The Architect of the Capitol (AOC) is responsible to the United States Congress for the maintenance, operation, development, and preservation of the United States Capitol Complex, which includes the Capitol, the congressional office buildings, the Library of Congress buildings, the Supreme Court building, the U.S. Botanic Garden, the Capitol Power Plant, and other facilities.

Until recently, AOC had no content management system in place to manage its numerous web sites. According to Web Developer James Graham, “Internal clients were given FrontPage to manage their content. With no design or approval oversight, all control of the look and feel was lost. In addition, content was rarely updated, files were orphaned, and the site was not dynamically driven.”

In considering how to re-architect its numerous Web sites, AOC knew it needed a solution it could deploy rapidly using limited resources (only one Web developer). In evaluating CMS solutions, AOC’s requirements centered on leveraging their current technologies, including ColdFusion and an Oracle database.

Since content for the sites would be maintained by staff from various departments, including government employees, restaurant staff and horticulture workers, with a wide range of experience and abilities, the need for a simple and easy-to-use application for updating content was key. With approximately 250 content contributors maintaining more than 10,000 pages across several distinct sites, AOC needed a solution that provided solid controls to effectively manage the look-and-feel of different sites and sub-sites, and provided flexible content approval workflow processes.

“After looking at other alternatives, AOC ultimately selected PaperThin’s CommonSpot™ Content Server because of its quick development and implementation capabilities, and the ease of use for content contributors,” says Graham. AOC worked with PaperThin and a team from Washington, DC-based consultant Fig Leaf Software to implement CommonSpot to manage two of its many sites, Senate Restaurants, and the US Botanical Gardens (www.usbg.gov).

The development of these two sites took less than five months, from site design to launch. According to Graham, “The implementation was by far faster than any I have done before—by a significant margin.” AOC rolled out end-user training produced and delivered by Fig Leaf Software in the first quarter of 2002.

AOC’s CommonSpot solution is running on top of ColdFusion 5 Enterprise Edition on a Windows NT platform and Oracle 8i on a separate Solaris platform. Compact Proliant 360 Web servers with a SAN device serve as the hardware platform for clustered and redundant CommonSpot 2.5 Enterprise Edition.

“What really impressed us about CommonSpot was the significant functionality right out of the box, as well as the ability to create custom applications easily for our specific requirements,” Graham noted.

AOC leveraged CommonSpot’s tight integration with ColdFusion by developing several custom ColdFusion modules. An example of this integration is a custom module that Fig Leaf Software created for the www.senaterestaurants.gov Web site (this site is not accessible to the public). The module lets restaurant managers within the U.S. Senate create custom culinary menus for different days of the week, presenting visitors to the site with a restaurant-like menu. Restaurant managers can edit everything from entrees to desserts, including prices, and can even build menus that repeat themselves for different weeks and months with a specified period. Built using ColdFusion 5 and integrated with a Microsoft Access data repository, the module also integrates with CommonSpot’s security feature, to ensure that only those users designated with appropriate rights are able to edit content.

AOC also deployed a number of CommonSpot’s powerful out-of-the-box features, including personalization and scheduled elements.

AOC used scheduled elements to present the “Today’s Special” menu on this page. Depending on the time of day, a breakfast, lunch or dinner menu will appear on the page, along with relevant food images (for example, a breakfast item shows up in the morning, a lunch item in the afternoon, etc.).

Also, as the many departments within AOC had varying internal procedures for creating, approving and publishing content, AOC implemented CommonSpot’s multi-level approval workflows, that allow for the use of different approval processes for each subsite when content is published.

On the US Botanical Gardens site, AOC implemented an entirely different look and feel using CommonSpot templates. Botanical Garden staffers can easily update frequently changing information including What’s New, a calendar of daily activities, educational programs and other events, with CommonSpot’s intuitive Rich Text Editor.

AOC has slated additional sites for launch throughout 2002, including a dynamically driven intranet site for employees, engineers and architects. How does the CommonSpot implementation rate? “So far excellent. One of the easiest implementations I have ever deployed,” commented Graham.