For the complete list of live sites, please refer to the wiki
Having taken the lead on the original APLAWS Pathfinder project, Camden were an early adopter of the system. This was implemented on our Intranet. Much of the development undertaken on the Intranet helped to drive some of the improvements that we wanted for the website. The first publicly live Camden instance on APLAWS was the Micro-Business Gateway subsite, which also involved us addressing and making improvements to the UTF-8 language facilities (for the storage and retrieval of non-Western character sets). We also helped develop other functionality to meet the subsite needs. Camden will be going live with the APLAWS+ code in April and are yet to make a decision as to whether or not to do this for our intranet.
Camden has full first line support for both instances of APLAWS for our Intranet and Internet. The two support contracts are similar but vary in extent: the internet requires the supplier to provide full first line support on all issues, including, for example, Oracle. For the intranet we have a more hybrid approach - focusing primarily on the APLAWS application only since we have tended to do our own internal development.
Web site set up:
| Physical configuration | 3 front facing Compaq application servers, 1 database server, 1 staging (test) server |
| Operating system | Red Hat Enterprise |
| Database | Oracle 9i |
| Application server | Resin |
| Web server | Apache |
| Caching | Squid |
Intranet
| Physical configuration | 3 front facing Sun netra application servers, 1 Sunfire database server, 1 Sun netra staging (test) server |
| Operating system | Solaris |
| Database | Oracle 9i |
| Application server | Resin |
| Web server | Apache |
| Caching | Squid |
We have undertaken ad hoc development work with several partners and developed a model whereby this can be implemented within our fully supported environment. Having several suppliers has been invaluable. Much of this work has been quality assured and has found its way back into the core product (e.g. the XML content type).
On an ongoing basis we have used third party suppliers for template work.
Alasdair Mangham
Head of Business Systems and Development, London Borough of Camden
Email: alasdair.mangham@camden.gov.uk
Blaby developed a new Internet site with APLAWS (CCM5.2) and went live in November 2003. The system operates on 4 Redhat Enterprise Linux Servers and is supported by a PostgreSQL database. Blaby has a 12 month support and maintenance contract in place for both APLAWS and PostgreSQL. Blaby designed and developed the site in-house, but are reliant on external providers for XSL/XML developments.
We will be keeping a close eye on installations of APLAWS+ over the next 12 months and will make a decision as to whether we adopt APLAWS+ for both our Internet and Intranet sites when our existing support and maintenance contract ceases next year.
Julie Hutchinson
Communications Manager, Blaby District Council
Email: julie.hutchinson@blaby.gov.uk
West Sussex Grid for Learning has now been implemented on Aplaws at http://wsgfl.westsussex.gov.uk
In our implementation, we have carried out a bit of ad hoc development to fulfil our users requirements: we have included the ability to authenticate users from one of several external directories (we have school users on a MS SQLServer and central staff on an LDAP directory).
We are about to implement login via https on an otherwise http site (our LDAP directory is used for authentication to several highly sensitive applications, and so we cannot allow users names & passwords to go across the internet in plaintext). We have personalised news - our school user directory holds a large amount of profile information. We allow authors to specify which profile areas an article is of relevance to and the news area on the home page is replaced with links to items of relevance when a school user logs in.
We have implemented access controls that prevents users seeing links to inaccessible articles, and because we have had to scrap any caching of pages for this, we have tuned the code to increase the speed of requests for navigation pages(from about 9 seconds per request to about 1 second). We have implemented full file attachment searching (not currently implemented in Aplaws or Aplaws+).
We have ensured that linking to an index page takes the user to the navigation page so that the index item and navigation categories are shown. Although some aspects of these developments are quite specific to our site, we are keen to share them with any other authorities who are interested, particularly if they are considering transferring them to Aplaws+.
Chris Gilbert
Senior Application Specialist
Email: Alun.Williams@westsussex.gov.uk
Coventry are using APLAWS to manage both their Intranet and Internet sites.
Coventry launched their Intranet site using APLAWS (CCM 5.2) in July 2003. The set up for this is as follows:
| Physical configuration | 3 front facing Compaq application servers, 1 database server |
| Operating system | Red Hat Enterprise |
| Database | PostgreSQL |
| Application server | Resin |
| Web server | Apache |
| Caching | Squid |
We have a full front line support contract for the installation of APLAWS 5.2, renewable every 12 months. The site was designed and developed in house, with additional work on XSL/Content Types contracted to our support contractor.
Having tried and tested APLAWS 5.2 for the Intranet, we decided to implement APL
AWS to manage our website. Work began in November 2003 and with the impending ch
ange to the code we decided to opt for using APLAWS+. This meant a longer lead t
ime as the software was still to be developed and tested, but was the option cho
sen as it meant that there would be no issues in migrating the website and conte
nt from v5.2 to APLAWS+ at a later stage. As a result Coventry was involved in s
ome of the back-end usability testing carried out for the new code. The support
and maintenance contract has been amended to reflect both deployments of the so
ftware.
The environment for the website is a mirror of above, but with an additional sta
ging (test) server. One of the application servers is shared between the intrane
t and the website.
We have used separate contractors for styling / XSL and for applying accessibili
ty standards.
The council website was re-launched on 31st July 2004 using APLAWS+ version 1.0.
1.
We are beginning work on upgrading the Intranet from using 5.2 instance to APLAW
S+. This includes work with our support contractor in building a single publishi
ng environment. The aim of this will be to enable some of the content published
on the website to be shared and viewed on our Intranet, using the Intranet's bra
nding and navigation. This will remove the need to individually create and publi
sh similar content on each build.
Coventry has also been an active member of the APLAWS User Group since July 2003
.
David Francisco
Internet Project Manager
Email: david.francisco@coventry.gov.uk