Access Glasgow is Glasgow City Council’s approach to the Modernising Government Agenda and will be a significant factor, not only in enhancing public service delivery but also in providing the means for citizens of Glasgow to take advantage of the world of technology and e-commerce.

Access Glasgow aims to provide the highest quality of integrated public services for Glasgow’s citizens and visitors, delivered through the medium the individual prefers. Included in this objective are the following principles:-

• Public services will be provided at a time and place convenient to the customer
• Modern technology will be used to widen the choice of access modes available to customers for public services
• Barriers of location, time and availability that prevent citizens obtaining the benefits of technology will be removed

The vision of the future is delivery of services by a choice of technologies, from which all citizens and customers will benefit. The Council’s Internet platform is one of the core components for realising this vision.

Following a review of the existing infrastructure and tools, recommendations were made to replace the complete platform with an infrastructure and products that would provide the functionality required to deliver the customer-centric model of electronic service delivery demanded by the Modernising Government initiative.

The Council selected Microsoft’s Solution for Internet Business for the new platform utilising Microsoft .NET, Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 and Microsoft Commerce Server 2002. Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 would facilitate distributed content generation across all Service Areas within the Council. The Content Management Server templates and online applications would be developed in-house. Applications would be developed using Visual Studio.NET, Visual Basic.NET and ASP.NET.

The Council explored internal hosting of the production platform however, the requirement and expectation for providing 24 x 7 service could not be accommodated in-house at this time. As a result, the Council tendered for a partner with experience of hosting Microsoft’s Internet for Business solution, who could provide quality managed services for the infrastructure, underlying operating systems and the application layer, thus facilitating reliable 24 x 7 service availability to the web site.

Attenda was the chosen contractor to provide hosting and management of the platform and products.

Attenda worked with the Council to design a robust high performance platform with availability in excess of 99.95% and security against unauthorised amendment and attack. The Council required a comprehensive solution consisting of production, staging and testing environments. The key requirements were improved availability and security.

One of the important selection criteria was for a deep understanding of leading edge Microsoft technology. This was particularly important because Microsoft Content Management was quite new at the time and there was not a huge amount of readily available expertise within the industry.

As David Wood, Head of ICT, explained: “Attenda has specialist expertise in leading edge Microsoft technology and total commitment to security as shown by the company’s IS027001 (formerly BS 7799) accreditation.”

Glasgow City Council was particularly diligent in following up references with Attenda’s clients.“We felt reassured by the calibre of clients which Attenda has attracted and retained, and the fact that 100% of clients have said they would recommend Attenda.”

In early 2004 Attenda was confirmed as the council’s selected supplier and began to work on the design of a new platform. To facilitate the Council’s aggressive delivery targets for launch of the new Council website by March 2004, the website was temporarily hosted with another partner whilst Attenda progressed build and implementation of the new platform.

Transfer to Attenda was undertaken in two phases. The first phase of the new platform went live in August 2004. Together, Glasgow City Council and Attenda project managed the transfer of applications from the temporary platform to the new platform in its own data centre. The second phase involved, decommissioning of the temporary platform, which was then transferred to Attenda and deployed to the new platform, providing resilience for the overall infrastructure.

Attenda manages and monitors three environments for Glasgow. The design incorporates three-tiers: web, application and database servers. The production environment consists of load-balanced web servers that also run a search engine, application servers in the middle tier and two clustered database servers in a failover configuration. A similar design exists for the staging environment. The testing environment, which requires less resilience, has one server in each tier.

At the heart of the architecture is Microsoft Content Management Server 2002, which facilitates distributed content generation across all Service Areas within the Council. Approximately 350 content authors prepare and publish content for the website. Content is prepared in the staging environment and once published is automatically available to the public via the production environment. Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 is used to track the validation and approval of content through a streamlined process.

Attenda provides a comprehensive range of managed services covering not just the hardware and infrastructure management, but also operating system and managed database services. A significant advantage in the council’s eyes was that Attenda could also provide a managed service for Content Management Service that includes day-to-day housekeeping activities allowing the Council to focus on managing the content. Attenda’s solution also incorporates a managed attack detection service that couples advanced intrusion detection technology with real-time security monitoring to correlate and process security event information. Attenda’s support team is alerted when real threats are detected and responds on the Council’s behalf 24 x 7.

Glasgow City Council is now realising benefits of hosting their internet web platform with Attenda. One of the clear improvements is that the new platform has added security and provides the Council with the foundation on which to build further online services. ICT staff are now freed from the day to day management of the web site to focus on developing new applications and services.

David Wood commented “The new platform enables Glasgow City Council to provide a better service to our customers. We have greatly improved availability for the web site through the introduction of this managed service.”

Glasgow’s web site has now been running successfully with Attenda for over a year and in that time Attenda has become a valued partner to the Council.