Connect Ontario Phase I Projects:
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Firewall implementation: The Municipality of Chatham-Kent had no in-house firewall between the Internet and the municipal systems. Web services had been previously hosted off-site with an Internet Service Provider. The project saw the completion of this work with a fully redundant firewall system now in place, a demilitarized zone established for all of our web servers, protocols and rules established for network traffic and the ability to establish virtual private network (VPN) and virtual local area network (VLAN) connections.
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Implementation of wide area network: The sites in the following list were installed and implemented after July 6, 2001 and provide the network connectivity essential to our internal and external municipal business process. The Municipality was able to submit the original installation charges for these particular sites as well as the on-going line leasing charges for the network for the period September 2001 to December 2002.
Sites installed: Dresden Service Centre, Ridgetown Service Centre, Merlin Library, Ridgetown Library, Tilbury Library, Dresden Library, Highgate Library, Wheatley Library and Thamesville Library.
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Improve and restructure the municipal web platforms, technologies and infrastructure to enable delivery of enhanced information and e-services: This project realized the creation and delivery of the Community of Chatham-Kent portal (
www.chatham-kent.ca) and the creation and hosting of the CKLAG web site (
http://www.cklag.com/). The creation of the Community of Chatham-Kent portal was established within a 7-month time frame and a 120 working day deliverable. The site was created as the key foundational component to move to and deliver electronic services for the Municipality of Chatham-Kent. The primary objective was to provide a one-stop source for Chatham-Kent information. The project required complete architectural and business process change as well as the implementation of back-end tools, technology platforms and databases.
Web services are becoming necessary for the continued relevance of public bodies. The improvement and restructuring of the web platforms will increase access to services and raise awareness of the community and it's visibility. The site was created on a three-tier system in which five servers are deployed to provide full redundancy of the site. We have established a development and testing environment, production environment and live internet delivery. The entire system is deployed using the Microsoft Content Management system. Through the establishment of workflow, branding and marketing, content and template creation, we now have over 120 internal staff established as the role of author and/or editor providing content to the site. Research into other municipal web sites determined that we wanted to create a site that was citizen-centred and topically driven. Word mapping exercises and usability studies were undertaken to determine the navigation for the site.
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Deliver on-line recreation program registration and facility browsing services to the Chatham-Kent community: The project resulted in the creation of "RecConnect", an on-line tool that allows a client to view a facility, browse for facility booking availability, search for recreation programs and register and pay for programs and classes using a credit card. The system contains information on over 350 municipal facilities and 250 recreations programs delivered on an annual basis.
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Support GIS/geospatial applications: Hardware and software components to support the delivery of our GIS applications were purchased and funded through the Connect Ontario initiative. A GIS application server, internet server, backup DNS/DHCP server and data warehouse server were purchased along with extension cables, rack mounting kit and peripherals. The Arc software was also purchased within the Connect Ontario funding. The purchase of these items allowed our internet-enabled GIS applications to be delivered and leveraged through the Community of Chatham-Kent portal and offered us the ability to create the "Map It" concept working with our vendors Concept Interactive Inc. and Orion Technology.