About

The city of Las Vegas is committed to enhancing the residents’ quality of life, while at the same time making sure Las Vegas remains the premiere entertainment destination in the world. The city staff strives to be open, accessible and responsive to community. Through this Web site, one can find most everything they want to know about the great city. At the fingertips of their visitor’s is information on all the city departments and services that the Las Vegas government provides.  Visitors can take advantage of the information on travel, lodging, transportation and entertainment.
Las Vegas is the fastest-growing metropolis in the U.S. To help keep up with the active, 24-hour community, the city of Las Vegas Web site is always open for business, 24-hours a day. As a government organization, the city of Las Vegas needs to provide up to the minute information to its 500,000 monthly site visitors. Because one person manually handled daily updates, content updates were delayed. The City sought a content management solution that would extend their commitmen t of quality service via their Web site – the key informational outlet to the community.  

Challenge

The city of Las Vegas was in need of a solution that would allow the Department of Information Technologies (IT), to create browser-based templates for its department such that they could update their own Web site content with little or no intervention from IT staff. “We needed a system with a powerful back-end but an easy frontend that would enable any one of our staff members – regardless of technology expertise – to manage online content,” said Louis Carr, Development Manager for the city of Las Vegas Department of Information Technologies. And from a back-end perspective, we can easily develop and create templates, standardize on other technology such as JavaScript, SQL Server or Oracle and also support ASP pages and other development languages.”

• Needed a system that would work in a Windows NT environment
• Streamline workflow
• Needed to publish static HTML pages
• Store information in existing database
• Minimize IT’s role in publishing content
• Needed a cost-effective solution without sacrificing core features and functionality

The city of Las Vegas responded to their challenges by implementing RedDot’s Content Management Server (CMS), Professional to manage and maintain their online presence. RedDot enables editors to quickly add, change and remove content on the Web site without the assistance of the IT department. Technical resources are liberated to concentrate on other initiatives and more mission-critical business needs. Information does, however, move through the comprehensive RedDot workflow engine to get management approval before publishing to the live site – resulting in complete content control. RedDot met the needs of the city of Las Vegas.

• No HTML Knowledge Required: Contributors outside of the IT department did not need to know
• HTML to work as editors. They now work in a WYSIWYG environment enabling them to update content to the site via their creation of multiple templates, without affecting the content or having to manipulate navigation, thus protecting the integrity of the site
• Browser-based Environment: Both the editorial and administration interfaces work within a web browser
• Distributed Content Authority: The IT department defines a hierarchy of contributors who can create content and easily move it electronically to assigned editors for editing and approval
• Standards-based Architecture: RedDot provides the IT department with a solution that will grow with their infrastructure, offering broad integration options and scalability, without sacrificing the functionality

Results

Since the implementation of RedDot Solutions’ Content Management Server (CMS), Professional, the city of Las Vegas has recognized several results that have impacted their business in positive manner. "Now that each department can work as an editor, they can create and post content based on the appropriateness of their working timeframe,” said Carr. “The team quickly responded to the simple user interface. The combination of authority distribution and workflow procedures has streamlined the maintenance of our online presence, resulting in an information-rich 1,900 page Web site that continues to flourish.”  RedDot manages the intranet for the City as well and will also be rolling out the service to additional departments in the near future. 

• RedDot’s software is ODBC compliant, enabling the City to store text into their database
• Can now publish static HTML pages, reducing server load
• Significant reduction in publishing times
• Can publish to multiple servers
• Each department now has responsibility for publishing their own content