Environment Canada

About the Client
Environment Canada and the BC Ministry of Water, Land, and Air Protection have been monitoring surface water quality for many years throughout the province. The federal-provincial water quality monitoring program plays an important role in determining long term trends in water quality, identifying emerging aquatic ecosystem impacts, and providing decision-making resource information to Canadians. The Canadian Information System for the Environment (CISE) provided regional funds for improving public access to the federal-provincial water quality data, information, and program.

Challenge
To present the data to the public, not only do water quality data need to be published to the public, but so do an explanation of what the data means. Scientific and general guideline publications need to be accessible to the public who also need to be able to access graphs and Microsoft Excel downloads for river basins across British Columbia and Yukon Territories. The website needs to have data changing on a quarterly basis which also results in new scientific data becoming available. In addition, partner update and change their data on a regular basis. Finally, because the website is part of the Government of Canada, all data and information must be presented in English and French while remaining within Federal Government common look and feel guidelines. Problem areas needing to be addressed include:

• Webmasters as "bottlenecks" in the content process.
• Content for internet not appearing in a timely fashion.
• Information having to be in English and French results in added level of complexity.

Solution
Environment Canada sought a web content management system that was affordable, designed from the ground up to handle multiple languages, would be able to ensure pages complied with Government of Canada online standards, extremely feature rich, and completely browser-based and easy to use.

Since the existing system was very difficult to use and after evaluating other solutions, Environment Canada selected ElementCMS because of the high value and rich feature set, out of the box integration with government compliance standards, along with the ease of multilingual page entry and management.

Outcome
Since the implementation of ElementCMS for the Water Quality Website, Environment Canada has come to learn that major websites can be deployed in a timely manner, within budget, and without the headaches or delays. Resources are now made available to the public in a timely and organized fashion. Further results from this successful deployment have included:

• Application and software specialists are now not tied up releasing to and formatting for the website; instead, the content experts maintain this responsibility.
• Translation from English and French can be done on the same day that the information is deployed; links between the two language variants of each page are automatically maintained and updated.
• The agency is now saving thousands of dollars in development costs not having to use technical staff to deploy content to the web and instead leaving this to the hands of those responsible in producing it.