Located in the south-eastern coastal region of NSW, Shoalhaven City Council has completed a project to integrate the TechnologyOne OneCouncil suite with its Content Manager (CM) platform to ensure continuity for record-keeping and maintaining a single source of truth.

A long-standing CM user in its many iterations (the council went live with TRIM 4.2 in 1998) it had adopted the TechOne platform in 2018 for Finance, Property, Ratings, HR and Payroll, pretty much everything except EDRMS.

“We now have 19TB of data and 8 million records, around half created in the last 5 years,” said Records Manager, Ros Ball.

“Content Manager was chosen to continue as our primary EDRMS, which presented us a bit of a problem as we needed the two systems to talk to each other.

“We knew there must be a way to do it, and in 2021 we went to market to find someone who could help us, and that someone was iCognition.

“We realised new middleware was required, so, we went out to our vendor panels for quotations. One of the key requirements was that it was demonstratable, which iCognition was successful in being able to provide as it has been implemented at other councils.”

Within TechnologyOne OneCouncil, documents are produced by various means.

The iCognition middleware solution sits outside OneCouncil and is constantly looking to see whether new documents have been created. These are then picked up by an open source CMIS tool and brought across to the Council network and registered into Content Manager via the iCognition integration tool.

In 2022 council has upgraded to Content Manager 10.0, which necessitated a new architecture with assistance from iCognition (see picture).

With CM10 bedded down and stable, Council is now exploring new features to implement such as sharing documents across OneDrive and SharePoint integration.

“Our journey is now underway and we will continue to try and expand the use of both OneCouncil and Content Manager across our organisation,” said Andrew Downing, Business Analyst/Solution Architect.

As part of its migration to CM10 Shoalhaven City Council chose to review its entire network infrastructure. With advice from technical adviser iCognition a new architecture was devised as shown above. Andrew Downing, Business Analyst/Solution Architect, said “We were considering moving to Elasticsearch but chose to stick with IDOL because we were familiar with it.”