at a recent conference on Web content management software sponsored by the Digital Government Institute of Washington.

For each of the last two years, the IRS site has earned a clean bill of health and GAO no longer comments on out-of-date content. Coffin pointed to the agency’s use of the Vignette Content Suite from Vignette Corp. of Austin, Texas.

As webmasters struggle with quality control on increasingly large sites, other agencies across the government—including the Agriculture Department, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Transportation Security Administration—are setting up their own content management systems.

Complex issues

More news on related topics: Content / Record Management, Executive Center, Management, New Products / Technology, Web Strategies



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