e-Spirit: City of Dortmund relies on FirstSpirit™

Internet city portal enters a new era with FirstSpirit™

The City of Dortmund website has been thoroughly revamped using FirstSpirit, the high-end Content Management System from Dortmund-based e-Spirit AG. On August 11, 2009, the city’s Lord Mayor, Dr. Gerhard Langemeyer released the new city portal for publication. Now that the site has gone live, Dortmund residents and others can visit beta.dortmund.de for a look at the new concept, layout, and extended functionalities of the site, which serves as the central medium of communication for the city. The beta version will in the coming weeks replace the existing version, which in the meantime will continue to be available through the development phase.

The City of Dortmund thus begins a new chapter in the history of its Internet presence, which dates back 14 years to the launch of its first website. The city portal, which has over 10,000 daily visitors, has undergone a thorough restructuring and has been enhanced with a number of innovative features. These include the extensive use of state-of-the-art Internet technology for simpler user navigation (Ajax) along with extensive use of graphics and video materials to complement the written contents. Additional plans call for making the media available in a specially designed research pool for site users.
The site redesign is taking place in two steps: Beginning immediately, the portal pages will appear with the new menu structure, an improved event calendar and news section, bundled search functions and central services. Online features from the individual departments and projects will then gradually follow in the upcoming months.

The move to a new system with CMS FirstSpirit 4.1, which will be used for page creation and maintenance, will mean significant improvements in user-friendliness for the editors working for the City of Dortmund. With this system, they will now have access to a high-performance platform where they will only have to update contents once centrally and can then easily publish them in different formats – HTML, XML, and optimized for mobile devices. The contents are statified by FirstSpirit and the editing system and the website run completely independently of one another – this ensures stability and makes sure that even in case of a surge of visitors to the site editors can continue working unconstrained in the editing system.

An essential part of the project was the automatic transfer of the existing data (including news, events, and address information) from the old system into FirstSpirit. Here the in|MOTION migration suite from Dortmund-based e-Spirit partner adesso mobile solutions GmbH was used to migrate data after it was customized to meet the requirements of the target system. Seamless integration of full-text search based on the Lucerne search index is being provided by ARITHNEA GmbH , an e-Spirit partner based in Taufkirchen.

”For us a decisive factor in our decision for FirstSpirit was the ease of use and the optimized editing processes. Along with the open system architecture and platform neutrality for simple integration with the existing infrastructure, another convincing factor for us over was the multi-channel capability for publication of content through diverse channels,” said Dr. Ulrich Poffhoff, business manager for online communication for Dortmund-Agentur. “With FirstSpirit we are using a system with greatly superior performance and flexibility, meaning that capacity bottlenecks at peak usage times, as was the case with the Loveparade 2008, should be a thing of the past.“

e-Spirit has supported the City of Dortmund in setting up the technical infrastructure and has given workshops with information on typical application options with FirstSpirit. Thus the editors and developers at the Dortmund- Agentur are largely able to carry out the redesign of the city portal autonomously, since FirstSpirit’s functionalities and tools are intuitive and can be used without significant training.
The project has a special importance for e-Spirit, says Jörn Bodemann, e-Spirit AG CEO: “As a Dortmund company, we’re of course very pleased to have the opportunity with our solution to help our home town optimize their website. It's also an opportunity for FirstSpirit to let our strengths shine with a portal that is as technically advanced and large as dortmund.de, with its traffic and advanced requirements for user efficiency, integration- and performance capability.”

By summer of 2010, the Dortmund-Agentur plans to bring the approx. 20,000 pages from over 100 sites for individual departments, owner-operated city enterprises and projects up to the new dortmund.de standard, which will involve the reorganization, redesign, editing, and transfer of the existing content to the new system.