Regione Emilia Romagna

Regione Emilia Romagna is an administrative Region in Northern Italy. Formally established on June 7, 1970, it serves approximately 4.5 million people and comprises an area of around 22,500 square kilometers, including the historical regions of Emilia and Romagna. Its capital is Bologna.

Regione Emilia Romagna is one of the wealthiest and most developed regions in Europe. It has the third highest GDP per capita in Italy. Its social, administrative, and political missions encompass: public health, economy, industry, environment, social safety, and co-ordination of the Local Public Administrations.

The Region is governed by a Council and an Assembly (Assemblea Legislativa), and includes several agencies devoted to specific activities like Environmental Protection (ARPA-ER).

On a national scale, the Regione Emilia Romagna has always been considered innovative and a leader in best practices. These proven ideas are then shared with other Italian Public Bodies, in particular within its regional boundaries.

Challenge

Migrate Regione Emilia Romagna's 200+ websites into Plone—without down time

Like any migration of this magnitude, there were a number of basic and special requirements. Foremost were:

• An architecture capable of housing thousands of content objects while allowing future growth
• Italian Law-Compliant Accessibility
• Preserve current content and data formats
• Migration and consolidation 200 websites
• Multiple LDAP integrations
• Independent, context-specific workflows

Special requirements included:

• An editorial style guide and general theme to guide organizational units in the design of their sites
• Customized collaboration for authenticated and unauthenticated users
• Document sharing and collaborative content editing
• Features for user retention, participation, and "fidelization" for new Intranet
• 3rd party integration for existing applications, such as the one used to edit and publish the monthly Regional Official Bulletin
• Cross-institution search capability between sites managed by separate Regional organizations
• Workflows to manage content creation and publishing
• Multi-media server integration
• Incorporate non-standard user authentication services (The Regione developed its own "federated authentication environment" [FedERa] where any Public Organization in the region can provide user credentials to any citizen, which are used to access online services by every Public Organization in Emilia Romagna.)

Solution

Leverage Plone's built in features

Requirements were fulfilled by leveraging Plone's built in features. Then, installing in successive steps, 2 High Availability server clusters with 6 load-balanced Plone installations, including an Intranet that serves more than 4,500 users daily.

Cross-institution search was initially achieved with a local Google Search Appliance and recently replaced by SOLR.

Listed below are site-specific solutions within Regione Emilia Romagna.

E-R, the Regione Emilia Romagna Institution Portal

The new portal, E-R, is a modernized version of its 2009 Plone implementation, ERMES. Pleased with Plone's performance, the Region is continuing its investment in Plone. The portal runs a new version of Plone and uses its flexible workflows to give staff greater content management autonomy. As the Region's need change and grow, the site will scale to accommodate future performance and feature enhancements.

E-R Homepage

Official Bulletin Board

This site is dedicated to the Official Bulletin of the Emilia-Romagna Region. It archives past issues and is integrated with Adobe InDesign, resulting in huge savings of paper and hours worked.

Internos, the Intranet

The Intranet is used by 4,500+ users. It features: customizable user dashboards, bookmarks, customizable calendars with events and alerts, notifications, and user engagement features like "Bookcrossing," "Flea Market," "Ask the Expert," and "Quote of the Day." Home pages for organizational units are customizable within the overall Intranet framework. Central news and news from organizational units are aggregated and available system-wide.

Plone Groupware

Plone Groupware is a customized implementation of Plone's standard security management. It created Workgroups and workspaces with management of documents, events, news, forums, blogs, projects, surveys, and comments. Groupware lets users from inside and outside the Region collaborate on projects.

IoPartecipo+

IoPartecipo+ is an e-participation portal where citizens can engage in discussions, participate in surveys, post comments, etc. about Region issues. User authentication accommodates various credentials, including the regional-standard FedERa authentication.

Emilia Romagna Portal for Companies

This portal is for businesses and promotes the Region's efforts in creating a "knowledge society" and increasing opportunities for sustainable development. It features various online services, an event calendar, news, multi-media content, and information for project proposals.

Assemblea Legislative Institutional Site

This elective Regional body focuses on laws that affect the daily lives of citizens like social assistance, trade, tourism, agriculture, local police, and vocational training. It is a rich with multimedia and required live streaming, Web TV, videos, and 3rd party graphics integrations.

These represent only a few of the Region's Plone sites; new ones are added regularly.

Whether you have one website or hundreds, Plone is up to the task. Upgrade to Plone today!