The New Zealand Parliament has called a tender for intranet and internet website content management software, although the solution will have to integrate with a .Net platform for document management.

The public Web site at www.parliament.nz and internal website http://OurHouse.Parliament.nz. have seen considerable effort put in to ongoing development of the application layers of the Web sites to create tools such as the online submissions and Alerts functionality.

The content management system currently utilised by the New Zealand Parliament websites at www.parliament.nz and http://OurHouse.Parliament.nz is Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 (CMS 2002), no longer fully supported by Microsoft.

According to the tender documents, “Parliament would like to make use of the advances in technology and the additional functionality that has emerged in content management software over the last eight years.”

The project also represents “an opportunity to cut the ongoing development and maintenance costs for the websites by upgrading to contemporary software that offers more functionality out of the box, simplifying and reducing the need for custom development.”\

The CMS replacement must retain the significant investment that has been made in customised .NET code and rich application layers.

The Web site publishes around 320,000 documents each year, with about the same number on the intranet site, with Google Search Appliance providing the search functionality.