California State Controller's Office

Public Website Modernization

The California’s State Controller’s Office (SCO) public website is their primary communication and service delivery medium. However, in its old form, the SCO public website failed to meet SCO’s business needs in providing accessible, relevant and timely information to its customers.

To address these issues and enable the business users to manage web content, the SCO initiated the Public Website Redesign and Modernization project.

SymSoft improved the website usability by following a user-centric, task-centric approach for information organization, and created a new visual design.  The new website has improved accessibility standards compliance (WCAG and ADA Section 508), while allowing SCO to deliver audio/video content for a richer user experience. The website content is now managed by the business units and programs, under Executive Office permissions, using a Web Content Management System (CMS), OpenText Web Solution (formerly called RedDot).

Recognizing that the implementation of a CMS affects the organization's business processes and that, for the solution to be successful, it must be adopted by the business users, SymSoft engaged the SCO business users since the early stages of the project. SymSoft listened to the business users, understood their concerns, and designed and implemented a solution that makes it easy for them to edit content. SymSoft assisted the SCO with the organizational change management efforts during the project, and provided Web governance framework that detailed the structure for the governance team, their roles and responsibilities.

On the technical side, working with the SCO, SymSoft upgraded the hardware, implemented the CMS, configuring security and access control, business specific workflows, standardized templated and accessibility compliance. SymSoft also developed custom components where needed, to improve usability. SymSoft provided detailed technical and user documentation, and provided training to the staff.

The California State Controller nominated SymSoft Solutions for the best fit integrator award.  Sym won the award for year 2009 from center of digital government in portal modernization category.

Services Provided:

Systems integration, Requirements Analysis, Usability, Information Architecture, Web Accessibility, Web Governance and Policies, OpenText Web Solution (RedDot CMS) implementation, Training, Project Management.

Technologies:

OpenText Web Solution (RedDot CMS), RQL (RedDot Query Language), JQuery, XHTML/CSS, ASP.Net, SQL Server