How the City of Helsinki Uses Ephox and IBM 
to Manage a Portal of Over 50,000 Pages

Background

Helsinki, the capital of Finland, is the largest city in the country and home to the government, ministries and state administration offices. The Greater Helsinki area accounts for 25% of the population, 29% of jobs, and 33% of the GDP of Finland.

The highest decision-making organization in Helsinki is the City Council. The Council makes important financial decisions and provides a variety of governmental services for approximately 1,300,000 people within the greater Helsinki area.

The City of Helsinki portal (http://www.hel.fi) is an essential community service, serving 50,000 pages of web content in several languages, and is maintained by over 600 employees from over 30 departments.

The portal provides information on the City’s administration including budget reports, school information, and library, health and social services. Citizens can also communicate with municipal officials through the web portal.

The Challenge: 

With 15.5 million visits in 2008 and 50,000 pages, the staff at the City of Helsinki was struggling with keeping the extensive portal content current in order to provide effective and essential citizen services.

In 2004, The City of Helsinki started a major project to get most of its websites into one, easily accessible system. After assessing the main content management systems through an open competition, they chose IBM Lotus Web Content
Management (IBM LWCM) running on WebSphere Portal. They chose IBM LWCM for its affordability and its ability to seamlessly manage their extensive web content.

“Our former system simply could not handle the volume of content we had,” said Leila Oravisto, City of Helsinki web services coordinator. “The content was growing daily with no end in sight.”

As they rolled out IBM LWCM, the project team realized they needed to ensure non-technical users could easily learn the new system and update their own content. They could not afford to spend a lot of time training 600 employees, so it was vital that the new system contained a rich text editor that had a familiar, easy-to-use interface.  

The Solution: 

After testing various rich text editors, The City of Helsinki contacted Ephox at IBM’s recommendation. EditLive! for IBM LWCM was just what they were looking for—an easy-to-use interface, extensive capabilities, and accessible content—all within a stable environment.

“The EditLive! system is very easy to use and provides our web content editors with a stable and consistent  experience,” said Oravisto. “This means we can easily share content between our web content masters.”

As a government agency, the City knows how important it is to comply with accessibility standards for disabled website visitors. EditLive! has an Accessibility Checker that provides a detailed analysis of accessibility errors and points users to the resources that help resolve the error. The Accessibility Checker supports the following standards:

• U.S. Rehabilitation Act Section 508
• W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Priority 1 and 2 

In addition to meeting the needs of disabled uses, creating accessible content also meets the needs of mobile phone users. Mobile phone use is very high in Finland with 103 mobile phones for every 100 people. The EditLive! built-in Accessibility Checker allows government agencies such as the City of Helsinki to quickly and easily create compliant content for both disabled and mobile phone users.

About Ephox

Ephox software allows creators of web content for wikis, public websites and intranets to be more productive and to collaborate more effectively.  EditLive! is a browser-based, rich content HTML editor with a Word-like interface that is designed for non-technical business users.  Ephox’s authoring solutions are integrated into leading Web Content Management (WCM) systems including CrownPeak, EMC|Documentum, IBM, Open Text, Oracle, Percussion, and Vignette.