The Regional Municipality of York (York Region) stretches north from Toronto to Lake Simcoe and comprises nine municipalities with about 4,000 staff working across over 40 locations.
York Region’s public site is an indispensable resource for residents, businesses, and visitors to obtain essential information about regional services, public notices, current news items, maps, route planning, and permit applications. At the same time, its internal portal is a critical tool that services the thousands of staff managing the nine regional municipalities. The municipalities rely on York to secure their technology and protect their privacy; as a result, York’s technical security team demands the highest levels of security for any system connected to its digital ecosystem.
Previously, York Region relied on a dated, complex, and self-hosted WebSphere CMS to manage its public site and intranet portal. Two different agencies built the website and the intranet; this, in addition to the self-hosting, resulted in two unique, challenging, and costly systems to maintain.
Using the WebSphere CMS also required technical expertise, limiting the number of capable content contributors and resulting in slower updates and dated content. The CMS was siloed from other business systems, restricting access to critical information without manual intervention.
As part of a larger digital modernization strategy, York Region desired a new user-friendly digital experience, publicly and internally - one integrated into its larger digital ecosystem, enabling staff to share information seamlessly and quickly across the organization and externally.
York expressed a desire to complete this project quickly - it recognized the urgency of modernizing these essential sites.
York’s new digital experience required a sizable content migration, so Northern strategically developed it with approximately 40 reusable components, each with built-in brand and style management capabilities, building York’s website first and then reusing many of the website components to establish the foundation of its intranet portal. The reusable and modular components allowed for quick extensibility, enabling content contributors to autonomously (without requiring coding) build and extend the sites while remaining on brand. The new platform features notifications for outdated content, encouraging administrators to update or remove content no longer applicable to their audience.
Northern built the website and portal with modern and sleek appearances conforming to user experience design principles and practices, which ensures ease of use, mobile responsiveness, and accessibility to meet WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA and AODA guidelines. And Northern’s content strategy of grouping service-specific content helps users find information quicker.
Northern partnered with Acquia to integrate Acquia Shield, which provides federated authentication, security hardening, IP-restricted admin logins, and two-factor authentication, making York Region one of the most secure platforms among the many regions in Ontario.
The sizable project involved numerous stakeholders, many, if not all, introduced to the Drupal platform for the first time. Northern provided Drupal training for over 75 staff across over a dozen sessions and co-created a Drupal best practices digital handbook with York staff. Now York's team offers continual training, setting its staff up for success and ensuring future content contribution consistency. Northern also co-developed portions of the site with York's technical team, training them and gradually building their Drupal skills and confidence.
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300 Wellington St, Unit 200, London, ON N6B 2L5
1 King St W Suite 4800 - 47, Toronto, ON M5H 1A1
