Dunedin signs up Dataworks

By ADAM GIFFORD

The Dunedin City Council has followed North Shore City's lead and rolled out the DataWorks document management system from Australian firm Advanced Data Integration.

Information manager Sarah Heal said councils collected a large amount of information which previously had been difficult or time consuming to access.

"Our customers told us they weren't happy with our record system, so we got [consulting firm] KPMG to do a survey of our needs," Ms Heal said.

Risk management worried the council. The risk in paper-based information is loss, sabotage or deterioration. With electronic information, the concern was about documents being lost in the system or e-mails not being reported.

DataWorks enables staff to quickly search across a variety of indexes. It was chosen from 34 contenders for its fit with local government processes.

The software also integrates with the council's core business systems, GEMS from Geac and the geographic information system from ESRI.

This means users can go into DataWorks, call up a property by street address or customer name and not only get all documents associated with that property or customer but any maps or plans.

Another plus is the ability to index e-mail and its attachments by subject, customer name or property address.

The system is being introduced gradually to the council's 600 staff. The first sites will go live in March.

Ms Heal said that once the system was running, there would be no new physical files created and no new paper added to existing physical files.

Dunedin uses SQL Server 2000 as its database server. The main database server is a Compaq Proliant ML530 with two 1000Mhz Xeon processors, 1 gigabyte of memory and up to six hard drives to hold the metadata databases, operating system and logs.

A second single-Pentium III-processor Compaq server will serve documents, and a smaller Proliant will be used as a workflow and fax server.

The council expects the system will grow to include up to 700,000 documents and 80Gb of data over the next three years.